We’ve been having a spirited debate about the place of theory in comics in response to Caro’s recent post on the subject. In particular, Franklin Einspruch vigorously contested Caro’s position. It seemed a shame to leave his responses buried in comments, so I thought I’d pull a couple out and highlight them here.
Here’s Franklin’s first comment.
There’s only one way to verify Caro’s assertion, stated a few different ways, that lowercase-t theory or uppercase-T Theory have something important to offer comics. That is to create said comics and see how they turn out. There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that such-and-such might to be possible in comics, but there’s a huge problem with suggesting that “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” would come into existence if only the creators employed particular philosophical or literary models. Art just doesn’t work that way. Attempting to make it that work that way gives you mannerism. I call it the Shopping List Problem. One can see certain characteristics in a successful innovation of style, inspiring other creators to copy the characteristics. But quality in art is not a shopping list of characteristics, checked off and accounted for in the new work. It’s an integrated whole that generates forward from the intuited feelings of individual creators. The head serves the heart. The other way around is poisonous.
At least as far as visual art is concerned, Theory has totally failed to account for that aspect of art-making. In fact it has put concerted effort into demolishing the very notion of universal value, and replace it with these checklists. I recently learned that a friend of mine, a beautiful realist painter, is having a show of new work in which she has more or less discarded painting. The gallery is thrilled that the exhibition “will be strikingly conceptual in its trajectory” and that she has been “gradually moving in a more conceptual direction.” A conceptual program, of course, is the major item on the checklist of contemporaneity as subscribed to by a certain species of art-worlder. People used to take it as a sign of progress when figurative artists went abstract. Now people expect them to go conceptual. This is mannerism at its worst. I nearly cried.
With all due respect to Caro, I suspect that her idea of “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” is in fact comics that better emulate the characteristics she finds attractive in a particular strain of literature. Someone who finds those characteristics exciting, and I mean genuinely enthused, butterflies-in-the-tummy excited about them, ought to have a go at it. The rest of us ought to be left alone to pursue our ambitions and literary inclinations as we see fit to do so. Something entirely new might arise, not dreamed of in her philosophies. I hope she doesn’t subscribe to the arrogant presumptions of historical inevitability, finality, and perfection that makes the culture of capital-T Theory the moral and intellectual sinkhole that it is.
One more observation: A picture is only worth a thousand words when you’re dealing with description. When it comes to dense, complicated fiction, words become noticiably more efficient. It distresses me that comics critics calling for Booker-sized ambitions seem not to notice this.
And after a bit more back and forth, Franklin added:
I have run into these notions before, namely that any kind of intellectual work done on behalf of art is theory, and that only theory stands in the way of sentimental or formal disasters. Both of them are mistaken.
Recasting traditional poetics and narrative as just another theory, even if you have to scare-quote “theory” to assert it, is certainly flattering to the culture of theory. Thus theory can be said to exist everywhere and at all times. I’ve even seen references to “Greenbergian Theory” as if non- or even anti-theoretical approaches to art merely constituted another theory. (For the uninitiated, the reference is to Clement Greenberg.) “Non-ideology, or non-theory, is an ideological and theoretical position, even if unacknowledged,” as Noah puts it. I’m sorry to be rude, but this is the sound of academic culture pleasuring itself. A finally fed-up Robert Storr wrote this in late 2009:
Speaking with a po-mo savvy young artist this week, I felt compelled to ask him what, given his approach to critical theory, was his attitude toward praxis? A puzzled look crept over his face, and, with a candour as admirable as it is rare among those who keep their verbal game up, he replied, ‘What’s that?’
The fact of the matter is that certain structures look good, sound good, or read well for some reason and seem ripe for reuse in an original way. Thus art progresses forward, by execution, not theory. When Caro claims that “You can’t feel your way around a 600-page novel unless you want that 600-page novel to be a rambling, solipsistic disaster,” I have to ask her how many 600-page novels she’s written, because that doesn’t sound right to me at all. I’m going to guess from the longer nonfiction I’ve written that really do have to feel your way around it, and you have to feel your way around it so thoroughly, self-critically, and intensely that the ramblings, solipsisms, and all the other weaknesses expose themselves as such. Then you root them out. Theory doesn’t save you from this work. As far as I know nothing does.
Are there broad biases against “literary thinking” in comicdom? I’m just as inclined to think that the Booker-style graphic novel envisioned by Caro would have to be the size of a children’s encyclopedia in order to achieve the same scope of ambition, because for certain narrative problems a picture is worth about six words instead of a thousand. Can one really just use more words? In my experience the words and the images have to sync at a certain rate or you’re not making comics anymore. We like making comics.
There’s something more than a little silly about critics, having trained on a certain specialty of literature, calling upon comics creators to acquire the same training so they can make equivalent comics. This is getting the cart so far in front of the horse that they’re not even attached anymore. Look, Caro, you’re a writer, you understand the literary angle that you’re looking for better than anyone, so do what I did when I wanted to see comics done a certain way and make the damn things yourself. As it is you might as well be standing on the sidelines of a football game yelling at the players to start playing hockey.
Jane Freilicher, Dark Afternoon. Franklin mentioned Freilicher in the course of the discussion.
Huh, deja vu — seems like I responded to this already. ;)
I ran across the following last night, in “Lord Peter Views the Body,” a collection of Dorothy L. Sayers’ tales of her gentleman sleuth. Wimsey has the following exchange with his estimable manservant:
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“…Dr. Hartman has a theory. In any investigation, my Bunter, it is most damnably dangerous to have a theory.”
“I have heard you say so, my lord.”
“Confound you — you know it as well as I do! What is wrong with the doctor’s theories, Bunter?”
“You wish me to reply, my lord, that he only sees the facts which fit in with the theory.”
“Thought-reader!” exclaimed Lord Peter…
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If we’re trading quotes, I think this is interesting. It’s Stanley Hauerwas quoting Oliver O’Donovan. He’s explaining the problem with compassion.
I would say, along those lines, that a detective without a theory can indeed enforce the law. Whether he can enforce justice is rather another question.
Of course, enforcing a theory isn’t necessarily justice either. Hauerwas would say, I think, that the separation of fact and theory, and the sense that you can discover or enforce either in any situation, is an error of liberal enlightenment thinking. The point for Hauerwas (who’s Christian) is that moral actions (such as hunting down a criminal) only take coherence in terms of a communal commitment to follow Christ. Whimsey’s remorseless pursuit of fact in the name (presumably) of truth is ultimately hollow — as you can perhaps see in the fact that he attempts to end murder by delivering more people up to be killed.
Franklin nailed it. Good show.
More Hauerwas. I’m sort of geeking out on this book (“Dispatches from the Front”)
“we must remember that imagination is not something we have in our minds. Rather, the imagination is a pattern of possibilities fostered within a community by the stories and correlative commitments that make it what it is.”
Ack! I keep wanting to quote passages:
“The world is not simply there, always ready to be known, but rather is known well only when known through the practices and habits of community constituted by a truthful story.”
He’s not talking about art, incidentally, but about how society should deal with, or be changed by, the mentally handicapped.
Franklin never did address my point that Fate of the Artist stands as a counterexample to his penultimate paragraph – he thought I was excluding it when I wasn’t, which was a legitimate misunderstanding (as we cleared up later in the comments) but the fact remains that Fate is an excellent example of a comic with Booker-level ambitions that isn’t the size of a children’s encyclopedia. Seems like it must then either rely too much on words or stand as counter to the assertions in the paragraph. There were people in the roundtable who commented that Campbell’s comics rely too much on words — Sean articulated that position extremely well. I think that counts as a “bias against literary thinking,” as well as a bias against the inclusion of prosecraft. We didn’t dig into that subject, but the status of prose reading and writing is absolutely essential to this issue.
In Franklin’s comments, admittedly, he was under the mistaken impression I was talking about something even more ambitious than Fate, something which nobody has written yet, rather than simply asking for more books like Fate that deal with “literary” subject matter in ambitious ways. But the conversation never wrapped back around to why exactly it is that more cartoonists don’t do it. Without implying that it’s easy, Campbell has nonetheless demonstrated that it can be done well by a single author in a very succinct book.
I think those issues are worth teasing out, much more worthwhile than rehearsing yet again the typical entrenched perspectives and biases and neuroses that come up whenever anybody mentions literature, let alone Theory.
While I really wanted (and attempted) to read the entirety of the commentary on Caro’s post (because I generally agree with Caro and did in this case, also), I didn’t have enough time so I’ll chime in on round two. I’d like to sidestep the issue of theory and state simply that there have be no comics, not one (maybe Jimbo in Paradise or Krazy Kat) that equal the beautiful, nuanced, complex, sophisticated work (specifically narrative, but not necessarily) in other media (film, literature, music). There’s a lot of craft going on (Kirby, Burns, Clowes) but nothing that congeals in the way that My Dinner with Andre or the Velvet Underground and Nico or Crash (some of my personal canon) do. I have tried and am still trying to get my hands dirty, offer my own solutions, but I have a wife and kid to support so my day job takes precedence.
And I think “theory” is a subset of smart, dense ideas that form the backbone of lots of the culture I’m interested in, but it’s not necessary – aesthetic pleasure alone is worthwhile but it functions best when it’s not sullied by lameness; thus, Taxi Driver is great and Ditko’s Spiderman (or Asterios Polyp – yuck)isn’t. I apologize if I’m making this binary – it seems like Caro is just asking for good, sophisticated work, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.
Chester Brown’s “I Never Liked You” is, of course, another example of a subtle, well done narrative comic concerned with “adult” subject matter. David B’s “Epileptic/L’Ascension du haut mal” is another.
J.Overby, Moebius’s comic ‘Le Garage Hermétique’ leaves all the examples you cite choking on its dust. Woodring’s ‘Frank’ as well.
On theory: this is an old joke about the French character: a French engineer looks over a proposal and, sighing, shakes his head: “It’ll certainly work in practice. Unfortunately, it won’t work in theory.”
I remember that one! Unfortunately, it’s not only in Academia where we see that “follow your ideology, no matter how much mere reality may contradict it.” In politics and religion this is far more damaging and pernicious.
Elsewhere:
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Eric Berlatsky:
If traditional history presents us with unified events, “sponging […] all diversity off of them” in an effort to create “coherent comprehension” (de Certeau, Writing 78), memory, due to its individual nature, resists this unifying effort at social definition, at least according to some theorists.
…for theorists like Pierre Nora, memory overcomes the debates over Holocaust representation. Instead, memory is often seen as something else entirely.
“Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition…”
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Um. So theorists (some, anyway) are making the argument that…history and memory are two different things!
Well, I guess it’s something to be grateful for. When, instead of volumes of nebulous gibberish in sentences that make Kenneth Smith sound like Hemingway, theorists are doing the equivalent of stating that — according to their theories — tables aren’t chairs…
This absurdly obvious “memory isn’t history” assertion then pimped up with a lot of highfalutin’ language in the same fashion that I’ve seen painters, with their Artist’s Statements, scroll forth Academese to somehow give validity to their canvas.
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Caro says:
…the fact remains that Fate is an excellent example of a comic with Booker-level ambitions…
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Is it me, or isn’t there something “off” about creating art with an award as the sun ’round which one’s work orbits? Why, look at the Nobel Prize for Literature, or the Oscars; genius and great works have been bypassed, mediocrities hailed instead. Politics, fashion, and emotion sway the judging. Are the Bookers above all that, then? (It’s even more off-putting when you assert that “Booker fiction is very engaged with theory.”)
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Seems like it must then either rely too much on words or stand as counter to the assertions in the paragraph. There were people in the roundtable who commented that Campbell’s comics rely too much on words — Sean articulated that position extremely well.
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I certainly don’t think they do, any more than Mozart’s music has “too many notes.” I firmly maintain hat Eddie Campbell is the greatest comics creator; and as a writer, I’d squeeze him in the #1 spot alongside Alan Moore.
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…I think that counts as a “bias against literary thinking,” as well as a bias against the inclusion of prosecraft…
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Not necessarily; couldn’t those arguments be motivated by the attitude that including a great deal of verbiage works against the “flow” of the art form? If cinéastes look askance at films with a voice-over narration rattling throughout, does that also show “bias against literary thinking”?
(A fascinating example of a profoundly literary work thoroughly transformed into film: Pinter’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu: The Proust Screenplay. http://www.hotreview.org/articles/proustscreenplay.htm ; http://tinyurl.com/3hgm9n8 . Massive amounts of complexity and nuance are lost, but isn’t this approach more successfully cinematic than having a narrator yakking away throughout?)
Again, though I don’t go as far as R.C. Harvey in asserting that words are a necessary ingredient for comics, they can clearly add a great deal. (I far prefer Jim Woodring’s pre-Frank stories — brilliant though the latter are — and mourn the loss of his unique prose voice.)
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Caro says [back in Comments Become Posts – Yesterday’s Thoughts on Literary Comics]:
it’s just exasperating to hear people make “literary” claims for a book like Asterios Polyp. It’s a perfectly good pedagogical tool and an interesting experiment in visual device, but by even the middlin’ standards applied to literature, it’s pretty run-of-the-mill as fiction.
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Can’t argue with that! For that matter, when in Ingmar Bergman Directs, by the highly demanding critic John Simon, he declared Persona “probably the most difficult movie ever made” (quoted from memory), I thought he’s probably right, and what a poor reflection it casts on what cinema has achieved, in comparison with literature.
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The biggest obstacle is auteurism and the DIY insistence on self-expression, which lead people who don’t have a lot of literary background to resist collaborations drawing on varied expertise (the kind of fecund collaboration, for example, that Anke F. has with Katrin de Vries).
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Speaking of collaboration, what did you think of the David Mazzucchelli/Paul Karasik adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass? To me, it works beautifully as comics, yet has a tasty richness and literary complexity. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Glass:_The_Graphic_Novel ; a highly enlightening interview with Karasik on the adaptation at http://www.indyworld.com/indy/spring_2004/karasik_interview/index.html )
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Hipster ennui — that classic mix of self-importance with complete and utter lack of seriousness — saturates art comics culture and generates a contempt for complexity and intensity that works against any meaningful engagement with literature.
A great deal of the writing in (and about) comics is — at its absolute best — BFA-level writing. And I’m not talking about prose-craft — I’m talking about the sophistication of the engagement with ideas.
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Sure, that’s quite true. With notable exceptions like Moore, Campbell, or Woodring, comics creators (or filmmakers; or painters) aren’t exactly the smartest or more intellectually sophisticated bunch. (Not saying that they’re dummies, but…)
Caro…I’m not super-familiar with Clement Greenberg, but poking around…I don’t see how he’s non-theoretical or anti-theoretical? Wikipedia says he’s a Marxist, and he seems to have fairly abstruse ideas about the relationship between art and society (he seems to think Jackson Pollack is anti-totalitarian?)
Was he strongly opposed to Derrida and French theorists or something?
I’m wondering if the issue is the art itself for Franklin (which would be consistent!) That is, “theory” is used for the set of ideas associated with contemporary conceptual art (which he seems to define quite broadly), while ideas associated with other art traditions aren’t theory…?
Marx is so important to contemporary theory that it seems weird to move any Marxists into an anti-theory box…but that’s just my perspective, obviously….and maybe Marx wasn’t all that important to Greenberg in any case….
Okay– so let’s puzzle out whether it’s possible that justice isn’t law, or memory isn’t history, or truth isn’t power, or visual representations aren’t verbal representations. That was a pretty simple sentence, and I think I could discuss those pairings with my high school students.
One reason people like Greenberg, Franklin, Neitzsche, St. Paul, can be considered “anti-philosophers” is because they actually have such a strong opinion on those questions of difference that it causes them to view themselves (and others as well) as standing outside of contemporary philosophy. But, despite their boldness causing some pretty clear contradictions in their logic, their boldness makes them irresistible for discussion.
And so, here we are, in philosophy.
Noah-
Greenberg was the poster child for “Modernism,” high formalism – painting as “paint on the canvas,” taking advantage of the supposed formal properties of that medium – kinda like Scott McCloud.
Alex-
I haven’t read much Moebius since high school as the good stuff is hard to get a hold of, but I think his drawings are really nice. Woodring’s Frank, to me, on the other hand, is the ur-example of formalism in comics, and is, as such, pretty boring. The first time I saw it (in some Tundra comic many years ago), I thought it was the most amazing thing in the world, but he’s plowed that same field for almost twenty years now, and it doesn’t get any richer than that initial wow-factor for me.
Mike says “memory isn’t history” is “so obvious” that it hardly needs theorizing. Of course, the reason it gets theorized is (as I discuss) is because the opposite argument (if thought through) is equally compelling….i. e. memory and history are basically the same. The fact that either side of the argument can be reasonably taken is a) what makes the discussion worthwhile, and b) makes “theory” necessary.
In terms of “art theory” or “literary theory”–the first step of any theory is “What is art? (or literature)” “Why do we do it?”—“Why are we interested in it?” Any answer to those questions is a theory about art!! Art is not intrinsically any one thing. For some, art is simply “entertainment,” For Franklin it’s “intuitive self-expression” (and expressions of the “universal” truths of the human condition?). For Caro, it’s sophisticated and unified expressions of complex ideas (just paraphrasing/guessing on all counts). All this means, is that they all have their own theory. Basically, Franklin doesn’t like Caro’s theory (or poststructuralism, etc.)….This doesn’t mean he doesn’t like “theory”–It means he doesn’t like “Theory”. The latter is perfectly reasonable—but to claim his own assertion about what “art” is is not a theory is somewhat foolish.
Mike’s tables/chairs dichotomy is also illustrative. It seems like a simple self-evident question…But what about those ridiculous contraptions that college students usually use. Are they tables? Or chairs? You need some kind of “theory” of tableness and chairness (perhaps a Platonic notion of these things) to answer the question (even if you just say–“Well, Berlatsky, you stupid theory-head, that’s a combination of both”). Yes, in theory, it is—but not in practice. Nobody glued an already existing “desk” onto an already existing chair. Rather, somebody had to “abstract” the properties of real “objects”–this is a theoretical exercise.
Nothing is really self-evident in the way Franklin, Uland, and Mike suggest.
Greenberg, like Franklin, does have a “theory” of what painting is and what it should be. He doesn’t use a lot of ten-dollar Marxist and/or poststructuralist vocabulary…but he does have a definition of the item in question….an arguable definition…and therefore a theory.
On the other hand, I’m delighted Mike read my excerpt–or part of it anyway…so let’s say I agree with him too.
And what do you do with the middle spectrum? A box can be a table or a chair. People’s individual memories are pretty central in historical scholarship. Certain laws uphold a standard of justice and some don’t.
Appropriating Bill Clinton, the definition of “is” is central to philosophy. I think Clinton also had some pretty profound thoughts about love and capitalism too….
Mike: I didn’t mean to imply that the Booker is in the creators’ minds; I just used it as a shorthand designator for a specific type of literature, one that tends to be extremely complex, take advantage of rich metaphorical conceits and engage theoretical issues, but within fairly traditional sustained narrative frameworks. The term “literature” covers such a diverse range of types of writing and the type that the Booker recognizes is a type I really enjoy and don’t see much of in comics. “Booker” isn’t an exact term: the prize specifically selects from literature of the Commonwealth and there’s American literature that has the same qualities, but there’s less hipster program drivel in the Booker shortlist than there is in the Pulitzer list, so I went with that designator. There’s no good sub-genre term from literature so I made one up. I don’t think the prize itself is the root source of interest in that type of writing though.
I actually really despise that Karasik/Mazucchelli book. I think it dumbs the novel down so far and misses the central conceits so entirely that it’s no longer even meaningfully referencing Auster’s book as a source. I need to write about this but it’s so hard for me to write about something I find that tedious and distressing that I haven’t managed it yet…
Noah: the objection to “Greenbergian Theory” is probably based on history; Rosalind Krauss was a protoge of his and her turn toward Theory was taken (by Krauss herself as well as others, I think) as a sharp turn away from Greenberg. So seeing him as in opposition to Theory depends on taking theory in the strictest post-war, linguistic turn sense, the “Theory” that informs Krauss, rather than as anti-philosophical in some way. He was a big proponent of medium-specificity (sometimes the term is even credited to him, although I think he was more a popularizer) and, as Jason says, he was extremely modernist. Not “Theory” in my sense, but theoretical in yours (to take advantage of those distinctions Alex keeps insisting on…)
People have used “Booker” as a shorthand before, actually–not always in complimentary ways.
Complimentary, or even perhaps not even complementary LOL. It seemed like a pretty easy choice of designator to me; I’m sure I’ve used it in conversation with writers before and been understood.
I don’t know — do the people who use it as a derrogative admire the stuff I refer to as “hipster program drivel”? I think it’s clear where I stand on that! Or do they just use it to refer to some different set of attributes from the ones I was pulling out?
Is Dave Mazzuchelli supposed to be a hipster? The hipster criteria are much different in the comics world– I guess it just means Spiegelman-esque. Which I am fairly happy to condemn under any terminological regime (without having read Eric’s Maus piece).
What about Paper Rad? They’re hipsters who actually are fine-art-credentialed, and, at least five years ago, were pretty definitional hipsters. And I think you can talk about those guys (CF et al.) with semiotics, etc.
I am familiar with Clement Greenberg, and the Wikipedia article isn’t so hot. By the time Greenberg developed his mature voice, he had established that the only way to get at art’s value is through intuited judgment. He spent the rest of his career reminding people that when he praised, say, a flat application of paint, it was in the context of particular works of art by Louis, Noland, etc., not art in general. The sad thing is that it didn’t work, and consequently Greenberg is known more wholly in the form of caricature than any other writer of the twentieth century.
If I understand the usage of lowercase-t theory here by Eric, Noah, et al., it means any idea about anything whatsoever. Since this is noticiably out of sync with common usage, the question arises of who is defining it in this way. The small sample here suggests that it is largely, maybe exactly the people who are signed up to some degree with capital-T Theory. I may very well be somewhat foolish, but there may also be a fair reason why not everyone is jumping aboard this all-pervasive reconception of the term. I never asserted what art is, anyway. I will say that I suspect that Eric’s first-hand knowledge of product design is about as thorough as Caro’s first-hand knowledge of writing long novels. I conclude as much because the mechanism by which he thinks that one arrives at the final product sounds similarly flattering to the culture of theory, and wrong.
Nothing is really self-evident in the way Franklin, Uland, and Mike suggest.
Most things are self-evident. Most things also have non-self-evident properties. But typically we interact with the self-evident ones, particularly when we make art. That solids have more empty space than material when viewed at the subatomic level is mostly of interest to scientists. That “chair” is a hard thing to define in a way that accounts for all edge cases is primarily of interest to theorists. You can analyze chairness until you’re crazed, and chairs just go on being chairs. I’ll bet you’re sitting in one now.
Caro, I only made the point about graphic novels the size of children’s encyclopedias because I thought incorrectly that you didn’t regard Fate as Booker-level material. With that cleared up I concede the point.
Franklin, would you say that it doesn’t matter if something is true or good in some abstract way, it all just depends in whether it works?
That’s called pragmatism, and it’s not a marginal philosophy (or a marginal notion to call it philosophy).
You don’t have to sit around thinking about it until it drives you crazy for it to be a theory of chairness. If we get off chairs, though (metaphorically–I’m still on mine)…Surely we’re not going to say that “art” or “literature” have self-evident definitions? The fact that these things have been debated, argued over, and discussed ad infinitum by theorists and (yes) by artists themselves, suggests otherwise.
Like “obscenity,” the “I know it when I see it” case is pretty weak. While I am not a product designer, I’ll point out that Bert, for instance, is an artist…
btw, I’m not even really “on the side” of complete relativism or linguistic determinism…. but I think it’s important to at least see what Theory is saying if one wants to combat it, or disagree with it logically. I’m not sure that’s the case here.
I’m personally pragmatic, and if that accords with philosophical pragmatism, I’ll do the pragmatic thing and go along with it. But if “do stuff that works” is theory, then you have an idea of theory that is too broad for my liking.
Eric, yeah, “art” and “literature” have self-evident definitions. It’s easy to hit the categorical center. People generally know what you’re talking about if you refer to a Rembrandt self-portrait as art, or to War and Peace as literature. The arguments take place at the categorical edges, among specialists, who discover that the self-evident definitions are vague and incomplete. The fact that they’re vague and incomplete is really only distressing to some of the specialists. If you’re mainly interested in language this is important. If you’re mainly interested in making things it’s not. The world somehow persists even with inadequate descriptors.
Franklin:
“The sad thing is that it didn’t work, and consequently Greenberg is known more wholly in the form of caricature than any other writer of the twentieth century.”
That caricature is most viciously embodied in Tom Wolfe’s novella-length satirical essy, ‘The Painted Word’.
It wasn’t Greenberg or his ‘rival’ Rosenberg (“the Green Mountain” and “the Pink Mountain”, as they were known) who triggered his comedic ire: it was a fatuous article by the New York Times art critic, Hilton Kramer.
The hyperrealists arrived en masse in the ’70s, and they caused deep unease among art theorists and critics. In the Kramer article, he complained that the hyperrealist painters hadn’t published a manifesto or any other theoretical justification…this was Wolfe’s “Eureka!” moment, when he realised how theory had replaced artwork in cultural discourse. read the book, it is hilarious.
A companion piece is his 3from Bauhaus to our House”, which savages modernism in architecture.
Bert:
“That’s called pragmatism, and it’s not a marginal philosophy (or a marginal notion to call it philosophy).”
But pragmatism, or pragmaticism, is so appropriate for a site called The Hooded Utilitarian.
Franklin, I’m not clear when you emphasize intuition over “theory” whether you’re trying to say that no authors draw on Theoretical or philosophical concepts when they write, or if you’re misinterpreting me to say that ALL writers MUST do so overtly and explicitly. (Let’s set aside Noah’s truly Theoretical point here that all writers do it implicitly.)
We got tangled up in T/theory, but my point is that writers have to be overtly and self-consciously intellectual if they want to get complex intellectual content into a novel.
Do they need poststructuralism (or any specific theory, or specifically Theory)? No, not unless the philosophical elements they want to get into the book are poststructural. Campbell acknowledges that he read up on poststructuralism when he responds to the question I asked him about writing Fate, so I don’t think it requires my having written a similar book to listen to what he says or to observe how successfully his research got into his finished product.
Have you had the chance (or interest) to look at any of Delany’s books on writing, which I mentioned the last time this came up? It’s very obvious from his critical writing that he not only thinks about Theoretical and philosophical issues, but that he thinks about them in very overtly philosophical ways, similarly to the ways literary critics think about them — they’re not just subtext that he’s picked up from reading other fiction books. Likewise, analytical critical and philosophical thinking is on display in say, Rushdie’s writing about the Wizard of Oz, or in Nabokov’s essays on literature (although he was writing before capital-T-theory so it’s different). Look at these quotes by John Hawkes (who is one of my favorite writers and really extraordinarily sophisticated conceptually). Do you really think he’s making all that up out of intuition, that he hasn’t ever encountered or been influenced by Theory (in this case, with a capital T)? His imagination at work is palpable, for example here, but he specifically rejects the notion of the “intuitive” taking precedent over the “cerebral”: “I believe in coldness, detachment, ruthlessness, a lot of consciousness in the choice of narrative material, in the creation of scenes and so on and so on.”
Hawkes is a particularly good example because you can so easily see the effects of his engagement with the linguistic turn and with the practice of postmodernism in American letters manifesting itself in the conceptual meat of his structures and concepts. But at the same time, he also absolutely approaches his presentation of that material as a writer, not as a literary critic or philosopher. It is absolutely essential to remember that the difference between criticism and literature is genre, not medium. Hawkes’ writing is immensely resonant with Theoretical ideas — the SAME medium, the SAME ideas, inflected by a different genre. Postmodernism did not emerge in a vacuum separate from literature but rather as a collaboration among writers in the academy and literary critics in the academy and a handful of public intellectuals. Ambitiously literary writers (by which I mean the ones who exceed the rote predictability of the Program) are extremely intellectual people. Are they all Theory-wonks? No. Are they philosophers? Largely not, as they rarely write in that genre. But they absolutely positively are intellectuals.
That is my point when I object to an overemphasis on “instinct” or intuition, with the caveats I made previously. That is my point when I complain about biases against literary thinking or an unwillingness to engage with complex analytical or imaginative prose — reading is a capstone of intellectual life.
I did study fiction writing, for what it’s worth, when I was a graduate student. I do have some, limited first-hand experience with writing stories like this — although less long-form fiction as in Program-land big novels are projects for mature writers. Being a fiction writer was never my goal — I always preferred essays and critical work even when I planned to be a literature professor.
But I adamantly don’t think it requires first-hand experience with writing period to listen to what these writers have to say or to respect and acknowledge the effort they have expended on ideas or the impact that effort has had on their art.
I readily admit to very much liking writing that’s informed by postmodernism, and I think comics in particular has so much to say and contribute to literary postmodernism, which is the most intensely visual and structural of any literary period, but I don’t think it’s the only kind of Theory that can inform the “good, sophisticated work” that Jason rightly says I’m calling for. I do, however, strongly believe that anti-intellectualism — in ANY FORM, always — gets in the way of that good, sophisticated work. We can argue about the extent to which intuition is actively “anti”-intellectual, but they certainly seem to me to be opposing but related poles. I was never trying to imply that ambitious, sophisticated creative writing can be produced without imagination — but I remain absolutely convinced that such writing is equally impossible without a whole lot of intellectual work.
The notion of Greenberg as anti-theoretical is bizarre to say the least. It is well-known–and taught in any undergraduate art theory class–that Greenberg quite self-consciously based his formalism on Kant; he was very philosophically informed, and in ways that speak directly to the contemporary configuration of theory. (His other important follower was Michael Fried, who took his work in a phenomenological direction.) Krauss’s dismissal of Greenberg is part of a complex, Oedipal struggle, and definitely cannot be taken at face value. Much of Krauss’s work is, actually, greenbergianism in semiotic clothing. Just compare their two articles on collage, which ultimately say the same thing, but in different language.
(I’ve been trying to stay out of this debate, but I just felt I had to pop in to say that. Going back into lurking mode now.)
You could even refer to Krauss as, ahem, Post-Greenbergianism.
And Clement Greenberg wasn’t a pragmatist either. He definitely didn’t think that just because your average viewer thought something looked nice that it was successful art, which would be the most intuitively (ha) pragmatist aesthetic. Pragmatists do steer clear of aesthetics, until you start getting into social practice artwork (“relational aesthetics”), which I’m sure Franklin hates.
Caro, I don’t dispute that an author needs a rich intellectual life to write rich intellectual fiction. I’m saying that without instincts regarding what constitutes effective fiction, no fiction will result even from a mountain of erudition. Whereas with instincts regarding what constitutes effective fiction, one can at least write effective fiction, if not especially erudite fiction. That’s why I’m saying that such instincts are primary. It’s why Bonnard said that a painter with charm could acquire power, but not the other way around. Even in the case of intellectual fiction, where do the characters come from? How do they know to do what they do, to express their thoughts when they express them? Obviously more than instincts are needed, but without instincts good art isn’t even a possibility.
Andrei, most of what is taught in any undergraduate art theory class is worthless. Not only did he not “self-consciously base his formalism on Kant,” he specifically denounced formalism. If Greenberg had a theory, it should be easy enough to say what it is. Go ahead.
A painting should be a painting. But it shouldn’t do what paintings used to do, which was to create illusions, but should call attention to the means of its creation.
How is that not a theory? It’s modernist, not postmodernist, but he had clear opinions. And definitely nothing nice to say about comic books.
I can agree with that, as stated, Franklin! (At least, the bit about writing novels; Greenberg I leave to the people who know more about Greenberg than I do.)
Woo hoo — time for beer!
From the Hawkes interview: “My fiction is almost totally visual and the language depends almost totally on image. I think you’re quite right that this fictional preoccupation and this particular interest in language do depend on my feelings from dreams and on my interest in exploiting the richness and energy of the unconscious.” He’s a complicated guy, to say the least.
A painting should be a painting. But it shouldn’t do what paintings used to do, which was to create illusions, but should call attention to the means of its creation.
Bert, you must have taken the aforementioned undergraduate art theory class. He never wrote this.
I’m especially fond of the quote that “plot, character, setting, and theme” are the “enemies of the novel.” GRIN.
I think it would have been incredibly cool to have studied literature with him. (I would have been too intimidated to take the workshop, I think… but he did teach both English and creative writing.)
Oh, I see. He never said: “+ The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence?”
Undergraduate art theory class indeed. It’s a Google search away. No student loans required.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Marx is so important to contemporary theory that…
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Yikes. Could one damn this “theory” biz more thoroughly? In order to bring forth his ideas for a “Worker’s Paradise,” billions had to suffer (and are still suffering) under tyrannies; hundreds of millions were either killed outright or starved to death in fiascos like the “Great Leap Forward”; economic stagnation and disaster resulted…
(A True Believer pops up): “But, that doesn’t prove there was anything wrong with the theory!!”
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eric b says:
Mike says “memory isn’t history” is “so obvious” that it hardly needs theorizing. Of course, the reason it gets theorized is (as I discuss) is because the opposite argument (if thought through) is equally compelling….i. e. memory and history are basically the same. The fact that either side of the argument can be reasonably taken is a) what makes the discussion worthwhile, and b) makes “theory” necessary.
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Well, in a world where Sarah Palin can be “reasonably taken” as Presidential material, I imagine that anything goes.
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Bert Stabler says:
…People’s individual memories are pretty central in historical scholarship.
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Sure; but history doesn’t begin and end with an individual memory, or a bunch grouped together. Being aware of how utterly unreliable the memory of folks who personally experienced an event is, I’m not at all anxious to consider it even remotely comparable to history; however much the latter can be distorted, its aim and focus is to stand apart, take a more distant view. Use memories as one of many factors to take into account.
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Mike’s tables/chairs dichotomy is also illustrative. It seems like a simple self-evident question…But what about those ridiculous contraptions that college students usually use. Are they tables? Or chairs? You need some kind of “theory” of tableness and chairness (perhaps a Platonic notion of these things) to answer the question…Nobody glued an already existing “desk” onto an already existing chair. Rather, somebody had to “abstract” the properties of real “objects”–this is a theoretical exercise.
Nothing is really self-evident in the way Franklin, Uland, and Mike suggest.
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“You need some kind of ‘theory’ of tableness and chairness (perhaps a Platonic notion of these things) to answer the question [of whether something is a table or a chair].” Double yikes!
A chair is something people habitually sit on; designed and constructed for that purpose. That someone may plant their posterior on, say, a picture-frame doesn’t throw the concept of “chairs” out the window, much less require for frazzled people to be calmed by a “theory” of chairness. (Issuing from the Academy of Furniture and Small Appliance Theory, no doubt.)
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Caro says:
I do, however, strongly believe that anti-intellectualism — in ANY FORM, always — gets in the way of that good, sophisticated work.
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What about non-intellectualism? The instinctive given sway, letting emotions or the subconscious influence the process of creation?
Aside from the superb art produced by “primitives,” there’s outstanding creativity from “outsider” artists, the insane. (Henry Darger, Richard Dadd…)
Also, still on Greenberg– for what it’s worth, he had very little to do with A) what many others have gotten out of Jackson Pollock (horizontality, performative production, all-over design), and B) what Pollock thought about his own work (mystical Zen insight).
Yeah, Mike, I would say that I do think non-intellectualism generally works against really rich and sophisticated work too, although less absolutely than active anti-intellectualism. The instincts and emotions are incredibly well-trodden territory.
Such an approach doesn’t make the work BAD, but IMO it does make it less sophisticated.
One of the things that happens to art brut is that people layer psychoanalytic insights on top of it, reading it as an accidental engagement with very sophisticated theoretical insights. (Implicit rather than explicit.) But most art by insane people isn’t any richer or more compelling than art by ordinary people without any talent or training…
It’s a little misleading to say that “Marx” is important to theory — Althusser and Gramsci are, and Marx is important to Althusser and Gramsci, but Theory’s more accurately “post-Marxist.” Theory is in the Marxist tradition, broadly, but many of the positions that we think of when we say “Theory” were developed by committed Marxists trying specifically to deal with the questions of global tyranny perpetuated in the name of Marxism. Theory is very much a product of the post-War world. This is one of the reasons why Alan Sokal’s more classical Marxism, specifically his relationship with the Sandinistas, de-legitimizes him so dramatically in my mind.
That, he wrote. And you will note that he is not saying how paintings in general should be, either presently or in relation to the past, but how modernist paintings are. You have the words right in front of you, and you don’t notice that they don’t support what you think to be true about them. What’s fascinating to me is that this usual. This isn’t one guy’s failure of reading comprehension – it’s a failure of reading comprehension in perfect conformity with what contempoary art studies holds to be true.
And then you have the Frankfurt School Marxists, who, like Greenberg, see all popoular culture as a big consumer scam.
It is apparently a central feature of modernism, as articulated by J.D. Salinger, that the main idea is to point at things and call them “phoney.”
What’s not phoney? If you gotta ask, you’ll never know….
I see. Are you patiently explaining to me that Clement Greenberg was not a critic during the period known as “modernism?”
My paradigm will soon be rocked, once I comprehend the realness of this close reading.
I am patiently explaining to you that you ascribed a theory to Greenberg for which you have no supporting writings.
And while I’m sure you’ll assure me that Greenberg didn’t identify with the avant-garde, he does in fact speak of them thusly: “(T)he absolute is absolute, and the poet or artist, being what he is, cherishes certain relative values more than others. The very values in the name of which he invokes the absolute are relative values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be imitating, not God — and here I use “imitate” in its Aristotelian sense — but the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves. “
Franklin, for me theory really doesn’t seem that distinct from philosophy. Hauerwas isn’t a post-structuralist, but he touches on many of the same issues they do (about knowledge, about being) because he’s part of the western philosophical tradition.
Also…I’m just not clear what it is precisely about post-structuralists that you dislike which is distinct from what other theorists or philosophers do. That is…you seem to be promoting instinct as an alternative not just to post-structuralism, but to any philosophical or theoretical (or intellectual?) ideas as applied to art.
In terms of instinct…I sort of said this before, but…I don’t think the kind of instinct you’re talking about in terms of art is the same as the general understanding of the word instinct. That is, it’s not the same as the instinct which makes a lizard bask in the sun, or a bee go to a particular flower. Those are instincts that are outside of language; they’re innate.
Making art though isn’t instinctual. It’s learned. And what’s good and bad in art isn’t instinctual either. It’s part of a communal or social agreement or process. Art is like language; it’s a form of communication, which makes it shared, not isolated. That’s what Hauerwas is talking about when he says imagination is a communal project. It exists within a society, and that society gives it meaning (and, arguably, vice versa.)
When I make art (whether poetry, art, criticism, or whatever) it’s obviously something of a mysterious process. Any thinking is, because we don’t know ourselves — in large part because so much of ourselves are other people. In that vein, I’d argue that the praxis of art making is itself infused with ideas; what you create, how you create is, what you think is good and what you think is bad, is all dependent on a conversation with other artists, with other critics, with ideas and arguments. Art is made out of other art, the standards of art come from other art, and that making and those standards are a discussion.
My problem with making that into a shorthand called “instinct” isn’t that it’s untheoretical. As I noted before (and as Bert did), I don’t really know that artists necessarily benefit from reading theory. But…making art into instinct makes art seem like a lizard sunning itself, or a person urinating. Art’s not a natural process like that. It’s a social thing and a cultural thing. Which means that art is never one voice; it’s many different voices. Criticism isn’t an outside thing that takes away from praxis; criticism is praxis, and vice versa. Thought and intellect are what art is made of, just as they’re what people are made of, to the extent that people aren’t just animals (of course, people *are* animals too…but art is not the animal part.)
I mean…it’s possible that I’m misunderstanding you and that you in fact agree with all of that. But when you appeal to temperament or instinct, it seems to me like you’re trying to deny the social and communal aspects of art. The artist is alone with her instinct, creating a thing of beauty which is beyond analysis. Humans do arguably create things like that — they’re called children. And despite the artful comparisons of metaphor, art isn’t children.
The point is, when you say that without instinct art is nothing…that’s an aesthetic opinion, which one can agree or disagree with. But without intellect without language, there literally can’t be art. In that sense, criticism, or language about art, precedes art itself.
To join the chorus of people speaking for Franklin, he did say “intuition” a few times, and I said earlier and still think that is a better word for what he seems to be talking about. At least, that’s the sense I’m taking his use of instinct.
But most of your comment might still be applicable even if you replaced instinct with intuition. Intuition is drawing connections without being fully aware of why they’re connections, what they mean, etc. — letting the connections control you rather than the other way around. It’s unconscious, not “natural.”
I don’t know whether Franklin agrees with that, but it’s the way I interpret what he’s talking about. Poststructuralism is inherently “counter-intuitive” in that a central axiom is that one’s intuition is profoundly untrustworthy, profoundly in the sense of all the way down. But it doesn’t put intuition on the other side of some aporia, covered over by language and inaccessible, the way it does “instinct”.
Franklin, is it poststructuralism’s suspicion of intuition that makes you dislike it? Or is your frustration with it mostly the way it’s used in academic and fine art culture rather than anything specific to the ideas themselves?
Noah –
I ran into this paragraph on the Wikipedia page about Surrealism. It might be bullshit, since it’s Wikipedia, but it seemed relevant to what you’re saying:
“Freud initiated the psychoanalytic critique of Surrealism with his remark that what interested him most about the Surrealists was not their unconscious but their conscious. His meaning was that the manifestations of and experiments with psychic automatism highlighted by Surrealists as the liberation of the unconscious were highly structured by ego activity, similar to the activities of the dream censorship in dreams, and that therefore it was in principle a mistake to regard Surrealist poems and other art works as direct manifestations of the unconscious, when they were indeed highly shaped and processed by the ego. In this view, the Surrealists may have been producing great works, but they were products of the conscious, not the unconscious mind, and they deceived themselves with regard to what they were doing with the unconscious. In psychoanalysis proper, the unconscious does not just express itself automatically but can only be uncovered through the analysis of resistance and transference in the psychoanalytic process.”
I’d say more, but I’ve got a dinner date, and then I need to sit my ass in my chair and write.
Barthes again: “…(T)he liquidation of the old criticism can only be carried forward in meaning (in the volume of meanings) and not outside it.”
So, maybe art is not the same thing as criticism– that seems even easier to assert than the difference of memory and history, or chairs and tables. But if a critic can’t look at art without resorting to meaning, can anyone?
The poststructuralist Thing is, there is excess of non-meaning inherent in meaning itself, which applies to the meaning of the chair I’m sitting on as much as it applies to the immigrants that Sacha Baron-Cohen paid to be chairs and tables when he interviewed Latoya Jackson in “Bruno.”
Just to keep it confusing, here is a Christian art historian sympathetic to Greenbergian formalism: http://dansiedell.typepad.com/blog/2009/07/rescuing-formalism.html
Aw, why not. Here’s my essay on the intersection of AbEx and Christian kitsch in a show in Chicago.
http://art.newcity.com/2011/03/07/review-chelsea-culpseerveld-gallery/
Frankly I find Pierre Bourdieu’s explanations about 19th century’s art and literary fields a lot more interesting than Kantian Greebergianism. The latter is partisan criticism, the former sees things from a vantage point (which is what true critics do).
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Caro says:
Yeah, Mike, I would say that I do think non-intellectualism generally works against really rich and sophisticated work too, although less absolutely than active anti-intellectualism. The instincts and emotions are incredibly well-trodden territory.
Such an approach doesn’t make the work BAD, but IMO it does make it less sophisticated.
One of the things that happens to art brut is that people layer psychoanalytic insights on top of it, reading it as an accidental engagement with very sophisticated theoretical insights. (Implicit rather than explicit.) But most art by insane people isn’t any richer or more compelling than art by ordinary people without any talent or training…
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Re the last, the Surrealists would heartily disagree. And from the examples of art by the insane I’ve seen, they aesthetically kick the ass of the boring still-lifes and landscapes, stilted nudes which “Sunday painters” — carefully trying to ape what “serious” artists do — churn out.
The thing is, unless you’re seriously brain-damaged, a “non-intellectual” approach doesn’t truly shut off the intellect; only its conscious, controlling side. There is a vast quantity of wisdom and intelligence in the subconscious. Think of all the people who have the answer to a baffling problem, or a deep insight, come to them in a dream, or when they’re otherwise engaged and – on a surface level, anyway – not thinking about the problem.
The psychologist and writer Nathaniel Branden developed a breakthrough in technique when once talking to a patient. Branden was trying to get the guy to realize why he had a particular dysfunctional attitude, had asked him about what motivated that, and the patient said, “I don’t know why I feel that way…”
Branden, in a flash of inspiration, said, “Well, if you did know why, what would you answer?” The patient then rattled out a bunch of remarkably lucid insights into his condition.
That question became part of Branden’s repertoire: he found out it somehow circumvented people’s blocks against allowing themselves awarenesses that their inner selves already possessed.
Another example, and one of my Favorite Anecdotes Of All Time:
The father of cultural anthropologist Jean Houston was a successful comedy writer and theatrical agent. Among his clients was the famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. One day the agent and his young daughter went to visit Bergen. Walking through his house to find him, they heard Bergen engaged in conversation with his most famous creation, the dapper puppet Charlie McCarthy.
Listening at the door, they found this was no run-of-the-mill chat; deep philosophical matters were being discussed. Bergen would ask McCarthy “What is the meaning of life?” and the puppet would give forth a lengthy discourse. Excited, Bergen would ask another question, and from McCarthy’s painted wooden mouth would issue the wisdom of the ages.
When the Houstons entered, Bergen apologized. “I was having a talk with Charlie. He’s the wisest man I know.”
“But, Edgar,” said Jean’s father, “you do realize in a way it’s you answering those questions.”
“Yes, but still…Charlie knows so much more than I do!”
(Jungians could suggest Charlie was a way of accessing the ocean of knowledge within that “collective unconscious.”
A no prize goes to the readers who spot the place of the following “n” in the comment above…
Noah, like I said, I think you have an unacceptably broad idea of small-t theory that seems only to have currency within big-T Theory.
As for instinct, as a matter of fact I do think the inclination to make art is instinctual, not unlike the bees’ instinct for certain flowers. I’m not the first person to suggest that. Frederick Turner has said that flowers reflect the aesthetic preferences of bees. There’s also Denis Sutton, who worked up an entirely evolutionary explanation for art that is convincing if imperfect.
That people learn how to make art is indipsutable. But every culture on the planet, present and past, seems to produce stories and items of visual interest. There’s no good way to explain this except that it’s the product of opposedly-thumbed animals with phenomenal powers of pattern recognition and conjectural mechanisms. (At least phenomenal when compared to lizards.) The forms that those stories and items take are, without a doubt, the product of learned culture, and as such are social and communal. The impulse to create in the first place is instinctual. Like any quality it exists in varying amounts from specimen to specimen, but given more than a few specimens, somebody with some talent inevitably shows up. These instincts not only generated art in the first place, they cause it to persist. And pace Caro, they are indeed natural. (Humans get intuition for free. It’s reason and logic that take extra effort.)
I’ve learned that the culture of theory hates these kinds of biological explanations, even more than they hate dictionary definitions of their privileged terms. They long for a world in which everything is at its core a learned social construction: art, gender, intelligence itself. Over and over again they assert that the world is this way, often without evidence, even against evidence, such as Noah’s claim that criticism precedes art. Biology is standing in the way of that vision. In answer to Caro’s question about why I dislike poststructuralism, I have a temperamental aversion to priesthoods.
Criticism isn’t an outside thing that takes away from praxis; criticism is praxis, and vice versa.
Robert Storr already got your number.
When pointed out, the most frequent defence is that intellectual effort should not be invidiously compared to the sweat of the brow and that making theory is praxis. Well, perhaps, if one reserves that division of labour for the handful of writers who actually think new thoughts and convincingly render them in words, as distinct from the legions who more or less opportunistically apply the thoughts of such ‘master minds’ to art criticism, academic treatises and museum scholarship, not to mention mutually congratulatory round tables and exhibition and book reviews.
I think even that’s too generous. Ideas don’t get tested against reality until you attempt some kind of tangible action in accordance with them.
Mike, to me it’s a question of how much interesting substantive insight you get from therapeutic and dream art rather than whether you get any at all.
I’m just personally not compelled by the intellectual substance of “art” that primarily just unveils the unconscious. I don’t doubt that has something to do with my having been so inmeshed in psychoanalysis. I value and seek so much the conscious effort that’s layered on top of those unconscious “intuitions” that what the unconscious produces seems like raw unfinished material, ink in the jar, clay in the bag. I am absolutely positively not trying to imply that the unconscious drives play no role in art — that wouldn’t make sense for someone as Lacanian as I am! — only that stopping before the conscious stuff gets layered in is insufficient to satisfy what I’m looking for aesthetically. (I suppose that kind of art triggers only “Tell me about your Mother.”)
The Hawkes essay with its emphasis on detachment and control — his stance on the unconscious when he says “The success of the effort depends on the degree and quality of consciousness that can be brought to bear on fully liberated materials of the unconscious” — is a pretty good statement of what compels me about art.
Which ties into Franklin’s point: I’m not going to evangelize for the specific philosophical insights of the linguistic turn, because if they don’t catch fire in your mind there’s nothing I can say that will make them do so. Despite their counter-intuitiveness, the insights of that approach to art and to life and to the world are profoundly intuitively correct to me and therefore extremely powerful. Add that intuitive sense of their truth together with my aesthetic taste for their amped-up intellectualism and it’s easy to understand why I like them and like work influenced by them. Lacan and Althusser at least would accept such a “interpellation” into the “posts” as part for the ideological course. So I never had the experience of someone demanding that I conform to Theory because it was always intuitively right to me to do so. For that reason I don’t particularly experience the world of Theory as a priesthood at all — if anything it’s neuroscience that seems that way to me, with its insistent positivism that elides all the things that can’t be fitted into a positivist box and that reduces us all to instances of biological range of norms. I think it’s always harder to tolerate priests who try to force conformity to ideals that chafe.
This is why the one thing I will evangelize for, passionately, is a subjective pluralism on these and related issues: especially where art is concerned, we don’t need consensus, only respect. I object to people actively showing contempt for Theory vastly more than I object to people simply not accepting it and caring about their own stuff. Both consensus and contempt — as well as their cousin hegemony — do vastly more harm than good regardless of what ideology we seek consensus on.
But that pluralism must go both ways, and that’s where it often becomes a struggle: biology insists on an even more doctrinaire hegemony than cultural explanations for human experience. Cultural constructivism can philosophically encompass biological determinism, whereas biological determinism sets itself in absolute opposition to cultural constructivism. But that amounts to giving a primacy to constructivism. That seems to me to be a very intractable problem. No positivist determinism can ever be truly pluralist. If your goal is to cure cancer, this is a bonus. If your goal is great novels, I don’t think it is.
The precision of positivism to me prevents the empirical sciences from opening up as wide or as interesting a space for literary exploration as cultural constructivism does — to me, art is supposed to be concerned with culture, and the more biological the emphasis, the more constricting and tyrannical the display. (I see this, for example, in the post-Snow Crash novels of Neal Stephenson, which I find really repugnant and difficult to tolerate, especially when contrasted with the lush embrace of diversity in Delany’s work.) I don’t care if my art is empirically true; I want it to be socially and culturally wise. Possibly even imaginative of possibilities society and culture has not yet though of. If I wanted my ideas beholden to reality, I would have been a scientist.
Historically, in the US, the search for that opening up of the form was a big motivation for literary postmodernism (the post-war context of poststructuralism was more influential earlier and more important in Europe.) I think it’s interesting how much closer and more enmeshed in each other the activities of theory and practice are in literature than they are in visual art. A big chunk of literary theory does in fact attempt to explain the functioning of literary device — but it does so in a way that opens up that literary device, making it less precise and more capable of interesting creative and imaginative manipulations, rather than making it more precise and focused, as biological explanations do. In writing, the value of Theory’s constructivism is that it significantly expands the possibilities of what practice can do.
Most of what Theory calls “postmodernism” (as distinct from poststructuralism which is philosophy) was thought up by people pushing the envelope of praxis in writing. Postmodernism came into being through intuitive experiment, followed by thoughtful analysis of what that experiment revealed about the object at hand, followed by more experiment informed by that thoughtful analysis, and so on and so forth for several decades.
I think that’s why “theory is praxis” makes sense in literature in a way that it probably doesn’t in visual art: theory and practice are engines of the same dialectic. That approach isn’t unique to Theory — it’s a dialectical intellectual engagement that philosophy and criticism have been making for quite some time, and its inclusion as part of making literary art dates back at least to the Enlightenment.
As a methodology it may or may not be available or particularly productive to people working in “pure” visual art — but it’s absolutely available to people working with the more linguistic components of narrative art and comics!
Franklin, I’m not necessarily against biological explanations. I just think there’s much more evidence that language is the biological thing that makes humans different than that anything else is.
And…I haven’t read Robert Storr…but yes, I find many theorists more creative and interesting than many artists. Would I rather read Haeurwas or look at paintings by Freilicher? There’s not much of a contest that for me…but obviously mileage differs.
Caro:
” I object to people actively showing contempt for Theory vastly more than I object to people simply not accepting it and caring about their own stuff.”
Well there’s a problem; because I have vast, vast scorn for Theory. Theory votives pimped my art school at the Sorbonne into irrelevancy.
And that scorn extends beyond contempt to anger at Lacan. I’ve read nothing of his that persuades me that he’s other than a rogue and charlatan, one who’s inflicted immense harm on the mentally ill.
Alex: you can waste your energy on scorn and anger if you like. But I’ll remain unconvinced it does anything other than get in your way. Especially since it apparently prevents you from articulating a position against Theory that isn’t so replete with scorn and anger that it says more about you and your issues than it does about Theory itself.
Lacan’s clinical practice has very little to do with his place in academic post-Freudianism. A few hours spent reading Zizek should make it clear that Lacanianism in Theory is essentially the psychoanalysis of culture — it works by an analogy akin to personification, which is why it’s so useful for literature. For Lacan subjectivity itself is “pathological,” which is why he doesn’t believe in a psychoanalytic “cure.” I believe I have mentioned how Theory in Europe especially in the ’50s is so specifically postwar — this notion of the absolute pathology of culture is a good example, as is Lacan’s concern with the “ethics” of psychological practice more than its efficacy.
Today, the clinical and theoretical branches of Lacanian practice are largely separate and only a small handful of Theoretical Lacanians are also clinicians. In the US at least, the mentally ill don’t get psychoanalysis — even when it might be beneficial to them. It’s not covered by insurance and is therefore almost entirely a treatment for the neuroses of the rich. I’m surprised that the French do otherwise, but if they do, the problem there is with stupidity among the French medical establishment, not theoretical Lacanians who write about literature and advertising and film. Eliding the difference seems to me an effect of scorn and anger blurring your perception, but it matters to me that Zizek’s never tried to “cure” anybody’s schizophrenia other than Hitchcock’s. Zizek’s cure is the kind that’s seasoned with salt.
Like I said — if I wanted the imaginative territory of art beholden to reality, I’d have been a scientist. The fact that art is NOT so beholden is why it’s ridiculous and pointless to use problems with Lacan as a clinical methodology to damn it as a philosophical heuristic.
But that pluralism must go both ways, and that’s where it often becomes a struggle: biology insists on an even more doctrinaire hegemony than cultural explanations for human experience. Cultural constructivism can philosophically encompass biological determinism, whereas biological determinism sets itself in absolute opposition to cultural constructivism.
Whereas I have never seemed this claimed except by theorists claiming it on biology’s behalf. One of my interests is memory training, people with normal cognitive gifts who have memorized pi to 50,000 places or the entire OED and things like that. The associated neurobiology makes modest claims about the matter, as it should, because we presently don’t even know scientifically where consciousness comes from. The science does turn up certain encouraging things about neuroplasticity, which would undermine a biologically deterministic stance. You’re right, it has to go both ways. If biological explanations lead inexorably to biological determinism, then social explanations lead inexorably to social determinism. For obvious reasons theorists never posit such a thing, nor the possibility of biological constructivism, in which bodily, holistic participation in the physicality of the world gives rise to myriad creative expressions with the power to defy stultifying cultural norms. You have recounted the narrative that theory believes about itself, that its social constructivism is a liberating force against the constraints of positivism. Thus ensues the notion that Theory’s constructivism necessarily expands the possibilities of practice. As far as I can tell such assertions are made in a spirit of certainty about its own egalitarianism and catholicity. This certainty is a huge assumption, and a conveniently self-flattering one. You object to people showing open contempt for Theory, but Theory has had an abysmal record countenancing other philosophical systems, science, free-market capitalism, simple reasoning, plain speaking, and sometimes even bare fact when it suits it. I won’t abuse people for sport but it would seem to deserve as much generosity as it has extended.
I should clarify for the sake of my inner editor that it has a abysmal record of not countenancing such things.
Domingos: “Frankly I find Pierre Bourdieu’s explanations about 19th century’s art and literary fields a lot more interesting than Kantian Greebergianism. The latter is partisan criticism, the former sees things from a vantage point (which is what true critics do).”
I so completely agree. Bourdieu had his share of “ressentiment” too, but directed against the elitist hypocrisy of the French educational system.
Lacan is so great. He said something to the effect once that life was the disease and death was the cure. I wouldn’t precisely subscribe to that sentiment, but I appreciate it. Barthes use Lacan to talk about the modern imperative to demystify, to vanquish all stories– materialist formalism looks a lot like a war on what Lacan calls the “imaginary,” in favor of the hubris of symbolizing the “real”… except you can’t symbolize the “real.”
Lacan also said that Sade represented the symptom of Kant (or, by extension, Greenberg)– the cruel comfort of a bare and brutally ordered reality.
My husband’s a neuroscientist; I find actual neuroscientists to be much more open-minded than most people who ascribe to philosophical positivism.
But “bodily holistic participation in the physicality of the world [giving] rise to myriad creative expressions” doesn’t sound like positivism — it sounds like phenomenology. Phenomenologists indeed don’t posit biological determinism — or any kind of determinism — but phenomenology is also one of the predecessor philosophies to Theory: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/
Derrida’s first book was a reading of Husserl.
I should say — I get the impression, which may be wrong, that both you, Franklin, and Alex were exposed to Theory in a somewhat ad hoc way through arts departments, relying mostly on readings of artworks and the history of your artistic disciplines read through a Theoretical lens and secondary sources with the occasional excerpt from a primary source.
I think this is related to the problem that Storr identified in that article you linked to — the difference between people who do really original work and people who write these offhand essays — “opportunistically applying the thoughts of [the] ‘masterminds’.” You appear to have learned theory from the opportunists rather than the masterminds — or at least, in a more “opportunistic” than rigorous context. You learned it for something else — your study of the arts — rather than for its own sake. I respectfully suggest this has something to do with your low opinion of it.
It’s a really bad way to learn Theory, because it takes the ideas out of their historical context and distorts their relationship to ideas that came before. It makes Theory seem like this aggressive, hostile rupture when it really emerged through some pretty familiar philosophical processes and includes and encompasses an incredibly broad range of ideas and axioms. There’s a “post-x” for almost every x, because that was what philosophy did for several decades in the 20th century.
Theoreticians who attempt to be hegemonic, who cause the kinds of problems you and Alex experienced in your programs, IMHO, are less-than-first-rate Theory people who don’t know their shit. The “opportunism” Storr is talking about is using theory to get an edge in academic politics, and that’s just lousy priorities. Theory is pretty totalizing, but the whole point of its politics is anti-hegemony. Anybody who misses that is missing the most important point.
When I talk about Theory being more open to the inclusion of positivism than vice versa, it’s not because my teacher told me that or because I’ve read other people who like Theory say it. It’s because Theory is, at its kernel, a post-Hegelian discipline, and Hegelianism, with its Idealist notion of “subjective truth” is more flexible at the level of first principles than the empirical philosophies. (Phenomenology is not, however, one of the “empirical philosophies.” It’s also a form of post-Hegelianism. Which is why you and I will agree sometime when you and Noah won’t — Noah is less Hegelian than I am.)
Without more interest in it, I’m doubtful you’ve done the kind of systematic reading in Continental Philosophy and its predecessors that you really need to understand it, and I’m even more doubtful that you had the benefit of a curriculum emphasizing its historical context — because most philosophy departments that teach it don’t even do that. That isn’t to imply that you should do all that reading but at some point, you have to accept that there is some well-reasoned substance to Theory, not just an academic politics, even if you disagree with that well-reasoned substance. I’ll absolutely side with you, every time, against Theory’s role in academic politics, and against the abuse of Theory and its influence and power for opportunistic and personal political gain. But I won’t side with you on positions that you take that assume that ALL Theory, even the work of Storr’s “masterminds,” is equally opportunistic and non-rigorous. You don’t have to pay any attention to it at all, you can certainly say you find it irritating and non-compelling or that it just doesn’t captivate your imagination, and you can definitely oppose its material effects in your field. But it accomplishes absolutely nothing for you (or Alex) to try to make philosophical or logical arguments against it without understanding it, from a position of disengagement and even hostility.
Caro:”I think it’s interesting how much closer and more enmeshed in each other the activities of theory and practice are in literature than they are in visual art. ”
I appreciate that as an olive branch to Franklin, but I still don’t agree with it. The claim that the magical realism of Salman Rushdie is more philosophically daring and relevant than any number of postwar art practices (and some amount of the criticism thereof) strikes me as “opportunistic and non-rigorous.” And I don’t care how many formalist Christian art historians agree with you.
Bert: I should have said “appear to be in visual art.” I just don’t know or have any information to base an opinion on other than what Franklin said. You guys’ll have to argue it out!
My academic exposure to Theory consisted of brief excerpts from the germane canon, and like nearly everything else I read in grad school I blew it off and kept painting. No harm, no foul. My real exposure to Theory came when I came forward as an art critic who wouldn’t give serious consideration to art that failed visually, and spent the next six years fielding attacks from Theory’s proponents. If there is a well-reasoned substance to it, it never appeared. However, my presumed pretension, conservatism, solipsism, anti-intellectualism, sexism, and Nazism were berated at considerable length. Meanwhile I had to figure out a career path around Theory’s proponents as well, such is the open-mindedness of the self-described open-minded. So you’re right, I don’t have the benefit of “systematic reading in Continental Philosophy and its predecessors,” which sounds lovely.
Instead I have had every variety of intellectual filth flung in my direction, and material obstacles to my progress as an artist, writer, and teacher placed in my way. There may have been a time, around 2004, when I might have been willing “to accept that there is some well-reasoned substance to Theory.” Now, I’m sorry to say, out of necessity, I’ve been weaponized. I will entertain well-reasoned substance of any kind from any source. But contrary to what you may think, when I publicly call out Theory’s baseless presuppositions, invidious claims, hypocricies, pretensions, quickness to resort to intellectually dishonest tactics, inability to present reasonable arguments, and sewer-like culture, people e-mail me with their congratulations. I don’t doubt that any substantive, lasting truths held by Theory – which I assume do not exist until the day I see evidence of them – will remain standing once it becomes shameful anachronism to subscribe to Theory, which would have happened ten years ago if not for tenure and the contemporary art museum. But this is its deserved fate, and I intend to help expedite its arrival.
Well, highly marketable neo-Impressionist painting needs critical legitimation too. Fair enough.
Bert, are you referring to someone’s work in particular? Because we can go there if you’d like.
No doubt Franklin will just see this as intellectual filth…but I enjoy the fact that even if bees have aesthetic preferences about flowers, that makes them critics, not artists. I’d be curious to hear an insect example of art practice. Termite mounds maybe?
Be that as it may…being out of fashion as an artist can certainly be irritating/soul-killing. I relate to some extent; the kind of poetry I wanted to write was pretty much completely uininteresting to folks who controlled who got into grad school or who got published. Poetry’s probably the most insular, academicized art out there at the moment, for that matter. And still the bitterness lingers….
So, you know, certainly there are things about the academy I dislike. But, at the same time, some of my absolute favorite books were written by academics. (Sharon Marcus’ “Between Women” is a recent example.) And similarly, some of the most exciting and moving books I’ve read have been theory — from Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” to that Haeurwas book I was talking about, to Niebuhr and Eve Sedgwick, Stanley Cavell in some ways, Zizek, Kant — I read Hume recently, who was a lot of fun. My engagement with them really is not so different than my engagement with Wallace Stevens, for example, or with James Baldwin — or Doestoevsky (who I just read recently) or Philip K. Dick…or Jeff Wall, or Rembrandt, or Bosch, or Art Young, or Charles Schulz. I’m excited by the way they put together thoughts and the way that they express those thoughts, and by the way in which they react to the world and present the world — in words, or visuals, or both.
Given that, I just have trouble giving credence to someone who seems to think (if I understand you aright) that as a creator Rembrandt, for example, has more in common with an insect than he does with Kant. That seems really intuitively wrong to me (though again, intuition seems to me just a kind of learning, not an instinct.)
Franklin, Susan Freilicher was the only artist you copped to liking. To me she seems pretty uninspiring, at least digitally– do we need more pastoral landscapes handled in that way?
It’s totally possible that we like an artist in common (I certainly like things because I think they look good, no doubt about it), but I don’t think she’s going to be that artist.
Your Boston Museum review seemed attentive and thoughtful though– it’s the only writing of yours I’ve seen, but yeah, why would anyone think that gestural abstraction was in any way unconventional?
I enjoy the fact that even if bees have aesthetic preferences about flowers, that makes them critics, not artists.
I’ll go along with that if you accept the flowers as artists.
Jane Freilicher, my fault.
“I’ll go along with that if you accept the flowers as artists.”
Hah! That kind of makes this whole argument worthwhile for me; I laughed out loud.
Flowers and bees are quite interdependent though; the only reason a flower/artist creates is to attract/amuse the critic/bees. You really couldn’t say that the art comes before the critic, or the critic before the artist in that case. Evolutionarily they’re completely intertwined and interlinked.
Also…I just see the Fall as really important to art-making and thinking about artists. Bees and flowers are prelapsarian; the real creative force there, the one making choices, is God. People have the knowledge of good and evil; they’re separated from their instincts and from god’s will. That opens up space for them to create. Artists (like human beings) are like god rather than (or as well as) of god.
Turning an artist into a flower seems to ignore the really amazing/glorious bit about art. The great thing about art isn’t that it’s natural, but that it’s unnatural — or natural and unnatural at the same time, like human beings themselves.
Franklin…we never established whether or not you hate Chuck Close? It seems like he could be a contemporary artist you and Bert agree on….
Do we need more pastoral landscapes handled in that way?
As a landscape painter I have to ask myself this in a serious way. Usually the answer is, “Well, fuck it, this is what I feel like doing.” Eventually that’s not going to be the case or that answer won’t feel adequate, and it will be time for the next thing. I’m not sure the question can be answered on more than one person’s behalf, but at the same time you have to make a contribution. It’s a hard problem.
I have my writing archived if you want to see more of it. That page is pretty complete except for my recent Edward Gorey review and a short Jennifer Riley piece.
I have written positively about Close but I’ve sort of gotten tired of him in the meantime for reasons I’m not sure about. I may have overestimated him in the first place. He’s respectable.
FWIW, I’m quite fond of this landscape. But it’s old and has very little to do with Theory.
I was very lucky to have the benefit of a historically situated Theory curriculum (I understand it was based on Berkeley’s pedagogy; my advisor did his PhD at Berkeley.) We had a series of seminars in which the Theory texts were the primary material and the secondary material was historical context, influences, and critical writing on the theoretical source — structured just like a literature class but focusing on an aspect of Theory rather than a literary genre or author. After the introductory course which was an overview, the reading was clustered into seminars on post-Marxism, Derrida, Lacan, and postcolonialism. I think there was a Foucault seminar I didn’t take and the feminisms were taught in the Women’s Studies department.
Each seminar started with the historical context — so for Lacan we began with a historical overview (seems like this is when I read Roudinesco’s biography), followed by germane essays from Kojeve, Levi-Strauss, Benveniste, Merleau Ponty and Marcel Mauss (and I’m missing a couple more; Freud and Saussure were covered in the overview). Then we read the first three seminars and XX and Encore, and we finished up with some good secondary applied material, the feminist revision, and Zizek. There were lots of supplemental reading lists for anybody who was interested in filling in the many gaps. It’s what’s known as a “genealogical” approach, following Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche. The Wikipedia stub on this is crap and I’m not coming up with a really good non-Theoretical capsule, but here’s what Stanford says:
This is one of the things I was referring to when I said that being hegemonic about Theory is bad Theory.
One of the reasons this curriculum was so great, in addition to the elegance of making the pedagogy consistent with what’s being taught, is that the emphasis was on learning how to read, for example, Lacan more than it was learning the substance of what Lacan said. It treats these “masterminds” as authors, paying attention to their style, the way they read their master texts and the reasons they read them, the context of their specific projects and the questions that concerned them, so that we left with a sense of them as engaged with history and philosophy, not a sense of them as some apotheosis of thinking about art. We were given a good arsenal for further reading, not just a memorized set of axioms. We became “readers of Lacan” in the same way we were “readers of Dickens,” and we learned to love Lacan the same way we love Dickens. I think it was a marvelous pedagogical model and I think if it were used everywhere you’d see a lot less of the aggression and entrenched ideology that appears to have been so damaging to you.
Interestingly, it didn’t really saturate the literature classes though. My 18th century literature classes really weren’t theoretical at all and although my postmodernism classes were, they tended to focus on writers rather than theoreticians (Postmodernism I think is an art movement, not “Theory”.) We read things like that essay by Hawkes, which is theoretical but from a writer’s perspective, and we obviously talked about theory in that context but it was driven by the art work rather than the philosophical genealogy.
I get the impression that things must be vastly much more hegemonic in visual art — that people are bringing very ad hoc theory out of the academy and doing really insidious things with it. Although I have to say that I’ve heard other people say that art isn’t Theoretical enough, that there’s still a lot of resistance to the kind of work done by Krauss et al. Perhaps that’s just academic art history. Of the people from the art world I’ve met here, far more of them agree with you than with me! Perhaps it’s hegemonic in English now too, since it’s been awhile since I was a full-time academic. But this curriculum had collapsed by the time I left graduate school because the highly theoretical junior faculty I was working with were all turned down for tenure and replaced with faculty who could more easily fit into the traditional periodization of the field. My program became less theoretical, not more, by the end of the ’90s. But I’m sure it was and still would be hard to compete in academic English without being into Theory at all; I was just so into Theory that the opposite was more an issue for me.
Steinbeck and Stevens– you definitely know your historical moment of choice. The descriptions in your articles are elegant, Franklin, there’s nothing bad about that. And nobody can be blamed for disliking irony. I’ll look at some more. My friend Paul Mullins is a painter who also hates Alex Katz– you might enjoy his work.
I was inspired to watch Ed Harris’ “Pollock” tonight, incidentally, a visually lovely film that made me reflect on how deeply our culture idolizes Frankenstein.
Hey Bert – which ones were you reading — Steinbeck/Stevens/Pollock could be the 30s-40s as a historical moment or the ’50s…?
I hate irony. Man, Franklin, can we ever bond on that.
Nothing wrong with irony in its place! From Swift to Art Young, irony is central to lots of artists I love.
It tends to work best if there’s belief behind it, I’d say. Shallow nihilism is hard to take.
Oh…this is a pretty straightforward discussion of Franklin’s position on conceptual art.
And by straightforward, I mean, ironic…but not nihilistic!
Caro, that sounds like the ideal presentation of that material. Visual art has always taken the bits that it needed from intellectual life and run with them. I’m sure that painters were not the best readers of the Bible or Dante or Ovid even as they made paintings of their scenes. That honor probably went to the clergy and various nobles. There’s a certain carelessness if not downright half-assedness about the intellectual component of art that was never a problem until a university education became a standard component of adult life and art marooned in the academy. What was once a liberated attitude about facts (like you said, you want your fiction to be culturally wise, not empirically correct) turned into plain old intellectual sloppiness and academic politics of the worst sort. Since criticism and fiction share the same medium I can imagine a productive golden age of Theory in the English department. It sounds like you were there for it. I don’t think art ever had one. I think it started its life as academic politics and stayed that way, thus entrenching a profoundly middlebrow, checklist-driven way of looking at work into a highbrow position. One of the ironies of the October crowd is that it doesn’t have a single member who didn’t at some point ask Clement Greenberg for a letter of recommendation.
Bert, thanks for having a look and for the compliments.
Noah, I have to say that I’m not overly proud of that essay. Conceptual art dating to the early 1970s looks radical as hell and it’s easy to see what drew people into it. My complaint is about its current incarnation, which is basically rehashing Fluxus and three items from Duchamp’s whole oeuvre over and over again like a scratched record because it has ensconced itself into a comfortable, nearly unassailable position, propped up by faux radicalism and real money. In that essay I lampooned certain intellectual and aesthetic failures that were justified by lack of rigor in and around conceptual art, but on some level this is not really conceptual art’s fault. Nevertheless I was called into the room by conceptual artists for a particular purpose and I did my best to upset them.
My two cents (hastily written between morning chores).
I did my undergraduate at Berkeley in Rhetoric. The department is/was interdisciplinary, populated by literature people, continental philosophers, film theorists, political scientists, etc. What they all had in common was an investment in capital “T” theory. However, this didn’t mean getting us on-board with post-modernism, turning us into unthinking disciples of some theorist or another, or anything like that. It was about getting us to understand, engage with, question, and elaborate the orgins of our assumptions about the world, as opposed to throwing our hands up and saying “it is what it is, onto the next thing.” This drive to question pushed me into a Ph.D. program, and then into the academy, where I continue to question the taken for granted in my research, and where and push graduates and undergraduates to do the same. I wouldn’t be doing this (perpetuating theory) if I didn’t think it served some greater good.
The problem with taking definitions for granted, or simply ignoring the possibility that were you’re coming from is informed by some deep seated sense of self or instinct for truth, is that self, truth, instinct, etc. are concepts shot through with politics, and that the status quo (“what it is”) is an outcome of power relations as much as anything else. You don’t need to be a hard-core social constructivist to buy any of this. You just need to be willing to accept the relatively uncontroversial premise that as humans we have difficulty bracketing values, emotions, and self interest. My scientist friends (and spouse) have no trouble admitting that values and politics play into what gets studied, and consequently what gets understood. And most even admit that these factors influence how these things get understood.
If you want to argue that we shouldn’t be asking questions about why we think of some things as natural, what some things are called art and others kitsch, then you have your argument against theory right there. Unfortunately, this is giving the game to the winner before you’ve had a chance to lose.
This brings me to Franklin. I hate to tell you this, but the argument about art and politics is itself deeply theoretical (anxiety of influence, anyone?). The notion that what is at stake in your success or failure as an artist or critic has everything to do with politics, intellectual trends, and nothing to do with the intrinsic value of your efforts is to question the status quo, to ask what assumptions underly the construction of truth, etc. What isn’t theoretical is positing that interests behind it are simply bad, or intellectually bankrupt, and stopping short of interrogating their founding assumptions.
I should also add that there’s no shortage of hostility toward theory in English, and that at best there’s plenty of tension between the old guard close readers, new historicists, and Frankfurt and Birmingham school cultural studies people and the post Marxists theorists. It’s also worth noting that theory really isn’t medium specific, though as had been noted elsewhere on the blog, its roots in the linguistic turn has led it to conceive symbolic action in terms of language.
That said, my understanding of visual studies/visual cultures is that it emerged (in part) from Art History’s embrace of theory, and that discipline’s attempt to expand both what “counts” as art, and to better understand how visual art (and its attendant discourses) communicates and to what effect.
I take Alpers’ work (and the October essays) to be foundational here… the notion that formalism isn’t enough, and that ideologies of representation are also at work. Are you suggesting that this is bunk, or merely that its an insight that’s been abused for political purposes? If the latter, how is this any different from a recalcitrant new critic refusing to accept anything outside the text as game for interpretation, and voting to deny tenure on those grounds (it does happen)?
The articles I picked at random had references to Wallace Stevens and another to Steinbeck, and another to the ignorant dismissal of modernist abstraction in New York in the ’80s. I just think Franklin is probably happy to exist in the cultural-intellectual milieu of early 20th-century America– without the Marxism.
Nate, like I said to Noah, you are using the term “theory” in a maximalist way that only has currency among subscribers to Theory. So let’s question that assumption: What do the proponents of Theory gain by this all-encompassing conception of theory besides the self-evident prizes: bragging rights, markers of value to and of the in-group, academic survival, and hegemony over the associated intellectual disciplines?
Franklin, I don’t accept your question’s premise. I made an effort to separate theory out from orthodox Marxisms and new historicism. Yes, my definition of theory is discourse community specific, but it is hardly all encompassing. Moreover, I didn’t suggest the everything should be understood according theory, only that theory yielded valuable insights into the hegemonies against which you inveigh, insights with which you systematically refuse to engage.
You “made an effort to separate theory out from orthodox Marxisms and new historicism”? Where?
Oh, you were talking about your 7:17 comment. It wasn’t clear that you were saying that those other people were not theorists. At any rate, we still have the assertion that resistance to theory is theory, and that “ask[ing] what assumptions underly the construction of truth” is theory. So it encompasses enough for me to pose the question I posed, and you are the one who refuses to engage.
Franklin, you may be underestimating both how legitimately totalizing Theory is as well as how extensively Theory has engaged with the problem of this totality: for example, your critique of “maximal” definitions of Theory is similar to the critique Habermas made of Lyotard. Lyotard said that the universally defining characteristic of postmodernity is a suspicion of meta-narratives; Habermas questioned whether a universal suspicion of meta-narratives wasn’t a metanarrative in itself. One of my all-time favorite Theoretical mastertexts is a book containing a dialogue among Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, and (the brilliant and understudied) Ernesto Laclau called “Contingency, Universality, Hegemony” where they dig into this contradiction and of course, fail utterly to resolve it, leaving it in this marvelously pleasing state of flux and play — a plurality of metanarratives, all equally suspicious of each other.
The fact that the book is multi-vocal lets it “perform” the overall suspicion of metanarratives without actually requiring any one of the individuals to question themselves into absolute relativism. Zizek comes closest, I think, to resolving it — he refers to the kinds of metanarratives they subscribe to as “particular universalities” — which are also, therefore, highly contingent, and (in theory) more resistant to hegemony.
From what I can tell, there are two collisions between visual art and theory in the situation you’ve been describing: a) the one where people with deep “particular universal” investments in Theories or artworks give you grief specifically for criticizing those things and b) the one where artists (you included) are expected to conform to a specific Theoretical metanarrative about how art is supposed to work or look or make meaning.
Both of those suck. The former is just rude and pointless — hegemony in its most localized form: bullying. The latter is actively antithetical to what Theory’s supposed to accomplish, which is an opening away from restrictive narratives about how things are “supposed” to be.
(I’m exempting the situation, which has been in evidence here, where people give you grief for being close-minded about Theory-in-General, independent from a specific critique. I’m leaving it out not to diminish how annoying I’m sure it is for you, but because it’s just one of those things that’s going to happen when people of differing opinions discuss ideas. There’s a difference between an argument where people try to get other people to acknowledge the value of their perspective, no matter how aggressively they try, and an actual act of hegemony, where someone tries to silence a critical or philosophical vantage point.)
I haven’t had a chance to search — can you point me to an example of an artwork that you think fails visually that people tried to convince you was acceptable because of its engagement with Theory? I’m about as steeped in Theory as it’s possible to be and I find a lot of conceptual art unsatisfying — sometimes I’ll read the artist’s statement and say “If that’s the best you can do, you should maybe just draw a pretty picture.” Other times I think there’s something really interesting. I sympathize with the problem that you identify but from the other side: art’s engagement with theory can be so ad hoc that it just leads to lame theoretical work. I’m absolutely no expert so this is a highly particular claim, in no way intended to suggest what percentage of conceptual art has this problem, but a good amount of the conceptual art I’ve seen is just grafting theory onto imagery rather than making insightful connections between the concept and the medium — the kind of insightful connections that writers like John Hawkes made for narrative prose. You have to know a pretty damn lot about theory to be able to make the kind of connections that he made.
I don’t necessarily think all visual art has to be “visually successful” — maybe a fantastic concept can be good enough sometimes, especially in an experiment — but if it’s true that a lot of art is both visually tedious and theoretically pedestrian, that’s a different, additional problem from the one about political hegemony and the cliquish pressures of the art market.
The measure of a highly theoretically successful work of visual art should be that it visually challenges the way visual art works — it performs that act of theoretical questioning against its own substance. If it doesn’t actually work as visual art, it really can’t ever do that. It should not be that it visually illuminates the way language and culture works — which is what I see a lot of. That can be cool, even valuable, but it’s essentially just an illustration of a theory, not the “theoretical metatext” that’s the holy grail of experimental art. It seems that perhaps there aren’t enough Rosalind Krausses (I almost wrote Rosalind Franklin LOL) to consistently examine all the atrocities being perpetuated in the name of Theoretical art.
OK, fair enough. The sentence you cited does suggest that anyone undertaking to answer the question “what assumptions underly truth” is doing theory.
What makes theory distinct from other persepctives is that its founding assumption is an absence of the true, the good, and the beautiful. It treats these terms (which are fundamental to Western philosophy) as contingent and provisional notions, and looks to them not for insight into their nature but in the social/political/psychological forces constituting them. To sort this out, it looks to discourse and language for insight into the absence, as opposed to definite presence. This makes theory different for orthodox Marxism, which seeks to strip away or expose false consciousness, and Freudian analysis, which looks to the sub-conscious for truth. (Yes, I’m painting in broad strokes here.)
So, when you assert a cultural hegemony a la Gramsci that while Marxist in origins, was developed largely by self-avowed practitioners of theory.
Finally, I am not claiming that proponents of theory do not try to assert dominance over other approaches. In fact, it’s been my experience that they often do. But that’s a problem with certain academics, and not with theory itself.
Caro:
” should say — I get the impression, which may be wrong, that both you, Franklin, and Alex were exposed to Theory in a somewhat ad hoc way through arts departments, relying mostly on readings of artworks and the history of your artistic disciplines read through a Theoretical lens and secondary sources with the occasional excerpt from a primary source.”
I obviously cannot speak for Franklin, but in my case this conjecture is half-right.
In the French and British equivalent of senior high school, where I matriculated with (French) Baccalaureat and (British) A-levels in 1973, I was in the humanities “stream” and thus took the equivalent of Philosophy 101. This cycled through the “classic” thinkers but also touched on Derrida, Freud, Barthes and De Saussure.
When that year I moved to Paris to study at the Faculté des Arts Plastiques et des Sciences de l’Art at Paris 1 (Sorbonne), what we’ve been calling capital-T Theory was already strongly entrenched, uneasily cohabiting with dogmatic Marxism as the two dominant ideologies. But it wasn’t just in Academia– it was in the air. Lacan was at the height of his “succès de scandale”. I tried mightily to find value there, and for the most part failed.
Lacan’s entire oeuvre is based on his therapeutic endeavours, as was Freud’s. It seems beyond bizarre to me to airily dismiss the therapeutic aspect of Lacanism, thus, in the context of textual study; a house of cards needs all its cards.
Contrary to the other so-called “masterminds” of Theory, such as Foucault and Baudrillard, Lacan never actually reasons or demonstrates. He proceeds by assertion. And he is deliberately obscurantist– he was the first one to acknowledge it.
Theory with a capital T is an ideology, and as such relies on foundational mists that don’t hold up to scrutiny, such as the linguistic turn.
Here is a description from a British historian’s website:
“The expression ‘linguistic turn’ can be seen as a shorthand for the impact of the focus on the relationship between philosophy and language, which began to be significant in the early 20th century. This has challenged the traditional tenets of historical objectivity, which assume that there is a real past which can be described (to the extent to which sources are available) as it actually happened. Instead, proponents of the linguistic turn argue that the past does not exist outside our textual representations of it, and that these representations cannot be separated from the ideological baggage that historians bring to them. British historians have been reluctant to allow these ideas influence over their actual practice, and the issues (connected with developments in cultural and gender history particularly) remain contentious.”
Of course, the linguistic turn extends infinitely beyond history, but this quote illustrates how problematic is the use of a notion so open to bad-faith abuse.
As conceived by Rorty and prefigured by such as Russell and Wittgenstein, the linguistic turn was a cautionary idea that should spur a more careful and refined use of language; now it’s an excuse for rampant subjectivism in its worst case.
“myths”, not “mists”!!
I wonder what that typo reveals about my subconscious…
Alex — almost all Lacanianism in contemporary Theory is passed through either the Feminist or the Marxist revisions, which are non-clinical. But the original Lacanian texts are readings of structural anthropology (Levi-Strauss), structural Marxism (Althusser), structural linguistics and phenomenology. Lacan thus constitutes a significant and original interpreter of those philosophical traditions. The — fully non-clinical — context in which his work is used by Theory is as the primary texts of a conversation between Freud and those disciplines. I think it’s misleading to say that Lacan’s “entire oeuvre is based on his therapeutic endeavor” because so much of that oeuvre is modeled on literature and literary reading (as was Freud’s). Both of them believed that you could “read” the unconscious the exact same way you could “read” narrative. Just because the analogy failed for therapy — which I agree it did — doesn’t mean it also fails for narrative, it just entails the replacement of the Freudian psychic unconscious with the Marxist “collective unconscious” — a replacement which is implied in Lacan’s own work in his formulation of the subject as something other than an individual. That replacement completely changes the context for the interpretation of Lacan and shifts it from a therapeutic method to a heuristic one.
You said: “Theory with a capital T is an ideology, and as such relies on foundational mists [sic] that don’t hold up to scrutiny, such as the linguistic turn.”
I like mists, actually. Check out Nate’s excellent summary — Theory wouldn’t disagree, since it’s axiomatic that no foundational myth can ever hold up to scrutiny. The myth you’re buying into is that there’s some outside to ideology, I guess?
Also on Nate’s: I think it’s important to qualify that “absence of the true, good, and beautiful” doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as beauty — just that there’s no such thing as the universally beautiful (true, etc.) Theory doesn’t discount that subjects experience the thing that Western philosophy has denoted by “beauty.” It just explores the ways in which that concept is contingent upon a myriad of other things, including the subjectivity of the person experiencing it.
That’s why a theoretical art work that embraces “ugliness” (or Noah’s nihilistic irony) often really misses the point IMO: it’s a pretty delicate balancing act not to just make beauty’s opposite “present” rather than exploring the contingency of the beautiful thing.
Also, I think Theory does support a notion of absolute or radical Evil, though, a la Badiou and Copjec. But the summation for “beauty” and “goodness” I definitely agree with.
Caro: Do you have some kind of magic powers? Two entries in my RSS reader after your comments about the Butler/Zizek/Laclau essay, this appeared: http://fckvrso.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/judith-butler-ernesto-laclau-slavoj-zizek-contingency-hegemony-universality-contemporary-dialogues-on-the-left/
Whoa, apparently I do! Stellar!
I really really love that book.
Caro,
Thanks for adding the qualification. I would suggest that the good, the true and the beautiful as previously conceived doesn’t coexist easily w/Theory’s commitment to their contingency. This isn’t to deny that truth and beauty don’t exist in any form. It does however explain why Theory gets in the craw of people committed to earlier ideas of truth and beauty, where these concepts exist in certain, a priori forms.
Nate, this is where for me the phemenology that is so important, I think, to Franklin is also important to Theory, at least Lacanian theory: the subject’s experience of beauty is both separate from and constituted by the concept of beauty. The previous constitution of the concept of beauty doesn’t easily co-exist — but Lacan beautifully recasts the experience of beauty as the “becoming visible of desire” which has a blinding effect: “l’effet d’aveuglement”, playing on the literal and metaphorical senses of “aveugler” as not seeing and not comprehending, but also the synonym “without reflection,” setting it largely outside the mediated linguistic field and in relation to the Real. He goes on to collapse the Kantian sublime and beautiful into each other, making the response to beauty into a Freudian “sublimation” — but rather than sublimating the drives beauty allows the psyche to sublimate the aporia — making it into a defense against the desert of the Real.
And Alex wants me to discard Lacan because of his free associativness. Oy. The collapse of the beautiful into the sublime is one of the most extraordinarily allusive chains of signifiers in Theory and it emerges in Lacan out of his readings of Antigone and James Joyce. This is clinical!? This isn’t clinical at all!
Well, we just have, at bottom, a “conservative” and a “radical” stance. Zizek of course privileges the radical, but I don’t, out of hand. Franklin and Alex see an old order, a natural harmony, an organic tradition that surpassed language, invaded and overturned by am alien force, a new regime of arbitrary artificial homogeneity. Caro and Nate (and to an extent Noah and I) are agitating on behalf of a foundational tension, rather than a foundational order, within which Theory is only the latest in a series of attempts to cope symbolically (through language).
I think there’s kind of a historical pendulum (swinging but also rotating– you know, rotation of the earth and all that)– the Enlightenment gave us liberal universalism, and the 19th century reacted sharply, with conservative particularisms (colonial revolutions rather than domestic ones), fighting for sacred tribal earth. The twentieth century brought conservative universalism in the form of various large-scale assertions of absolute truth, and one might hope that this century would grant us some liberal particularism. That means that the totalizing arrogance of radical stances needs to start recognizing boundaries, and the vicious purity of the conservative will have to be redefined in humility.
On a more practical note, if “clinical” means people taking potshots without naming names, constantly beating up on this imaginary “hegemony” of hack conceptual artists (without doing the Jackson Pollock/Hulk/Frankenstein thing: “rrrRRRAH! Fluxus! MMMuhhh!”), then this whole conversation vis-a-vis art is pretty darned clinical. Like… Matthew Barney. He’s famous, plenty of people hate him for political-type reasons, but he’s certainly making art about art– what’s wrong with him?
Bert, I’d have to go downtown and find the pieces I didn’t particularly like — I didn’t need to store that information at the time so I didn’t. It’s generally a response I have strongly only when I read the statement too, though — are there statements for the Barney pieces? I’m often better off to just let the conceptual piece be whatever it is and not worry about what the artist meant it to mean. I like Jeff Wall’s images immensely though, and I think his writing about art is quite wonderfully smart.
But FWIW I don’t especially dig the “conceptual” interpretation of Pollock; all the unconscious stuff, if that’s really even conceptual, that makes Pollock’s canvases into the visual equivalent of the end of Coover’s baseball novel. I much prefer the surface-for-its-own-sake take. Although Coover’s considered postmodern that take on Pollock feels very modernist to me: there’s probably something to be made of that discrepancy.
I like your penultimate paragraph there a great deal. It’s beautifully dialectical.
That pendulum bit was a shout out to the Hegelians in the crowd. Historicism I am certainly okay with, but inevitable progress is not really me, which is my conservative side- I wouldn’t entirely dismiss Chesterton’s claim, for example, that the Renaissance was a step backwards rather than forwards (disliking biopower is always a conservative stance). And yet I do like penicillin and functioning sewers far more than the divine right of kings.
Who interprets art as being about the unconscious anymore? I mean, it might stand in for Franklin’s “intuition,” but that makes it all the more modernist, given his preferences.”Just on the surface” is Greenbergian visual New Criticism, but not altogether incompatible with structuralism, so probably more amenable to both you and the October crowd. I definitely read Pollock as about a new kind of looking at work that had completely abandoned representation in favor of embodiment, which is an example that all the artists following him have striven to follow.
Which gets us to the aporia (contradictions) in conservatism, is that conservatives have to write off the forward motion of an earlier era (while radicals have to write off the backward movements). Comics and landscape painting are completely about representation, not embodiment. Just as Nietzsche had his own number with the “ressentiment” thing, and Marx illuminated his own irrelevance in writing about the base-superstructure, and Freud’s attempt to create a safe space to verbally release repression reflected a new power structure of total traumatic visual transparency. I don’t write any of these guys off, but postmodernism and modernism each have their own demons. Modernism wants to get rid of the body, and postmodernism wants to get rid of the subject, and those are both a problem.
I don’t think you can read Pollock as about embodiment without banging right up against the unconscious through subjectivity. If you read him as embodiment without subjectivity, that’s either extraordinarily dehumanizing (to the notion of embodiment) or no different from reading him as about plain old materiality.
You can read him as about materiality — but that bangs you right back up against Greenberg, which as you say is compatible enough with structuralism. Embodiment is an interfacial concept that’s pretty saturated with psychoanalytic overtones to me.
But maybe that’s not what you mean by embodiment? I certainly agree that comics and landscape painting aren’t about embodiment…with exceptions like W the Whore, which is about embodiment and landscape and embodiment as landscape.
I don’t know that I buy the equation of aporia with contradiction. Aporia is radical absence: you can have contradictions in the phantasied place of presence too. I would phrase it that postmodernism successfully gets rid of the individual by recasting “individuality” as “subjectivity”, with its ambivalent elision of selfhood into Otherness, but not that the subject goes away as well. Does visual art postmodernism try to erase the subject too?
*note: this commented has been edited to remove offensive content per the discussion below
Psychoanalysis is about restoring the subject– the body is not affirmed by psychoanalysis. It is a liability to be overcome– or, in Jung, completely melted into the ether of archetypes. Zizek loves the crucified Christ because it represents victory not only over the big Other but the body itself.
Pollock liked Jung– he certainly thought he was doing something related to his subjectivity. But I would say the reason his work matters is because of its embodiment and materiality– which is how we get performance and installation; another strand is Duchamp, who was never a proper modernist, and spawned institutional critique and appropriation. Greenberg’s formalism was modernist, but his outlook on materiality is what helped to spawn postwar art criticism, and, to a degree, postwar art. All of these practices, culminating in relational aesthetics, are about constituting a referential field devoid of humanity.
Of course there are still names of auteurs, just as there are in literature, but they’re reference points. I would follow Zizek in saying that freedom has suffered as a result, but there needs to be some kind of affirmation, linked to specificity and lack, rather than some abstract universality laid over the irreconcilable multiplicity spawned by negation.
Pollock thought POLLOCK was doing something subjective– hopefully that made sense. I don’t give Jung credit for much of anything.
Caro – Whoa there! I usually restrain my activisty language-prescriptive impulses around these parts (not calling out, for example, the repeated ableist use of the term “lame” when I might have), but “him/her/it” I’m afraid strikes a little too close to home. Aside from that phrase itself being an insult used to deny trans people’s gender identities, it also makes use of “it” as a gender-neutral pronoun. Human beings are not objects; “it” typically refers to objects, and is frequently used as a transphobic insult by itself for that reason. I am a genderqueer trans woman – not a man, and only in some ways and at some times a woman. Unless you think I can be viewed from one perspective as a female person and from another as a genderqueer chair or table, I would very, very strongly prefer that you use singular “they/them” or an alternative gender-neutral pronoun of some kind (“ze/hir” for example).
This individual, having discovered itself to be an uncomfortable Modernist chair, is going to go off to get itself placed in a design museum. Ta ta, now!
On the other hand, I had forgotten about the copy of Contingency, Hegemony, Universality lingering in my suitcase. I think I’ll give it another shot per your recommendation – I recall liking what I had read so far.
Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially in the feminist revision, is very concerned with the body. That doesn’t sound right for Zizek who is very materialist — what passage are you thinking of?
Let me try to get at it this way: what formal element of Pollock’s art anchors it in a specific theory of embodiment, and how does that formal element evoke or explode a (preferably shifting and open) idea that eludes the place of the unconscious in that theory of embodiment?
This is my problem with the aspect of conceptual art that says that the “idea is the art”: I agree with Franklin that an idea isn’t art. That’s just a way to skirt the demand, so strong in literary postmodernism and in literary theory, of locking the theory into a dialetic with the form. It’s a rejection of materiality rather than a complication of it. That makes it, ultimately, a rehearsal of the same old binary. Theory is not about opposites; it’s about supplements.
That’s not to say that no conceptual art participates in the logic of the supplement. It’s just that when you articulate the relationship of a work of art to the theory it’s supposed to engage with, you can’t just articulate the idea — you have to anchor it to the materiality of the art. It’s associative — but the association is the manipulation of the chain of signifiers, not a Rorschach test. The signification of the materiality matters. If the relationship of the material to the idea is basically a Rorschach test, pure association, rather than something anchored in formal signification, the only way to link it to theory is by implicating the unconscious. Regardless of what the theory being invoked is. (I’m skeptical whether it’s linked at all without the signifiers, but linking an association without reference to either signifier or subjectivity would be a fully Modernist, not very Theoretical, project.)
That anchoring drops out of a lot of artists’ statements I’ve read: they’re just imaginative, extremely individualist, often poetic (but more frequently jargony) musings on what the art means to the artist. That’s really not quite how it works when it works best…
Anja — “it” was actually meant to refer to the subject of psychoanalysis — the subject that’s never been an individual at all except by the reverse metaphorization. That’s the one that theory is most concerned with: the “natural condition” is that non-individuated “it.”
I’m extremely sorry it bothered you; I don’t know a good way around the problem you identify – gender differentiation is pretty much irrelevant to the psychoanalytic position at this level. It’s the reason why so many Anglo-American feminists consider French feminism to “erase woman” from theory. But from the psychoanalytic perspective it’s just the opposite — there’s no individuality to begin with and all gender is papered on top of that neutral blankness. It is very specifically an object though — “objet a”.
They and Them aren’t gender neutral. They’re gender inclusive. But they do not include this particular Theoretical subjectivity. Remember that Irigaray describes woman as “this sex which is not one.” The proper English pronoun for the psychoanalytic subject is “it.”
I will absolutely try to qualify it if I ever need to use it again; it was thoughtless of me. But the subject is an object — I can’t get around that when Lacan’s the topic at hand.
Here’s the concept that I’m aiming for:
I will try to rephrase the paragraph above so that it’s less offensive and will annotate that it was changed. I wasn’t aiming for gender neutrality at all and certainly don’t want the opposite. Sorry Anja; sincere apologies.
There’s no need to get upset about there being a difference between Pollock’s modernist reasons for making art and the results in the discourse of art after modernism. He used his body to make the work and his soul disappeared– you ended up with paint as paint on canvas as canvas. This is why artist’s statements really don’t matter, just like Jung doesn’t matter, just like Lacanian clinical practice doesn’t matter.
Who said the “idea is the art?” Except for all the iconoclasts on this culture website? Postmodern art is absolutely about materiality– that’s what I’ve been saying. Not representation. Representation is an idea.
That’s why it supposedly led “inevitably” to abstraction, but abstraction has quite a bit to do with the materiality of typographic and photographic technology. But I digress.
Lacan is definitely different– the body we’re overcoming has now become language, which is pretty crazy (and Hegelian). Lacanian feminism is certainly body-affirming. It’s actually a nice parallel to what Pollock (perhaps by accident) did to abstraction. Deleuze and Lacan are obviously not at odds, even though Deleuze dedicated a book to denouncing Freud.
Caro – Thank you for your thoughtful and speedy response! I was using the term “gender-neutral pronoun” as it’s used in transgender, genderqueer and trans feminist jargon; I haven’t the theoretical knowledge to properly evaluate or dispute your characterization of “they/them” as inclusive-but-not-neutral. I wasn’t aware of the concept of subject-as-an-object that was being worked with. I might have something (passionate, even) to say about the idea of gender as “papered on top,” but I suspect my lack of knowledge will make me too prone to misreadings of the jargon at hand. Hard social constructionisms (constructivisms? I never know which term to use) can be and are used in transphobic ways by feminists and social theorists, but I’m not sure if that’s the beast I’m approaching here or not, so I’d better not provoke it too much lest it trample me.
Oh– and for Zizek– he explains his affirmation of the subject over the body by way of quantum physics and Tarkovsky, in the Monstrosity of Christ, but elsewhere as well. I would say that the post-Lacanians are the ones restoring the Freudian preference of subject over body, in reading Lacan.
The “idea is the art” thing is in that article of Franklin’s Noah linked to, I think. It’s in one of Franklin’s essays…the original statement is Joseph Kosuth, though, isn’t it? In “Art as Idea as Idea”?
I’m not thinking biographically here — it doesn’t matter how the art was made or what Pollock thought he was doing — but it does matter what the materiality of the art is. I don’t see anything formally in Pollock’s art that points to a reading grounded in embodiment rather than materiality. Reading the act of making the art into the art isn’t poststructural…is it possible to read it formally, without reference to Pollock or to the conditions of its creation, and end up in Theory other than Greenberg’s?
Not that it absolutely has to be read formally, but reading its production is post-Marxist, and post-Marxism wouldn’t be attentive at all to the artists’ body, only to the conditions of production. Which seems like where you’re going in your third paragraph? But I’m still not following you to embodiment, only to materiality. :|
I’m perfectly happy to let the artists’ statement not matter; that generally works much better for me. But that seems like a problem for conceptual art. If the art is the idea, shouldn’t you be able to articulate the idea?
(My trying to get you to read Pollock as conceptual art is probably what’s leading us astray here — maybe try Barney instead?)
Multi-tasking here– forgive the gibberish. But I guess, let’s stick with Pollock for now, since I think most people know what at least his most famous pieces look like, and he’s not a tricky example.
For me, I’m not really using “materiality” and “embodiment” to mean different things, although I am guessing that you might have a Hegelian/Marxist take on the word “material” vis-a-vis “materialism” (although that in turn is different from Hobbesian contractual hierarchical political materialism, which is in turn not the same thing as Spinoza’s ontological materialism). For me, when Greenberg saw the paint as merely the paint, this made the art not a window into Pollock’s mind, but a residue of his activity.
For Greenberg this may have represented an autonomy from art history; he may have felt that, as you suggest, the piece revealed some truth of the means of its production (which completely makes the work an idea again– a schematic of sorts). But for others it destabilized a lot of what a painting meant, and, as painting stood in for art (metonymically, I’m sure Noah would point out), helped explain visually not the process by which the sausage is made but what it meant for a piece of art to be just a thing, an object unto itself, and, by implication, for the artist to move kinetically without center or direction, merely to have a body. I don’t know that literature really had an equivalent to performance or Minimalism or any number of other embodied practices that followed Pollock– merely the more Duchampian line of appropriation, which in visual art was Pop and in literature was genre fiction being appropriated for literary purposes.
Kosuth is not a stellar spokesperson, but he rejected formalism on the mode of Duchamp rather than Pollock. But Kosuth, along with other Conceptualists, and practices of institutional critique- Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Piero Manzoni, the Guerrilla Girls– are all about interrogating the mode of cultural production in a way that might resonate as more classically materialist.
And I also don’t know about any literature, no matter how self-aware, that calls the site of value-creation (the museum or art market for art, the publishing industry or literary journal) into question in the same way that these visual art practices, some more materialist, some more embodied, make at least a game effort toward doing.
the publishing industry or literary journal FOR LITERATURE, sorry.
Anja, you’d have lots of company in passionately opposing Lacanian gender theory – Freud was no friend to women and the vast majority of feminists feel the same way about Lacan and the psychoanalytic poststructuralists. I’m fond of Lacanian feminism although I don’t know much about how it links up with transgender issues: it’s so very theoretical that it’s likely to be alternately problematic and empowering depending on the perspective. (Irigaray does get a shout-out from Donna Haraway here, for what that’s worth.)
It wasn’t a theoretical observation that “they and them” aren’t gender neutral, though; just a grammatical one. They’re plurals, so they’re inclusive of all. When referring to people, they don’t actually mean “not him or her but instead a third singular pronoun that doesn’t specify gender” they just refer to “all the hims and hers.” If there were a third singular pronoun that was really gender-neutral, they would refer to that too, which is why I think people are so drawn to them as a substitute for the gender-neutral singular pronoun we don’t have — they imply the inclusion of that category even though that category lacks a signifier.
But they’re still plural; the fact that there’s nothing about them that excludes gender-neutrality doesn’t make them into a singular pronoun referring to a specific person who doesn’t fit the him or her. I realize using them instead of the gender specific him and her is intended to be kind and, indeed, inclusive, but I don’t much like the symbolism of it either, because if you can only refer to a certain individual in the plural, that kind of erases that person’s individuality and specificity too. A trans person is as singular an individual as anybody else, and using only the plural signifier is kind of creepy to me. We really need a real gender-neutral pronoun, not a gender-inclusive workaround.
But I admittedly wasn’t thinking about the issue at all when I wrote the original comment, so I am sorry again, and thanks for calling it to my attention and giving me the chance to fix it.
The comments from Anja are also helpful– ze (is “she” definitely not acceptable? Just wasn’t sure.) doesn’t appreciate being either desubjectivized by postmodern particularism or disembodied by modernist universalism, when ze is a person who represents a lot of challenges for traditional procreative ideologies bound to the endless deferring of language and Law. I would be very glad to open up the discussion of queer theory and its central importance for discussing culture.
Hey, I kind of like “ze.”
Noah said: “Also…I just see the Fall as really important to art-making and thinking about artists. Bees and flowers are prelapsarian; the real creative force there, the one making choices, is God. People have the knowledge of good and evil; they’re separated from their instincts and from god’s will. That opens up space for them to create. Artists (like human beings) are like God rather than (or as well as) of God.”
Just to reiterate the way in which queer theory emphasizes the way in which the artificiality of our intelligence affects even the presumed natural status of our bodies– thus the parallelism, rather than opposition, between the object nature of a piece of art (even if autonomous as an object) and the object nature of a body (even if prior to the self-aware activity of the brain).
Bert, I’m not gonna manage another response tonight. Tomorrow is another day!
I am completely unused to people basically getting where I’m coming from and not demanding that I educate them, angrily refusing to use invented pronouns or singular “they,” mis-pronouning me, et cetera – so I hereby award you Special Ally Cookies (and believe me when I say that my Ally Cookies are hard to get).
“She” is complicated. On the one hand, it certainly functions well for certain parts of my fluid gender map, and it can feel good, but on the other, it’s the pronoun I have to use out of social convenience in much of my life. It can get to feel invalidating; in the company of trans/queer radical friends, I use it as one of many pronoun options.
Bert – I think you got it just about right. On the one side, there are the hard-line partisans of social construction who deny that gender is “real” in such a way as to paint trans people as victims of false consciousness. On the other are binarists – sometimes motivated by their understanding of science, sometimes by their religion or social philosophy, etc. – who are deadset on reifying the gender binary, and often also on genitals being destiny. Both are non-options – but of course, there are trans people who take a queerer-than-though “post-gender” stance, and (many more) trans people who police the gender binary quite vigorously.
—
“They/them” is certainly not ideal. It’s just a workaround that’s easier to get people to use, and easier for people to adjust to, than actual gender-neutral pronouns. A few folks prefer “they/them” as their official pronoun of choice – but what we really need is a standard, respectful neutral pronoun.
Some pronouns I like aside from ze/hir include zan/zan’s, ze/zan ze/zir, sie/hir, v/v’s, se/ser. I’ve also been known to use humorous options like sqr/sqr’s (“sqr” as in “don’t be a square”), fnorg/fnerg, and the actually only half-serious, I’d-use-them-if-it-were-doable unpronounceable or silent pronouns like &&/&&’s and ~/~’s. A friend of mine routinely uses &&/&&’s online and in writing.
I like ze (prounounced “zee”) and hir (pronounced “heer”) as well. Ze can be quite pleasant in some sentences, although it becomes annoyingly sharp at times due to the prominence of the “z” sound; it’s unable to fade into the fabric of sentences when it would serve it best to do so.
And hey, I’d love to discuss this further if the thread derail will be tolerated – or maybe queer gender and trans issues have something to say about the limitations or lack thereof of theory and Theory? Theoretical frameworks of all kinds have certainly been used to justify the mistreatment of trans people…
Much of the most interesting theory of the last quarter century at least has dealt with queer issues (Foucault (at least indirectly), Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick.) And surely this whole thread is basically one long derailment. So by all means…derail further!
Folks (and Anja especially) might be interested in this vein in the gay utopia project I put together with a lot of help from Bert. Bert’s essay is here.
“Queerness” has kind of, for me at least, become the ultimate abstraction of the “minority” position– ideas of gender and perversion are just so central to so many conflicts over identity and difference, it’s worth discussing in the context of art or anything cultural-historical-philosophical.
And I am all about Ally Cookies. I’m quite happy about virtual baked goods.
I want to read Franklin’s thing on Kosuth, but I can only find him complaining about Louise Bourgeois. Can sopmeone post that again?
As far as I know I don’t have a particular piece on Kosuth. I think Caro was referring to the possible origin of an idea from the conceptualism essay you linked to.
Wait, Noah linked to it. This one.
There is a hilarious takedown of radical social constructionists and “postmodernists” in Ian McEwan’s latest novel, _Solar_. It’s in the second long section of the book (for those who don’t want to read the whole thing). I think Franklin will get a kick out of it, since it contains the tyranny of humanities academics, social ostracizing, and willful misunderstanding of more complex “biological/natural” positions. I’m not totally sure which side of this divide McEwan comes down on, but the characterization is true enough to be really funny. Take a seat in your bookstore and read it, if buying doesn’t appeal…
There’s also some plagiarism of Douglas Adams…and a hilarious polar expedition with a frozen (and feared lost) penis. Very funny (and McEwan usually isn’t). Haven’t finished it yet…and it may end badly…but these little set pieces are too funny to pass up. He knows his way around the English language too…
The only thing worse than irony is the lack of irony…
That’s pretty ironic, Eric. Hey, what does Franklin, or anyone else, think about stodgy superstar critics like Matthew Collings and Dave Hickey?
Wow– well, I read Franklin’s essay, and I wouldn’t say he’s allergic to irony, unless bitter sarcasm doesn’t count. Hia Arguing By Pointing Out The Tactics Of The Other Argument technique is in full flower. It’s completely entertaining, too– far more conversationally engaging than plenty of art criticism.
But he’s still not (at least in this essay) naming names. But I did find that one essay taking issue with the renown of Louise Bourgeois– which is more forgivable if you accept that art shouldn’t tell any stories (unlike film, music, literature– anything other than pure design), but the idea that Bourgeois’ spiders and dildos are far less exciting than contorted Rodin or Degas bronzes is not justified, to me, precisely because she has a story to tell. It’s just part of her art, the same way finger marks and painful poses are part of the story of neoclassical compositions added to realism, which is the story of all those Refusee types. Which is more or less the same thing Kehinde Wiley is doing, putting young African-American men into the compositions of Old Master paintings– which I imagine Franklin doesn’t like any more than I do. And Bourgeois pulls off her work with less formal panache than Rodin, but more comedy and lyricism, which balances a lot for me.
‘Wow– well, I read Franklin’s essay, and I wouldn’t say he’s allergic to irony, unless bitter sarcasm doesn’t count. Hia Arguing By Pointing Out The Tactics Of The Other Argument technique is in full flower.’
I believe the common term for that is ‘strawmanning’. And rather poorly too.
Whether strawmanning or not, I don’t think it’s poorly done. That’s a damn rhetorically effective essay.
It lacks nothing as far as style is concerned, merely content– which is sort of the thing with formalism. Except when the formalism has reprehensible content, as in Ezra Pound.
Matthew Collings: “I don’t really mean that I hate those artists or even those moronic zombie curators, with their ghastly pc homily ideas. I went to art school to be an artist…I never had the remotest interest in making this contemporary art scene that we now have, which as everybody knows is mostly just crap, accessible to an audience who has no real interest in it anyway.”
Dave Hickey: “These people were setting themselves up as guardians of public taste… My argument was, basically, beauty allows us direct access to art without public oversight.”
Just saying– Franklin isn’t some kind of neglected freethinker. He’s the silent majority.
‘Whether strawmanning or not, I don’t think it’s poorly done. That’s a damn rhetorically effective essay.’
I think if you manage to come off like you know absolutely nothing about what you’re strawmanning AND you’re forced to make up a mythological history where there were no such things as succesful mediocre painters or rich people with more money than sense you have effectively lost an argument to your own strawman.
I’m not really on Franklin’s side, formalism wise, but I don’t think he implied there was any such mythological history.
To be fair, though, Renoir remains abjectly overrated.
Yeah…I don’t think he’s doing what you say he’s doing Marcus.
I disagree with him, but not because his argument is unfair or on its face ridiculous. He makes a strong case for the formalist position, I think. I just don’t agree that beauty and intellect are separated in the way he sees them as separated. I think apprehension of beauty — while not necessarily clearly explicable — is in large part learned and communal (which is why we have arguments like this in the first place.) So the binary between interesting/beautiful he sets up is wrong. But…that’s a real difference, not a function of strawman arguments.
The place where I see some slippage in the argument is where Franklin connects salon painting to conceptual art. I actually think that’s a reasonable thing to do — but it seems like Franklin shouldn’t, since he keeps vigorously arguing that contemporary theory-based art *is not like* earlier kinds of art which relied on theories. Though to be fair…I still don’t really understand where he’s coming from with that.
I’m curious if Franklin does like any Christian art, though. El Greco? And if you do like that sort of thing Franklin, is it despite the content? On the basis of pure formal qualities?
‘The third reason that conceptual art is awesome is that you can involve a lot more people in the art world, as audience members, than you would ever be able to rope in if participation required having a lot of taste. At one time in history, art was made for a relatively small group of connoisseurs. These people had to have an eye, and having an eye is a relatively rare thing.’
‘It used to be that art depended commercially on a handful of rich bastards who happened to have a good eye. With that whole eye thing out of the way, your potential pool of bastards increases enormously.’
If that isn’t a false history I’m not sure what is. He’s implying a) that you had to be a rich bastard with a good eye to support art (you didn’t, you just had to be a rich bastard) and in implying that he also implies that b) Bad art wasn’t succesful because these mythical impeccable rich patrons would never have supported it.
There’s also this part right after, where he creates a lovely delusional world where a gallerist selling formalist work doesn’t and didn’t do the exact same thing just with ‘formal’ replacing the word intellectual and is instead some kind of mystic gatekeeper who simply presents work to cast its spell over the eyes of the flawless rich.
‘Chatting up a prospective buyer regarding the assumed importance or intellectual content of a work of art is much easier than hanging out and admiring something with him, and it doesn’t necessitate all those long, awkward silences while you wait for him to take in a work of art with his eyes.’
Lastly there’s this part where he actually manages to lose an argument to his strawman by not managing to come up with a single effective counterpoint to his strawman’s arguments about beauty. Not even mentioning the fact that this is based on his hypothetical conceptual art that lacks an aesthetic element
‘You could point out all the technically beautiful work out there that we don’t regard as important art, and remind the defender of beauty that we contemporary art lovers are more concerned with importance. You could insist that he define beauty, which like many other experiential phenomena is not definable, and then express your frustration that he’s asking you to value something even he can’t define. You could point out that he doesn’t necessarily regard the same things as beautiful that you regard as beautiful, so the appreciation of beauty must be some kind of arbitrary phenomenon that’s indoctrinated by culture, not passed along by nature. (For bonus points on this last strategy, work in a crack about dead white males.)’
Bert, the essay makes references to people in the room at the time it was delivered, so there was no need to name names. It was already rude enough. Like it says, the framing around that presentation was ridiculous from its inception. Consequently I went in a satirical direction that maybe wasn’t the best idea in retrospect, but it is what it is and it has its moments. Another essay along vaguely similar lines, The Mind of Materials, makes a positive argument alongside the negative one and is more specific about its objects of criticism.
As for Bourgeois, I’ll certainly take her over Wiley, who is uniformly terrible. (The essay that Bert is referring to is this one.) Collings and Hickey have their moments as well.
Marcus, a straw man argument sets up a weak version of the object of criticism, one with no real instances, and attacks it. That’s fallacious. Counterarguing by examining the tactics of an argument is fair game. Think what you want about the examples being delusional or mythical or whatever makes them challenge your own example-free assertions of how the art world is – no one in the room disputed them, and believe me, they would have if there was something wrong with them. This was delivered to a philosophically hostile audience.
Well — I don’t see the glorification of formal gallerists there. It seems more like he’s saying that formal gallerists just have to stand around awkwardly, which is uncomfortable.
‘Marcus, a straw man argument sets up a weak version of the object of criticism, one with no real instances, and attacks it. That’s fallacious’
This is exactly what you did. People probably didn’t talk to you about it because noone wants to talk to and excessively rude man who blames a shadowy ‘theory illuminati’ for the faltering of his career.
You actually don’t have any examples at all it seems, you’ve been asked over and over to give some, and given none but vague allusions of ‘they knew who I was talking about’, why don’t you provide some?
Unlike you I’ve got examples, just going off the impressionists, here are some examples of artists who were succesful but were largely overrated, mediocre or just plain bad: Renoir, Sisley, Hassam (in fact, most of the american impressionists), Beliard, Astruc.
Outside of impressionists there’s of course Braque, whos greatest claim to fame is being friends with Picasso. And in the opposite side there’s Van Gogh, who was passed over as hideous and beastly by the same rich men of taste you champion as having had an impeccable eye for beauty.
‘Well — I don’t see the glorification of formal gallerists there. It seems more like he’s saying that formal gallerists just have to stand around awkwardly, which is uncomfortable.’
They don’t though, I’ve worked in and with galleries, as well as having a good number of friends in the MA curation course at Whitechapel. Good curators talk up the work to potential buyers no matter whether it’s conceptual or formal, bad curators stand around uncomfortably and make you feel uncomfortable in turn.
This is exactly what you did.
“The only thing worse than irony is the lack of irony.” – Eric Berlatsky
People probably didn’t talk to you about it because noone wants to talk to and excessively rude man who blames a shadowy ‘theory illuminati’ for the faltering of his career.
Wow! It’s like you were right there in the room.
Noah, what Nate is calling theory (“its founding assumption is an absence of the true, the good, and the beautiful”) and what the salon academicians were thinking are polar opposites. But to the extent that checklist-driven approaches to art don’t work very well, they have some things in common.
I like plenty of Christian art. The real, pious Christian artist that first comes to mind is Fra Angelico, who is sublime. I have no problem with content. Content is just recognizable form. Even though I insist that art has to succeed visually to merit serious regard, most art wouldn’t exist if not for some kind of content to get the ball rolling. Content can be hugely enabling. What it lacks is intrinsic artistic value, because if it had any, one painting of an apple would be as good as any other. Ideas have enormous value to art, but they have zero value as art.
Okay; that makes sense in terms of conceptual art and salon art.
Re Christian art. I think that the distinction you’re making between form and content is nonsensical…and would be seen as both nonsensical and insulting by someone like El Greco. The religious content in the art isn’t there to let you get your formal jones on. Rather, the formal skill is employed in the interest of the content…and the feeling of the art, the power of the art, is tied inextricably to that content. Gruenwald’s paintings are passionate because they’re about the passion; the passion isn’t an incidental enabling blip.
What’s funny too is…I actually like your essays, as art…because of the way you use concepts. You have a fertile gift for analogy which is really fun…but is that gift formal? Is it conceptual? I don’t see how you can split that up. It’s delightful because you move concepts around…but the concepts are the metaphors, not just the things the metaphors link.
It’s more obvious in language…but I think language is much more like art than art is like juggling. The point of both language and art is that it isn’t goal-driven (the way juggling is) and it emphasizes open-ended freedom of choice (the way juggling does not — unless you put together a juggling performance, and then you’re into art again.)
Anyway…probably I’m only irritating you further. You’ve definitely highlighted for me how much of beauty for me is ideas, and how closely the beautiful and the interesting are connected — so much so that the interesting seems to me like an essentially aesthetic category. (Probably causing you to tear your hair out now….)
‘Inventing a fictitious persona with actions or beliefs which are then criticized, implying that the person represents a group of whom the speaker is critical.’
You invented a fictitious persona of yourself as a conceptual art supporter.
satire (which you admitted it was, of conceptual art arguments)
‘the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.’
note the specific use of criticize in both definitions
What you did is actually the definition of a straw man fallacy, as much as you want to brush it off with an irrelevant quote
Fra Angelico is super powerful. And Thomas Kincade is not. But it’s not because Fra Angelico is Christian and Thomas Kincade isn’t, or because Fra Angelico was essentially publicly-supported (the Church) and Thomas Kincade is a corporation. I’d rather look at most Cezanne paintings than most On Kawara paintings. So that all is meant to lend support to Franklin and his angry formalism. And Franklin didn’t choose his essay as a stand-alone statemetn for his views on contemporary conceptual art.
But the idea that there’s an art-historical break between neoclassicism and realism, and between realism and abstraction, and between abstraction and conceptualism, is just wishful dithering. I think the idea that great art stopped after World War II (or at least with movements beginning after World War II) is conservative in an ideological way that I can’t go along with.
Oh, and I think Thomas Kincade IS Christian. But that’s more evidence as to why Christians should be suspicious of formalism, AbEx or otherwise– makes them look pretty bad.
Marcus, it’s pretty weird running into someone so humor-challenged on a blog about comics.
The religious content in the art isn’t there to let you get your formal jones on.
Well, the El Greco’s not hanging in the museum for the sake of my Catholic yayas. But this…
Rather, the formal skill is employed in the interest of the content…and the feeling of the art, the power of the art, is tied inextricably to that content. Gruenwald’s paintings are passionate because they’re about the passion; the passion isn’t an incidental enabling blip.
…I absolutely agree with. That fact that the Passion is enabling is not incidental, it’s crucial. Enabling is a major thing. That said, there’s a wall-sized Veronese in Venice that was commissioned as a Last Supper. When the clergy who ordered it saw the dog and the musicians and declared it sacrilegous, Veronese said, fine, it’s a Feast in the House of Levi. Too, think of the many thousands of Passions that have been painted that aren’t half as good as the Gruenwald. Their failure isn’t the Passion’s fault, or their piety, but some deficit of taste, technique, and/or feeling that manifests as inferior form. I realize that some conceptions of Formalism characterize it as a critical approach that excludes everything except abstract shape even when faced with content, but this was not Greenberg’s practice and it isn’t mine either. Form that delivers content with the impact of the Gruenwald Passion is successful, urgent, compelling form. That’s not to the detriment of the importance of the story, it’s to the detriment of every artist who phoned in a Passion, or piously, ferverously created a Passion-themed mess because of his lack of talent.
Bert, thanks for the support, but who thinks that great art stopped after WWII? Great art will continue as long as humans do. It may just not always reside in the official or expected locations, or appear in the official, expected ways.
Bert has treacherously turned on me and implied that I am saying that the content is the powerful bit; I’m trying instead to say that form and content aren’t really separable. The content is the form, the form is the content. Changing the content (as Veronese did) may indicate that that particular content wasn’t important to that particular artist — but there’s always content as there’s always form, and detaching them isn’t so simple. (Which Franklin may actually agree with.)
Which reminds me…in terms of Pollock’s embodiment. I think the thing about Pollock to me (am I spelling that right? Suddenly I was seized with a doubt…but it’s just a stupid blog comment. Onward.) is that it’s hard when you look at those things not to imagine the creation of them; the arm movement, the brush movement, the splattering. It’s similar with a lot of Charles Schulz’s work; all those raindrops are so physical you feel the pen moving. Or with Japanese or Chinese brush painting especially; for all of those things there’s really an insistent pointing to the body that created them.
So I think a lot of technique qua technique isn’t just about the materiality of the paint or the pen, but about the hand and body that wields them. To me that’s one way in which form becomes content and vice versa…. I’m guessing that’s not too theoretical for Franklin? I could be wrong though…
Oh, and yes, of course the art gets repurposed by museums. But just because romantic modernism is victorious doesn’t mean that it should get to erase history in every respect…(or at least I’d prefer that it didn’t.)
…detaching them isn’t so simple.
Well, it’s easy enough to talk about the color of a shape independently of what it represents and vice versa and so on. But content is recognizable form. In that respect, you can’t get them apart. The former is a subset of the latter, although recognition itself has to come in from somewhere else.
I think a lot of technique qua technique isn’t just about the materiality of the paint or the pen, but about the hand and body that wields them.
I have a feeling that one day someone much smarter than me is going to find a biological reason for this intuited effect of execution, and it’s going to have something to do with mirror neurons. Until then, I think that’s a big part of the attraction of a technique.
just because romantic modernism is victorious doesn’t mean that it should get to erase history in every respect
Lordy, I have no interest in erasing history and I doubt I’m all that victorious anyway. Ideas have no value as art but they may very well have value as ideas.
Anyone who was poking around my site after following links overhead, and noticing that my journal hadn’t been updated in a while, might enjoy knowing about the new entry.
You have a lot of faith in the neuroscientists! The science of mind has I don’t think ever managed to come up with explanations anything like the one you’re asking for, for anything. That’s why Lacanian and Freudian theories of mind are so difficult to get rid of — i.e., science can’t actually explain the things that matter re: mind any better than the weirdo theorists can. Or at least so John Horgan argues in The Undiscovered Mind (quite convincingly, I think — though Charles may be lurking to tell me how wrong I am…)
Marcus, it’s pretty weird running into someone so humor-challenged on a blog about comics.’
I write humour comics, you’re just not funny.
Since Noah called me out for tuning on him (which I didn’t, unlike when he turned on me for defending his use of art as rhetorical support versus Caro), I will rush to his flank and say– of course form and content aren’t separable. But… content can change, as both Veronses and Pollock make abundantly clear. Structure stays constant– as honored by Plato, Hegel, Freud, Saussure, Wittgenstein, Greenberg, Deleuze, all the idealists. But yes, separating form from content is not simple, Noah, as i said when defending you/ defending myself from you.
But the form that formalists are missing out on is the form of the field of art. And yet, they’re not really missing out on it, since Franklin believes in unofficial art (he may believe in Modern Painters magazine and New American Paintings more than I do, but that’s another matter). Art is not a repository of form, art has BECOME form itself– Thomas Kinkade is art, undergraduate tampon installations are art, buried rocks, crossword puzzles, bad poetry, craft-fair jewelry, the stuff you hate is art just as much as the stuff you like. And that ephemeral communal aspiration, tasteless and subtle and stupid and quirky and creepy, is kind of exhilirating to me– I can like some of it and love some of it and feel indifference toward most of it and disdain for some of it, and it just doesn’t go away.
The connection between bravura gesture in Pollock and the embodiment thing is absolutely accurate. It’s fairly sympathetic to the phenomenological being-with thing that Caro was talking about earlier.
I do have to thank you though Franklin, I was considering writing reviews when I moved up to Scotland, but you’ve made me realise what a ridiculous idea that is for an artist with any integrity to do.
Sorry, make that humour-challenged.
The stuff you hate is art just as much as the stuff you like.
I’m fond of saying that art is free to do anything. Including suck.
Okay- see, here we have an issue of ethics (aesthetic ethics? aesthethics?) versus onotology, in philosophy-talk. If all this bad art is still art, Franklin, where does that leave the claim that art is not about ideas? If art about ideas is bad art, then it is in fact art, and you have created an a priori category. Unless you have this notion that art about ideas could accidentally have form (good or bad form), and that’s what makes it art, then it isn’t really about ideas at all, so no foul.
The years between Impressionism and Expressionism (maybe that’s not your only range of ideal cultural context, but it sounds good) were certainly not the only time that form was central to art, but those might be the only time they were absolute values (decorative practice, after all, is almost always linked to functional objects and spaces). Having that as the sole window of undiluted awareness of pure truth is a really odd to me– especially since every other period seems to be befogged by bad faith or false consciousness or something, which I wouldn’t think you would really be willing to endorse.
I’m behind – I didn’t have time to keep up today – so I’m going back to Bert’s comment 18533 from 7:03 yesterday that I didn’t respond to last night.
I think, Bert, I would just use “materiality” for what you’re describing. “Embodied” has a phenomenal component to it — only subjects are embodied. I think of it as a term of feminist jargon. Like this. It’s a way of layering humanity back into that “objectification” of the subject I mentioned last night. But I follow you.
However, the question I asked was what formal element of Pollock’s art anchors it in a theory of embodiment, and although I can recast it as what formal element anchors it in a theory of materiality — you’ve essentially just provided an interpretation of the artwork’s materiality, not a formal anchor linking the art to a particular Theoretical understanding of materiality. Formal elements are abstract…the parallel in literature would be that words aren’t formal, grammar and device are formal. Similarly, the parallel in cultural studies is that signs aren’t formal; myths are formal. So I’m looking for the intermediate abstraction, the semiotics that links the concept to the medium.
Conceptual art sometimes skips that semiotic step. I’m not sure that Theory really works as a ground for “art” without it. At least, art made that way is less rigorously semiotic and more subjective and free associative — a play on semiotics rather than semiotics itself. But IMO, the best conceptual art doesn’t skip the step — one of my favorite pieces is Duchamp’s Etant Donnes, which plays visually on (among other things) the artificiality of the peep show contrasted with woman as irrational nature (the body, without the head). But the semiotics there are extremely linguistic, which is why they work so efficiently and evocatively. So my question remains whether you can ground a Theoretical reading in formal semiotics that are native to the image, not images functioning as linguistic signifiers. Because most of the conceptual art I’ve seen — and Pollock too — doesn’t involve images as substitutes for words.
I’m not sure why literature would need to call attention to its material-making since it’s so easily reproduced — but you said “value creation,” and I think it’s because the creation of value in literature isn’t more diffuse. Yes, the literary journal has a lot to do with what counts as art literature, but that doesn’t then lead to that next step that you have in art, where the opinion of the art-erati makes such a difference in who can make a living as a writer. Pulp writers make vastly better livings than art writers do.
I think I have more to say on this but I need to reread the comments.
Also, thank you Anja. :)
I’d like to see some of Marcus’ funny comics. I do like Franklin’s work a lot, both critically and aesthetically. Not that anybody remembers, but I was originally asking only for intellectually engaged work, not “Theoretical” work, and Franklin’s work is smart as well as lovely. But I do also like Louise Bourgeois. I like Theory aesthetically, but it doesn’t govern my aesthetics. I do have a hard time aesthetically appreciating things that lack any cerebral content at all, unless they will keep me physically warm.
As sometimes happens, you’ve moved into a theory-talk space that I only occasionally marginally understand, Caro…but I think in Pollock, as I tried to say above, it’s the gesture that links abstraction to embodiment. It’s not metaphoric and completely arbitrary, though; it’s metonymic. That is, the formal elements are linked to the body (presuming that’s what you mean by embodiment) because they’re part of the body, or part of its movement.
So I guess I’m saying in part that in art I think it’s possible that the formal elements are not in themselves entirely abstract…? The grammar of painting isn’t a completely arbitrary grammar the way that grammar is arbitrary in writing.
I’m wondering if this accounts somehow in part for painting’s greater ease with abstraction…? Words are always already arbitrarily linked to meaning, so there isn’t so much a way to create abstractions that don’t point to meaning. In painting the grammar leans more on metonymy, which can be broken…though you’re still left with the material, which points to bodies.
That probably makes no sense to you or anyone else. Off to bed….
Noah — it makes sense — it’s not Theoretical yet though. :)
Think of it this way — how do you connect the abstraction to embodiment if you pretend that the art just exists, that nobody made it? The bit of literary formalism that’s often the hardest to transfer over to art is the stuff that in New Criticism is the “self-contained, self-referential” object and that Theory recast as the Death of the Author. How do you link the abstraction to materiality in, say, Shimmering Substance, if you start from “art is” rather than “art is made”?
More on the other points you made tomorrow. Been kind of a long day.
My point is that I don’t think you can do that in the same way with art.
Art form/art concept — it all insists that there’s a hand. You can say that there’s no hand if you like…but you rob the art of a lot of what it’s about and how it functions if you do that. Pollock’s art is deliberately gestural; it points to its maker. Duchamp does the same; he didn’t make the toilet, but it’s art because he touched it. Same with Warhol; same with everybody really. Art tells you it’s made.
Franklin argues that for paint that’s natural, or hardwired. It doesn’t have to be; you could say it’s learned, or a sign of embodiment if you wanted. A computer or a chimp could make those gestural movements, perhaps. But if you didn’t think someone made it, rightly or wrongly, you wouldn’t think of it as art…unless of course you did think of it as art. And then you’d be the one who made it.
Look at it this way maybe? If you get rid of the artist…then an abstract outcropping of rock becomes art. Language may speak itself and still be language, but form that forms itself isn’t art…it’s a tree, or a child, or a wave. All of which can be art if someone calls them art (by, say, photographing them.) But someone has to call them. If a tree grows in the forest and no one takes its picture, it’s just a tree. It isn’t art.
I bet that’s still not theoretical enough….
Well, it’s not theoretical enough — in my sense, the French Theory sense — specifically because you’re saying you can’t do The Theoretical Thing, which is to completely and totally supplant any concept of the individual with a dialectic between culture and an objectified subject. But if you’re examining a specific art object, the object takes the place in the dialectic occupied by the subject; it doesn’t take the place of culture. The relevant dialectic for art is between culture and the self-referential object that culture produces — art is produced by culture through the subject, not by the subject.
Think about even the term “subject” — what is the subject a subject of? It’s not just the subject of a sentence; it’s also, equally, “subject” like “subject to the law” and “subject of a king.” I think it’s just hard to wrap your brain around how vigorously and profoundly anti-Humanist this stuff really is…
You’re invoking two ways of thinking about the material of the art: partly 1) just reducing the whole thing to Materialism, the conditions and effects of production, which is fine but still pretty classical, but you move more toward theory with 2) creating a dialectic between culture and an individual, “the hand” — a specific hand, a specific consciousness, that makes art and makes things into art. Which is part way there, but not all the way there.
It seems to me that the notion that art is art because someone touches it has a lot more to do with the political problems in art than French Theory does. That’s specifically the kind of grounded-in-the-authority-of-an-individual philosophy that Theory’s designed to destabilize and debunk. If you can’t get rid of the artist, you can’t do Theory.
Of course it’s not that the artist doesn’t exist — it’s that art’s meaning has nothing to do with the artist. Remember that the next step, after “language speaks” in Barthes essay is that it “restores the place of the reader”:
That has to hold true for conceptual art too, because insofar as it’s conceptual, it’s a text — equally “written,” in Barthes’ very totalizing poststructuralist understanding of writing. If you make the concept of Pollock’s painting closely linked to Pollock — its origin — then you don’t yet have a “text,” you still have Art. And Art is humanist. And humanism is not Theory. That’s why I say it’s not Theory yet.
I don’t agree that this is a more difficult vantage point for visual art, that the artist is less separable from visual art than the author is from literature. A novel didn’t grow organically — it was also created. Those sentences passed through the hand of the writer just as much as the images passed through the hand of the artist. A subject creates a novel just like a subject creates a painting. So if the novel can be separated from its maker, so can the painting.
So it’s a fiction when Theory does it to literature too, a shift in the premises that allows you to ignore certain things in order to see through them to different ones — but it’s a productive fiction, and one that visual art has heretofore really resisted, even refused.
Theory is a constant, never-ending displacement of each and every thing from itself. No thing is ever a thing. The aporia is absolute and omnipresent. I personally find it extremely liberating. It’s terribly hard to be Individual all the time, but as a woman, the idea that my unconscious and my body are “natural” and “instinctual” has a lot of really extraordinarily shitty connotations. The idea that they are constantly subject to culture, that I am never quite myself, makes much more sense.
But Pollock was a machine. His hands flung paint. This was initially an auteur move, but, as I said earlier, his soul disappeared. He has been written about as the painter of the industrial period for that reason– not because of his picturing of labor as a subject (proletarian or otherwise), but because he generates a fairly arbitrary product through a series of movements. It is horizontal (laid on the ground), centerless and boundaryless. That is clearly formal.
Minimalists literally phoned it in. They ordered art materials and created instructions for them to be set up in spaces, in ways that addresed the space in which they were being put. Not the media of the art but the visual context was the structure.
The fact that we have a cultural category for visual art, we hang paintings on walls (and formerly painted them on easels), we put sculptures on the floor (and formerly on pedestals), we look at them and expect certain things, both aesthetically and sociologically, visual art addresses those expectations far more explicitly (metonymically?) than literature does.
You want anti-humanist, how about Santiago Serra making naked people do his unseen bidding as utterly uninhabited bodies? I think describing such an act is always more humanist than just showing it, because there’s much more of the sense of a sympathetic (or at least engaged) viewer rather than a surveillance camera.
Franklin argues that for paint that’s natural, or hardwired.
Not at all. I’m saying that there’s something natural or hardwired about Noah seeing Charles Schultz’s raindrops and feeling the pen moving. That’s the attraction of technique, not the material itself, which could be applied in an uninspired way and not have that effect. Picasso said, “There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.”
Where does that leave the claim that art is not about ideas?
That’s not my claim. My claim is that ideas have enormous value to art, but they have zero value as art. We’re thinking creatures and ideas cling to everything we do. You can certainly make art about ideas. But even interesting ideas don’t save the work when it fails visually. Thinking that they do is the essence of academicism, and what connects bad conceptual art to bad salon art. Santiago Sierra has made an entire career exploiting that error of taste.
…the idea that my unconscious and my body are “natural” and “instinctual” has a lot of really extraordinarily shitty connotations. The idea that they are constantly subject to culture, that I am never quite myself, makes much more sense.
I don’t see why those are mutually contradictory assertions. As far as I can tell, human life has a natural and instinctual basis which culture is working on all the time.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I’m trying instead to say that form and content aren’t really separable. The content is the form, the form is the content.
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So, is a stage performance of “Hamlet” a wholly different thing than a filmed version of that performance?
On a less elevated level, does not Frazetta’s “Sun Goddess” painting – http://fan-tas-tic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Sun-Goddess-by-Frank-Frazetta.jpg – have a pretty substantial kinship to its sculpted version? ( http://nsidecollectibles.com/catalog/images/fraztarz.jpg )
Breaking that “The content is the form, the form is the content” assertion down to a formula, we get its logical conclusion: If A = B and B = A, therefore A = A and B = B.
So a Thomas Kinkade is the equivalent of a Rembrandt, because they’re both paintings. Or, at least, far closer to a Rembrandt that that filmed “Hamlet” would be to the stage-production “Hamlet.”
(Now, a more nuanced statement such as “the form is a significant part of the make-up of a work of art,” I would agree with.)
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Franklin Einspruch says:
…there’s a huge problem with suggesting that “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” would come into existence if only the creators employed particular philosophical or literary models. Art just doesn’t work that way…
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Indeed; the result would be a diagrammatic exercise, rather than a rich and fully-fleshed thing.
I’m reminded of the advice given historical novelists: “do a lot of research, and then, when sitting down to write, forget the research.” (Don’t keep it in mind, that is…)
Caro: Some of my old comics are up on my tumblr.
http://booksandbeers.tumblr.com/
I’m not necessarily saying there has to be a hand of a specific artist. But…there has to be some hand. It has to be made.
The idea that novels have no author…it’s not entirely a (theoretical) fiction. Foucault argues that people’s language is made of discourses. Somebody typed the thing, but it’s discourses speaking through them, not individuals creating discourses.
Art isn’t arbitrary like that. That is, you can have a discourse about art making (and indeed you do!)…but the art itself implies a creator in a way that Foucault got around for a novel.
Maybe you’re saying that you want someone to do that for art? And I”m really not sure it’s possible….
This is why arguments from design don’t work. The earth isn’t like a painting, so looking at the earth doesn’t imply a creator. A painting, though…even if you can say it’s put together by many discourses (which I think works fine), some body (or many bodies, or a machine) had to put the paint on there. I think it’s not fully theoretical in your sense precisely because it *is* embodied.
And I think that’s why Bert is right that visual art actually addresses the issues you’re talking about more explicitly than literature. Because some artist-fuction is pointed to in a more embodied way, it’s easier for art to play with it. When you look at a piece of artwork, one of the questions you ask is, “how was that done?” Contemporary art often works off that question (it was done by a person; by a machine; by a committee, by a chimp, by a computer….) To me that’s actually more interesting than the one theoretical answer you’re looking for — it was done by nobody (though I think that answer is often played with or posited as well in art.)
I mean, in many ways it makes sense that visual art would have a more heterogenous answer, doesn’t it? Visual art is made of many mediums…novels are all made of language. And, in fact, text art (which can just be slogans) often gets at the no-authorness of language much more aggressively than novels do…
You and Franklin have exactly opposite complaints about visual art, right? Franklin feels it’s too theoretical; you feel it’s not theoretical enough….
Nobody thinks that a movie of Hamlet is the same as a live performance is the same as a book though, right? Form matters– largely because of the content of culture, history, and minds.
In “From Work to Text” Barthes argues that the open “text,” as opposed to the closed “work,” “is that which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation.” You can certainly see that in Joyce and Faulkner and Woolf, as well as in plenty of visual art after Pollock, but I haven’t really run into it in my admittedly sporadic interactions with contemporary fiction. Not in the David Foster Wallace-type bastardization of Pynchon and Nabokov, anyhow.
Noah — the only difference between making a painting and making a novel is that Theory has succeeded in making you think about novels as discourses, making you pay attention to the gaps and abstractions rather than the material instantiations, whereas Theory has not succeeded in making you think about paintings that way. They’re not essentially different human acts: to say they are is to apply a different Theoretical starting point to your analysis of novels than your analysis of paintings.
It’s easier to see how close they are if you look at poetry, which calls attention more to the hand (or rather, ear) of the poet — or if you look at advertising drawings, where the meaning is dictated by the semiotic demands of the commercial function. You can talk about the artist’s hand in advertising art too, but it’s not important to or inherent to the art’s meaning: a drawing of a toothpaste tube is just a sign for toothpaste. There’s as much overlap as there is distinction — the disciplines have just taught you to be attentive to the distinctions instead of the overlap.
Poetry has myriad ways at its disposal not to become completely absorbed in its own “materiality,” most of them tied to the abstraction of words and that denotative/connotative field. Visual art has that field at its disposal as well — the ways to manipulate it for artistic purposes rather than commercial ones are just not as well thought through, because the visual media constitute a more insistently material form of art.
The medium of novels is words; the medium of art is image. But Theoretically, both are discourse. Here’s Barthes again:
Now, I’m convinced of and interested in the idea, which you suggest, that the semiotic field works differently for images than for words — I think that’s clear in the Barthes as well as in Lacan. But my question is how the semiotic field works differently, and the approach you’re taking to answering the question of flattens the dialectical relationship to culture, because the art object itself is too much of an anchor. This kind of emphasis on materiality restricts the play among the signifying abstractions at stake in the representation. That’s a tremendous conceptual limitation.
So I’m disagreeing with you most strongly on the relationship between embodiment and play: for me the more embodied the artist-function is, the LESS easy it is to play with it. If the object primarily signifies its own materiality, then that materiality becomes mostly a signifier for itself — and that’s essentially Presence. I buy reading it as metonymy, but metonymy is vastly more limited for creating conceptual conceits than metaphor is. That still opens up only a very limited field.
Now, I also disagree with you that the object has to signify its own materiality in this particularly insistent way. It’s much easier to see the places where a novel resists its embodiment, because the words themselves are abstractions. Literary self-referentiality runs no risk of miring you in the concrete. But if a painting has meaning, it also resists its embodiment — there’s just more tension with materiality, more risk. De-emphasizing that resistance is a theoretical choice (toward materialism), but it’s not a Theoretical one.
I’m not trying to say that art should NOT do these materialist things, take these materialist theoretical approaches: I’m trying to say that these things are limited in ways that have their greatest effects at the level of conceptual sophistication. It is easier for art to speak to materiality and for literature to speak to concept than it is for literature to speak to materiality and art to speak to concept, so when they’re put in dialectical relation it takes work to separate them from their more “natural” associations.
So I don’t actually agree with Bert that visual art addresses the issues I’m speaking of more explicitly. I think it addresses them more materially. I guess that’s a synonym for explicit — but to me the answers art gives tend to completely beg all the interesting semiotic questions because they narrow the semiotic field rather than opening it up. They do narrow the field to a question that art is particularly well-equipped to answer. But I’m interested in art’s answers to the questions it is not well-equipped to answer.
The way you and Bert are framing it actually makes me agree with Franklin LOL. I might rephrase Franklin’s point to be that “theory” in visual art constitutes an effort to read materiality as a semiotic abstraction, which has the result of de-aestheticizing it. Basically, I’m unconvinced that the Theoretical project is at all successful if the semiotic abstractions remain tied to materiality in that metonymic way. If you aren’t essentially manipulating Barthes’ formulation in the art, exploring a dialectical relationship between the material and the sign, then all you’ve really accomplished is a heightened self-awareness of the materiality, rather than opening up an unexpected Theoretical field in which that materiality can be manipulated in new ways.
I’m willing to consider that for pure visual art, this isn’t really that big of a deal — if visual art wants to have as its central questions issues of materiality and to ground its key critical concepts in materiality, go ahead! But for comics, which are both narrative and mechanically reproduced, it seems like an even more pronounced limitation — still, very much a bias against the proliferating playful associative abstractions of literary thinking. I think in the case of comics the consequences of too much materiality are significantly more dire.
“the only difference between making a painting and making a novel is that Theory has succeeded in making you think about novels as discourses, making you pay attention to the gaps and abstractions rather than the material instantiations, whereas Theory has not succeeded in making you think about paintings that way.”
That’s just not true. There are lots of practical (not to mention historical) differences between making a painting and making a novel. Given that, it seems reasonable to think about them theoretically in somewhat different ways. I don’t accept that theory has to be completely abstracted from material or reality in order to count as theory (whether small t or large T).
Perhaps more importantly, I just don’t really see the conceptual sophistication you’re talking about in contemporary literature. Salman Rushdie or Don Delilo or even John Ashberry is more conceptually sophisticated than minimalism, or Jeff Wall? Do you really believe that? On the contrary, I think the struggle with materialism has added urgency to art, whereas literature has tended to be flushed down the navel of its own glib self-referentiality. All there is in John Ashberry is the playful rush of signs…and when that’s all there is, it’s not exciting or invigorating. It’s boring — like a magician continually pulling nothing out of a hat and then waiting with a smirk for the applause. What’s sophisticated about performing the same non-trick over and over again?
It is true because your point was formal, not historical: what you said is that literature doesn’t wear the hand of its creator as much as art does. But that’s bullshit. A novel is just as “made” as a painting — you’re just accustomed to not noticing that. You pay attention to the author less for historical reasons — because literature has been so steeped in the structuralisms for so long and because the seamlessness of the imaginative universe, “getting lost in a good book”, has long been considered a virtue in narrative writing. So the work was done very early to “construct” the conventions that you’re interpreting as intrinsic elements of the artform. But they’re not formal, they’re historical. They’re just so old that they’re what we think of as the form. The point of poststructuralism in particular was separating out what we think of as the form of language from what’s actually intrinsic to language. The same project applies to art as well as to language in general.
Literary writing is just as crafted and created as painting, it demands just as much technical skill and just as much openness to the interplay of intuition and cognition as any other creation. A sophisticated well-wrought concept in a novel doesn’t just happen any more than visual art just happens and the author’s history and hand is just as visible if you choose to look for it, to emphasize it. It’s just that that has never been terribly productive in literature, so we almost never do it.
I can switch around the term I use for it, but Capital-T-Theory, French Theory, Continental Philosophy, is anti-Realist and synchronic. It’s a structuralism. It is strongly, genealogically, tied to Hegelian idealism and to Russian formalism. That kind of theory has to be completely abstracted from materiality and reality — or it becomes a different kind of theory.
So when you give greater weight to the practical and historical you are not being structuralist and you are not doing French Theory.
You’re instead making a classically materialist argument — you’re saying that literature is less formally concrete because it has been less concrete historically and that painting is more formally material because it has been more material historically, and that that history gives it a specific form that demands (or at least asks for) a specific Theoretical approach. That’s about as materialist as it gets. You can mix in jargon from French Theory, but even if you’re taking the weak-form cultural materialism (like Jameson’s hybrid) you’re not there yet.
French Theory requires you to be more formalist and relativist about the framework you’re talking about. You have to be able to shift those premises back and forth. You cannot have a “native” set of axioms that are “best suited” to examining a work — that makes the work and the axioms present to each other, and it makes the work present to history. It makes the Theory that you use to examine a work less arbitrary. And arbitrariness is absolute, the first principle, for any and all structuralisms. That is how you shift your premises from nature or history to structure.
Now, I’m not saying that it’s not reasonable to think of art theoretically from the perspective of materialism. Art can absolutely both be thought of ALL the different ways.
But that’s the point — there is nothing determinative about the materiality or the history of either art form that prevents you from thinking about it from any Theoretical vantage point. There are plenty of materialist readings of literary texts and they are “theoretical” in the sense that you use it — but they’re not French Theory, which is a specific anti-Realist philosophical discourse. And art seems to have an inordinate amount of trouble getting completely out of the Realist/Materialist discourses — that’s what I mean by the questions it’s not well-equipped to answer. And those are the questions that I want art’s answers to — that’s why the materialist answer begs my questions.
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Even if I were to agree with you that Ashberry in particular doesn’t do anything interesting with the play of signifiers, the failure of that single writer doesn’t make the approach a failure. You think the “playful rush of signs” is boring because you don’t like it aesthetically — you like works that have that material resonance — but there’s plenty of modern writing that deals with the play of signifiers in interesting ways and is not naval-gazing — Rushdie being a particularly strong case in point, but one with a more materialist historical bend. Ishiguro is an even more remarkable one due to to his more sustained formal elegance. There’s very little in Lacan but a playful rush of signs too, but the playful rush is imaginative. The play opens up the space for him to do the imaginative associations he does best — which have almost nothing to do with Lacan’s “art work” and everything to do with the interplay of his concepts. In Hawkes, there are layers upon layers of signs playing with each other in complex structural ways at both the fictional and metafictional level.
There’s nothing that says the ahistorical perspective has to be all there is — most great literary works are not purely formalist. But formalism in the construction of fiction operates in a more discrete way than you seem to think it does. It is separate from content in exactly the sense that you say doesn’t exist in literature — the creator has to manipulate it separately from the content, or the content will restrict and contain what can be achieved through form. Theory is a heuristic that helps you see PAST things that might affect the way you look at a work, not a scientific explanation of how the art is put together.
For the record, though, I do, in fact, think that all of the writers you name, however, are more conceptually complex than minimalism, although I think Jeff Wall is extremely conceptually complex — specifically because he is attentive to semiotic things beyond the materiality of his art. The value of that attention doesn’t disappear because you can find examples of other creators who don’t do it well.
“I can switch around the term I use for it, but Capital-T-Theory, French Theory, Continental Philosophy, is anti-Realist and synchronic.”
If it’s anti-Realist, how can you say it’s anything else? On what grounds do you claim it’s synchronic, for example? Isn’t that a historical and/or essentialist formal claim about the nature of Theory? Is Theory the only stable thing in a fluctuating world of variable signs? That doesn’t seem like it’s right.
I’m sure I’m missing something vital, but…Foucault is not anti-historical. Lacan is not uninterested in (abstracted, but still) biological development. Zizek does not reject materialism.
Theory’s great, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum talking to itself. Like any human utterance (thought of very broadly) it’s involved in a conversation. And if you’re involved in a conversation, that means that what your conversation partner says matters (with the pun on materialism intended.) You can of course use any theory about any art…but the art is going to affect your understanding of the theory as well as vice versa. Art is its own discourse, both formally and historically. If you put that in conversation with theory, you’re going to get certain kinds of conversation. That’s not a failure of art or theory; on the contrary, it’s the reason you want to occasionally try talking about different things and/or to different people, because having the same conversation all the time is a little tedious.
Not to disregard the possibility of fissures, but the fissures occur in a context too.
Oh, and of course form restricts content, and vice versa! That’s not a bad thing. Art is as much about its limitations as its freedoms. That doesn’t make me a materialist, I don’t think. Maybe a conservative, but that’s a little different….
Althusser is a sort of pseudo-materialist structuralism; you might find this interesting.
Jameson’s description in the Political Unconscious is maybe a little clearer, but more rigorously materialist. Resch comments ‘Althusser is defining and defending a theoretical space between the naive objectivism of reflection theory and the sophisticated relativism of positivist concepts such as Weber’s notion of ‘elective affinity’ and postmodern formulations such as Derrida’s notion of différance.’ I think that theoretical space is closer to where you’re coming from, but you tend to move pretty quickly away from it toward Jameson (and Eagleton) — and Althusser is still more materialist than Derrida (or Lacan).
Asking art to speak properly to structuralism isn’t the same thing as preventing art from speaking properly to materialism — but speaking properly to Derrida and Lacan really does mean leaving the materialism entirely behind.
Like I said, I’m not entirely sure I buy that Lacan leaves materialism entirely behind. Derrida perhaps…but in any case, “speaking properly” doesn’t mean that you have to assent. If it does, you’re not even in a dialectical relationship. You’re in hegemony.
Foucault is pretty anti-historical actually — he replaces historicism with genealogy. I think there’s something about that in the same essay I quoted from when this came up with regards to the Berkeley Theory curriculum. Give me a few minutes to find it.
French Theory has a genealogical specificity too — its anti-Realism, its structuralism, its reliance on synchronic logic. If you step outside of that, you’re doing something that’s a break from that genealogical specificity.
I’m not saying that’s bad — I’m saying it will not give answers that participate fully in that specific context and conversation. I’m not telling you my premises are natural or inherent: I’m just marking out for you the specific genealogy that I’m eager to see addressed. The insistence on materialism always being part of the conversation causes that particular specific mark that I’m after to always get missed, because the mark is defined as anti-materialist. If you can’t separate out materialism and formalism, you can’t speak to synchronic structrualism, because synchronic structuralism is formalist and not materialist. It’s just one way among many of marking out the field of inquiry, but so marked it’s a field that art hasn’t really engaged.
You know…this is something like an effort to deal in a Derridean way with art while not turning art into language. Not sure it works, really, but I think it’s sort of what I”m doing.
The fact that Caro looks at a plate of steel on the floor and says that the theory behind that isn’t as complex as that in a book with a million words makes me think that she really might have some materiality affecting her formalism. The Real is what surprises us, it is demonstrated, not explained.
And the way you dispose of history in something as historically specific as the novel, and then as straightforwardly allegorical as the novels of Salman Rushdie, completely baffles me. A minimalist piece of art that directs your attention away from itself, into the room, into the matter and weight of your body, into the heuristics that cause you to recognize form in any way, could be said to have something to do with phenomenology, but the presence is so abstracted and self-aware as to be palpably destabilized.
Speaking of Presence, I always think of the Zeppelin album cover for Presence, in which smiling midcentury advertising models admiring a black obelisk, as a great way of understanding minimalism, 2001, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I would throw “the concept of aporia” into that list as well.
I specifically didn’t say it wasn’t as sophisticated. I said it wasn’t as complex. What I meant and I should have rephrased is that a minimalist artwork is not as complex as the work by those writers. The whole idea is that it is less complex — but that choice creates a specific limitation. It shifts the proliferation of concepts to the external field. The axiom here is only that concrete form is simpler than abstract form.
What linguistic and philosophical formalism articulate is a bridge, mapping “concrete form” into “abstract form.” This allows the material of the form to stop working via metonymy (to use Noah’s articulation, which I think works) and start working via metaphor. The more tied the form is to the concrete, the less room there is for abstraction to open up complexity, because the concrete can’t abstract itself without that formal interface.
Concrete elements anchor the dialectics and keep the abstract form from proliferating inside the work. Abstractions can proliferate endlessly outside the work, of course, in the work’s sphere of suggestions — “in the room, in the matter and weight of your body, in the heuristics” etc. But they cannot perpetuate formally, inside the work, unless there’s a way to both connect and move between concrete and abstract form. Grammar and device and structure and Barthes’ denotative/connotative field provide that in literature. Even very short poems can trigger that internal, formal proliferation. Puns and homonyms are the simplest instances of it. It’s harder in art, but there is a way to do it.
Concrete poetry does it, as does “W the Whore Makes her Tracks.” T.J. Clarke finds it in his wonderful readings of Picasso. Krauss finds it in pretty much every reading she does (although less so than Clarke, who is a fantastic formalist.) I don’t accept that visual art itself, especially comics, is profoundly resistant to this type of project. It’s only visual artists and art critics who are resistant to it. You see this in the fact that in common art parlance, “abstraction” is the opposite of representation rather than the opposite of “concrete.” The concreteness, the materiality, is assumed and not questioned.
In the Pollock example, for instance, I asked you to articulate how the concrete forms of the painting become abstract forms. You told me what the concrete form signified — the trace of embodiment. But that’s not abstract form: that’s something signified by form. Form takes the concrete and makes it abstract — Concept manipulates those the abstractions. You’re skipping a step, leaving the concepts associative rather than rigorous.
The lesson of Derrida’s prose is how a philosopher can articulate every single step of that “destabilized something-to-do-with-phenomenology” as it manifests itself in form. His greatest contribution to philosophy is the “logic of the supplement” because it allows for poststructuralist proofs. That’s what I’m asking for, for art theory to spell out every single step in the way the artwork makes meaning, exactly the way Derrida did for language, including the steps where there are aporias and elisions. Form matters — not form-as-materiality, not form-as-history, not even form as content. Just form — the interface of concrete with abstract.
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Here’s Foucault’s way around the elision of embodiment into materiality:
So even setting aside my own interest in seeing fully structuralist and poststructuralist theoretical engagements with visual art, I don’t see how even Foucault lets you make as much recourse to the body as you’re trying to do with Pollock. Neither the imprint of history nor history’s destruction is really being articulated — you’re just reading the form as a material trace of the body’s presence. But for Foucault what remains when the body is destroyed is not a trace but an imprint — that’s why writing speaks for itself and why the author vanishes. You’re not being teleological, but you’re not actually being genealogical either.
Caro, that big fat block of theoretical explication with the “LOL” sandwiched in the middle you wrote a few posts back? THAT was a great piece of conceptual art. :D
On a more serious note, I never understood the desire of Minimalists to leave the actual production of their work to someone else. I find the process of crafting my work central both to the satisfaction that I get out of it, and to the outcome of the work itself. Using assistants, collaborating with craftspeople or engineers etc., helming or taking part in a large project involving many people, these things I get – but drawing up some plans and sending them off to be fabricated? Not so much. I need my personal practice, my personal “hand,” to be integral to my finished product (this is also why I am not an architect). I’m aware this may be considered a theoretically reactionary desire in some circles, but it comes from the place that art occupies in my life, not really from any intellectual considerations one way or another.
Of course, I just glossed completely over the meditative nature of drawing up the plans in the first place. D’oh.
I guess what I’m getting at is that I want that meditative practice to involve process, an interweaving of idea-building and execution – not a clean break between concept and execution in which I’m excluded from the execution entirely.
I know this isn’t a terribly Interlectually Sophisticated approach, but my art *is* instrumental to me – in a life-saving, meaning-congealing sort of way – and I *need* it for that. I think there’s a level of privilege on display in (some, at least) artists who use approaches that don’t allow for the sort of nourishment gotten from that process-involvement, just as there is in people who blithely write off all personal storytelling in art.
Not sure what the French is…but in that translation anyway, the body doesn’t disappear. A body totally imprinted by history is not the same thing as an imprint without a body. Genealogy is articulating and exposing the body and the destruction of the body; both presence and absence. The body is a surface and a locus, not an absence.
You’re assuming (teleologically?) that the process of the destruction of the body ends in the body being destroyed. But couldn’t the destruction and the body more or less coexist infinitely? In fact…the body appears to be imprinted both by history and the destruction of the body. But imprint is a surface; that doesn’t mean the body is gone.
Formal proliferation is never internal. There is no internal to art. Art objects aren’t sealed. I know the external/internal divide is just a metaphor…but I think you’re letting that metaphor interfere with seeing how art works. Puns point to meanings in language, which is not internal, but external — it’s a shared social and cultural medium. Art, like minimalism, is playing with the internal and externalness of art; it’s pointing to the field outside of it, disappearing into that field, and swallowing it up. When Bert says everything can be art..that’s the point. The line between what’s the art object and what’s outside the art object is where the associative meaning creation occurs in a ton of contemporary art. So…the fact that the art points to the materiality of Pollock’s body doesn’t negate a theoretical engagement any more than Foucault’s mention of the body means he’s not a theorist.
I think you’re kind of circling back around to Franklin…
Allow me to reprint a couple of earlier sentences, to reassure you that I don’t restrict Pollock’s body to Pollock’s body. “He has been written about as the painter of the industrial period for that reason– not because of his picturing of labor as a subject (proletarian or otherwise), but because he generates a fairly arbitrary product through a series of movements. It is horizontal (laid on the ground), centerless and boundaryless. That is clearly formal.”
His piece of art is no more burdened by its concereteness than a novel. It has been reproduced in many, many ways and senses of the word, and was always about engaging with the history of art. Which is the history art usually deals with, one could argue, as a metaphor for all history.
And if anything embodies an inscribed surface of dissociation, and volumes of disintegration, I have no problem experiencing that when I’m in the siwrling elctrostatic vector-field of a Pollock painting.
I appreciate the citation of critics and philosophers, but I have yet to figure out who your source is in regard to the specific impossibility of abstracting from the visual referent. Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, have no problem with the concreteness or presence of the visual sign. Your understanding of Minimalism reflects your own way of reading works, not that of the discourse of contemporary art. There is literally no outer boundary to a Minimalist piece– it is all inside boundary– i.e., externality, the monad, made visible. The “work itself” is far more “outside” the piece than in a novel. Thus ithe impenetrability of highbrow art to the average citizen.
And yet, it is not a mere idea, any more than an arrangement of words is a mere idea. The difference between written and oral language, between hieroglyphics and sign language, is no greater than that between conceptual art and language-focused poetry, or between symbolic images and symbolic imagery. Unless you include the discursive milieu, which would not be sufficiently formalist for your taste, I would think. Even though Jameson, Foucault, and Barthes stress the levels of interpretation with a motif of framing that almost seems borrowed from iconographic interpretive practices in classic (and classicist) art history.
The synchronic aspect of fine art is what Ranciere talks about in terms of the (Romantic modernist) aesthetic regime of art. IT is a field that determines the set of options that are available at this certain moment in history, which are different from those sets of options at other points. And this body of determined possibilities is what I was talking about the exhilirating field of options, of good, bad, and indifferent practices and aspirations, that is extremely situated and extremely open, like no other set of possibilities I have experienced. The concrete world, the syntagm of nature is far more radically open than language, precisely because it hasn’t been symboolized. Art represents an engaging Otherness outside of communication with the play of signifiers.
Chuckle, thanks Anja! I’m fairly sure that a lot of writers, even postmodern writers, probably even the vast majority of them (although probably not Hawkes) would absolutely agree with you about the personal and emotional nourishment of their writing, and certainly the Program is very process oriented.
I absolutely agree with you that there is a great deal of privilege in both reading and writing the kind of fiction and creating the kind of art that I’m talking about. But — I’d like to see access to it broadened rather than see it killed off as elitist, not that you’re suggesting that. It does give me a great deal of pleasure as a reader, and it appears from this thread that the privileges of academic writing might be in practice less destructive than the privileges of academic art. There’s so much writing, and a really broad diversity of people make a living as writers and get their books published and in bookstores. The market for writing skews away from the privileged forms toward populist ones. I think it’s important to still have the privileged forms, but I also think I would be unhappy if the market was skewed in favor of those forms over others. It’s an extremely valid point that this kind of art displays a privilege, though. It’s elitist from top to bottom, absolutely.
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Noah — It’s a suspended dialectic, but the point is that the body has always already been destroyed, not that it both exists and doesn’t exist. Remember that poststructuralism is opposed to the “metaphysics of presence” — it’s not both presence and absence. It’s the recognition that presence IS absence. Nothing is ever itself — everything present is absent, all the time. Ir’s a crack in the fabric of the universe. So a reading of Pollock’s painting that depends on his body having been at the canvas isn’t poststructuralist.
It doesn’t make it a bad reading. Just not a French Theory one.
“How art works?” Seriously? Art doesn’t work one way or the other — you’ve said this yourself, before, in your moments more sympathetic to poststructuralism. I fail to “see how art works” the way you’re saying it does because it works all sorts of ways, all at the same time, and I’m interested in one of the other ways. It works the way you say it does — but it also works the way you say it doesn’t. Formal proliferation is never internal and always internal. The limits are where you place them.
That’s why theory is logic, not science. The premises are not observed; they’re stipulated. And as such, they are not materialist, no more materialist than a geometric proof or a syllogism.
All you’re doing when you say that formal proliferation is never internal is rejecting a particular set of limits, the ones that “formalism” uses to define itself to itself. You don’t actually change the fact that they are internal for, say, Northrup Frye, or Roman Jakobsen. Nor do you erase the importance of Frye and Jakobsen to Derrida — he was deconstructing them, but not replacing them with their opposite! You’re letting your commitment to the materiality of visual art blind you to the historicity of linguistic formalism.
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Bert: it’s not that I think it’s impossible to “abstract from the visual referent” — it’s that you haven’t articulated the mechanism that specifies the relationship of the concrete materiality of the visual sign to its referent. What you’ve done is assert the relationship of the concrete materiality of the visual sign to its referent. You’ve parsed the meaning — you’ve made the association between the sign and its signifier — but you have not articulated the specific mechanism by which the concrete thing becomes meaningfully associated with the abstract thing. You haven’t mapped the signs, you’ve only given me a glossary and told me what country I’m in.
I specifically said that a lot of people including T.J. Clarke and Krauss successfully map visual signs, so obviously I’m not suggesting it’s impossible. What I’m saying is that your reading of Pollock does not do it. Saying that the painting signifies the trace of the body isn’t a formalist reading — it’s an allegorical one. I’m asking you for a specific thing — a specific kind of post-formalist reading — and you’re giving me something different, telling me that it’s what I’m asking for, and then getting irritated with me because I’m not satisfied with your answer.
In asking that question I’m specifically challenging whether the syntagm of nature is actually as radically open as you’re saying it is, or whether that is a myth. I lean toward thinking it’s the latter, that art works more semiotically than you’re claiming. Successful conceptual art may be a site of resistance that is actually the cause of the opening that you are saying it represents.
I heartily disagree that Barthes and Derrida “have no problem with the concreteness or presence of the visual sign” — I think the analysis of that question is specifically what Barthes is calling for in the passage I cited earlier, and I think Derrida consistently questions and deconstructs any and all notions of presence. Specifically with reference to the visual sign, that’s explicit in the switch from speech to writing — writing is not bound to the speech mechanisms, it is not “language” but is the “iterable mark”, which can include the image or the visual sign equally as well. But still writing, still clothed in differance, still not present to itself. The visual sign is neither concrete nor present in Derrida — it is, like everything else, a sign, and the logic of the supplement that applies to other signs apply to visual signs as well. I don’t think Derrida’s formulation can account for everything that happens with images. But claiming he reasserts the metaphysics of presence for images is just wrong. Even Lacan, who puts images much closer to the Real, doesn’t do that.
And the extreme exteriority you describe is nothing but a really big interior that shifts the edges of the object of art from the material Thing to the cultural plane. For Foucault and especially for Derrida, interior and exterior are a foundational tension that cannot be resolved. If there’s no outer boundary, there can be no tension, and there can be no interpretation or signification. Here’s an excellent summary from the University of Chicago’s school of media theory:
And here is Deleuze on the same topic:
Unless you are going down the road of Franklin’s “the idea is art” (which I have problems with), all you do if you remove the tension and allow the exterior side of the binary to “have no outer boundary” is reinstate the position of privilege, now for “exteriority” rather than the traditional interiority. You’re only shifting the boundaries — you CANNOT remove them unless you abandon form altogether and only have thought. You’re essentially asserting that you can reify the Outside into a “form” of art. But that doesn’t actually happen — what happens is that you just make the “object” part of the art object so big and so abstract that I have trouble seeing how it can participate dialectically at all. You need the play of signifiers locked into tension with the interiority of the form to get something that’s even dialectical, let alone poststructural.
And again, I’m not saying that conceptual art has to be poststructural. I’m not saying that what you describe is not
“how it works” or even a perfectly valid theory of how it works. I’m not telling you you shouldn’t find it exhilirating. I’m saying that a) it’s not rigorously poststructural and b) it’s not what I’m interested in.
Bert — you said: “this made the art not a window into Pollock’s mind, but a residue of his activity.” I realize that it could be a residue of any body’s activity; that’s not my problem with it. My problem is that, following Barthes, the residue of a body’s activity is still author/artist/creator centric rather than reader centric. That reader-privileging formalism is indispensible to the kinds of readings I’m wishing there were more of.
But also, sometimes, just plain formalism: what specifically makes this art look like it looks and not like some other art. Like I asked for here, in Tom’s fist Binks post.
“You’re only shifting the boundaries — you CANNOT remove them unless you abandon form altogether and only have thought. ”
But that’s what conceptual art does. Or darn close to it in many cases. That’s my point. You’re saying you can’t do this, but it’s pretty much where visual art is. And…yeah, that does put you with Franklin, more or less, arguing that that move is illegitimate and/or uninteresting.
When I said you don’t seem to understand how art works, this is what I meant; not that art can’t work in lots of different ways, but that one of the main ways contemporary art addresses these issues is through radically screwing with the boundaries between what art is and isn’t. The way art gets to the arbitrariness of language is by making the category of “art” itself entirely arbitrary. You feel that isn’t as complex or as connected to discussions of presence and absence as Salman Rushdie writing semi-allegorical histories of India. Which really baffles me…but mileage differs, etc.
Just to go on a little:
“You’re essentially asserting that you can reify the Outside into a “form” of art. But that doesn’t actually happen — what happens is that you just make the “object” part of the art object so big and so abstract that I have trouble seeing how it can participate dialectically at all. You need the play of signifiers locked into tension with the interiority of the form to get something that’s even dialectical, let alone poststructural.”
I mean…this is what contemporary art is all about, from Duchamp and Warhol on up, right? You’re saying that the art isn’t poststructural, to show that it’s not poststructural, you list a bunch of problems drawn from an understanding of poststructuralism…and contemporary art is absolutely consumed with fighting with and addressing all of them. How far can you push those boundaries without abandoning the concept of art? What does a boundary even look like when you’re thinking about thought? How big and how abstract can you get while still having something coherent? How far from form can you go and still have it be form? Is art present as idea? Or is the idea an absence? And if the idea is an absence, is the form just a more solid absence?
Franklin’s position at this point makes a lot more sense to me than yours. He actively rejects all those questions as irrelevant and invidious. You raise them — and then insist that art is not engaged with them even though, as I said, this is what contemporary art and conceptual art is about, at least in large part.
It would probably help somewhat if you maybe provided what you would consider a poststructuralist reading of Pollock? That would probably clarify things for me anyway…. Or give us an example of Krauss mapping visual signs in a way you feel is relevant?
The thing about Pollack…and I”m not sure this addresses your point, because I’m not sure exactly what your point is, but… Saying that the gestural brush strokes point to the existence of a body doesn’t have to be a reification of the body. If you’re looking for a grammar, you could say that certain kinds of motion signify presence (metonymically, but still in a culturally determined way which is arguably arbitrary.) Pollack, in making those marks, isn’t pointing to his own body, but to the understanding of bodiness. It’s not a trace of his own embodiness left on the canvas, but an imprint of his rather desperate claim to being embodied. I paint therefore I am refers to two different people.
Franklin’s probably bailed, but if he’s still here, I”m pretty sure that that’s exactly the sort of post-structural reading of art he hates…and he doesn’t hate it because it’s uncommon, I don’t think….
I don’t know…as an example of the idea being art….Ackroyd & Harvey’s Polar Diamond. Here’s the paragraph from my recent review:
“Perhaps my favorite piece of the exhibition is Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey’s Polar Diamond. This is an actual diamond, created artificially from the carbonized ash of a cremated polar bear bone. I wasn’t aware until I saw it that diamonds could be synthesized, but apparently we tricky humans have been making our own for decades now. That alone amazed me. But to know that we can take a polar bear bone and turn it into a diamond seemed especially awe-inspiring. What can’t we do, after all? Well, one obvious answer is that we probably can’t keep polar bears from dying out if we radically raise the temperature of the earth—or (and this, not global warming, is the current greatest danger to polar bears) if we keep shooting them.”
This is a conceptual piece where the physical form — the diamond itself — is really almost superfluous; it’s an illustration of, material evidence for, the idea. And in a lot of ways it isn’t even that…how do I know it’s a diamond? How do I know it’s made out of polar bear ash? They could be lying to me; it’s all just their say-so. And, really, do I even need the evidence of the diamond there? Would the piece be that much different if they just told me the diamond had been made? (Truly or falsely?)
The real piece exists then as an idea…or really as language. The diamond is perhaps specifically there not so much as evidence of a physical fact as evidence of the arbitrariness of the signified; it doesn’t *have* to be there, and in fact is in some sense not there at all. In its presence or its absence, though, it’s also (a la Foucault) not a network of meaning, but one of power. Technology (meaning language and all its products) created (or possibly didn’t create) this thing; changing bodies (like polar bears) into other arbitrary signs (the object “diamond,” but even more the word “diamond.”) The piece (which doesn’t *really* exist except as language) is about the power of language over the world; how by saying we change and destroy. It effectively erases bodies in various senses…and suggests some of the exhilaration and the consequences of that erasure.
I don’t know if that addresses any of your concerns, Caro — but the piece seems to me both conceptually complex and quite deliberately engaged with post-structural ideas (whether or not they happened to have read Derrida and Foucault.)
Oy, this is a really overlong comment. What I’m saying is that if conceptual art shifts those boundaries it is either not poststructuralism or it is not art, just thought. When I say “only have thought,” I mean ONLY. Not “an object that shifts the boundaries between art and thought.” I mean NO OBJECT PERIOD. JUST THOUGHT.
Foucault isn’t ambiguous on this: if there’s an object (including the object that is the subject); there’s a boundary over which power and knowledge contest and on which they operate.
I UNDERSTAND that conceptual visual art works by pushing against and playing with these boundaries. But you seem to be suggesting that poststructuralism raises questions about those boundaries when in fact poststructuralism is a specific philosophical answer to what and where those boundaries are and how they work. It’s not a big overarching general thing; it’s a extremely precise and specific and narrow thing, that also happens to be extremely totalizing.
So there are two things awry with the questions you list as arising from poststructuralism.
1) Those questions are too big. Theory is about the minute details. The mechanisms and the steps. Derrida wrote logical proofs. Literature and literary criticism puts a lot of meat on the minute details. But if art criticism is to be believed, a lot of conceptual art makes grand gestures toward them without actually interrogating the minutiae. Even when the art itself does a pretty good job of the minutiae (as Wall does, as Duchamp often does), the way people talk about it often elides the minutiae in favor of the big metaphorical leap. That’s mistaking the question poststructuralism takes on for the answer poststructuralism gives to it.
2) Making the category of art arbitrary doesn’t “get at” the arbitrariness of meaning, it doesn’t interrogate it — it just instantiates it. But that kind of instantiation isn’t poststructuralist — it’s dada. Art as the “instance” of an idea.
The diamond piece — that sounds like a really great, interesting piece. But that’s basically Dada. That’s not poststructuralism. And Dada’s an art movement. Making loose associations between Dada and poststructuralism isn’t pushing art to confront literary thinking. It’s just making loose associations where it makes sense to make them.
I do think instantiations like that are often, but certainly not always, boring — actual dada less so than postmodern dada (or whatever you want to call it.) To me it often plays exactly the same way that contemporary poetry plays to you (although I agree with you more on poetry). It’s different manifestations of the same trick, the same gesture, over and over again. The idea is different in visual art, just like the signifiers and mechanism is different in poetry, but it’s the same basic repetition. It is materially diverse but formally repetitive. And often the formal elements, because of the whole syntagm of nature being radically open thing, resist parsing in ways that shut down the play of signifiers toward the interior.
So I think you may be overemphasizing “language” a little bit when you think about this. Derrida, for example, is not about the arbitrariness of language. His move in Grammatology, replacing speech by writing, is that we think it’s language that’s arbitrary, when in fact it is all meaning that is arbitrary. All meaning, including speech and language, is therefore “written.” It’s not language that’s primary and inescapable — it’s writing.
So the poststructuralist move in visual art would be attentive to how that art is written too. Not made, written. Written with pictures, but written. The poststructuralist questions are “how is this art written,” and “how is this art meaningful to a reader” not “how is this art arbitrary?” or “why is this art art?” The question of arbitrariness long predates poststructuralism and is reflective of structuralism, the start of the linguistic turn. But poststructuralism is more specific than those broad structuralist premises. (As are Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis and the other posts.)
So for example, opening up a big exteriority with no boundaries to see how far you can get with it before it’s not art anymore is vaguely structuralist, but it’s just NOT POSTSTRUCTURALISM (third time).
And what I mean by that is specifically that you can’t use the fine details of, say, Foucault to make sense of it — you can only use a high-level summary of Foucault’s big axioms. It’s inspired by Foucault, but it doesn’t display mastery of Foucault. You can map it onto Foucault’s concept of the outside, except it’s an instantiation of Foucault’s concept of the outside, which makes it exteriority. Except it’s not exteriority. So it doesn’t map. It isn’t even a simulacrum. And so on and so on. It’s just not attentive to the fine details, because its point is a big suggestive idea. Obviously big suggestive ideas excite Bert and possibly you too. But poststructuralism isn’t a question. It’s an answer.
The stuff I like is attentive to both the big suggestive idea and the fine details. Like “W the Whore” and “Blood Oranges” and the New York Trilogy and Alphaville and El and Etant Donnes.
Rushdie in Midnight’s Children takes advantage of poststructuralist insights not in allegory but in the conceit he builds around “partition” — he metaphorizes the separation of India and Pakistan, Muslim/Hindu, East/West, Us/Them into a series of ever-collapsing interconnected binaries in which the constitution of each pole, each identity, by the other is not only asserted but traced. The tiniest details are all consistent with this supplemental loss of priority. The history he asserts isn’t allegorical — it’s emergent out of these binaries collapsing into each other and people trying to grab onto one pole or the other. It’s extremely, extremely detailed — there’s also a big allegorical conceit, and it’s an impressive big allegorical conceit, but it’s hardly exhaustive of the nuances of the work. And it’s not very poststructural at all. But the details of his narrative of the history of the subcontinent follow the logic of the supplement extremely closely and at a very fine grain. It’s impressively poststructural, but not because of the big overarching conceit. Because of the details.
I think I said to Franklin earlier that this may be a problem of criticism: maybe conceptual artworks DO have all these details in them. But the art writing I’ve seen about them, including many artists’ statements, doesn’t illuminate those details — it goes for the big conceits, the “idea” rather than the formal nuances in the work that give that idea its richness and specificity.
Our cobbled together reading of Pollock here is an example of that. The pieces that are missing are the specifics of which understanding of bodiness he’s pointing to, and how the gestural brush strokes, the mark, actually signify to a reader that the painting is engaging that specific understanding of bodiness. It’s easy to see how it’s about paint on the canvas: the brush stroke is a brush stroke. But you want me to get from “I recognize this as a brush stroke” to a metonymic reading that signifies something about embodiment, and you want me to get there without directly calling on the hand that drew the brush stroke. So what is that something that’s being signified, what is it about the brush stroke that’s carries the association. What is it about the brush stroke that signals “desperation” rather than “celebration”? What is the formal specificity that anchors the metaphorical reading? How do I read it, rather than just interpreting it?
That’s the level of detail that needs to get into the reading. Ideally, the association should be something surprising, something nobody’s ever thought of before, something that makes my understanding of brush strokes completely different and that causes me to see brush strokes in things that I previously didn’t think of as brush strokes, because meaning is arbitrary and associative, and you’re going to make me see conceptual connections that I didn’t know were there…connections like the one where Lacan shows me that the sublime is the same as the beautiful. He doesn’t just tell me that the sublime is the same as the beautiful. His chain of signifiers is so powerful that having encountered it, I now have to spend energy to think of the words as meaning what they meant before I read what he had to say about them…
That’s the kind of ambition I’m looking for in the art that interests me — and it’s what I look to critics to help me see. Krauss shows it to me all the time, but she’s a rare bird, and I’m told less visual than she could be.
A good example from Krauss getting it right, articulating in great detail the richness and specificity, is her essay on Picasso: http://books.google.com/books?id=D5-C2w8n5NwC&lpg=PP1&dq=Rosalind%20Krauss&pg=PA23#v=onepage&q&f=false
She gets at readerly formalism in a way that is very rare in art and that seems to be looked down on in art. She doesn’t avoid historicity or materialism when it enriches her reading, but she doesn’t give it any privilege and can move toward and away from it at will.
Matthias doesn’t like that essay because he says it ignores the visual and is too linguistic. I get that the main thesis is linguistic, but especially there at the beginning it seems to me to be very engaged with the paintings. So I do not understand what something as specific as what she does in that article but more “visual” would look like. The only times I have seen art do it is when they do it like Krauss.
So although I absolutely do not think it’s impossible in visual art, I do not have an example of what it would look like to talk about the images, the visuals, with equivalent specificity, assuming that you agree with Matthias that Krauss is too linguistic.
“Thinking addresses itself to an outside that has no form.” A fine description of much postwar art.
Okay Caro, so Tom wrote: “This picture makes texture its centerpiece; usually texture is more of an accent, from what I’ve seen.” T.J. Clark wrote, “Only the possibility of total revolution could have liberated Dada.” So– you want trivial decorator dithering or unrepentant reactionary bombast, that’s what equals real formal critique? Not all that talk of marks and edges?
(For my own dose of ressentiment, this reminds me of when I got browbeaten on a theology blog (by an atheist Zizek scholar) for suggesting that Zizek said things that were useful for theology.)
Philosophy is just not that much more serious than everything else. You can use it in a manner that differs from the precise context in which it was conceived– especially when the context in which it was conceived has become dependent for its revolutionary appeal on offending Muslims (I could be discussing literary fiction or editorial cartoons– they’re both apparently permitted for discussion using contemporary philosophy).
Spilled paint is author-centric– how about Piero Manzoni’s shit in a can? How about Carolee Schneeman rolling in meat? You don’t see a connection to Lacan and Lacanian feminism, embracing abjection and writing with the body? Do I need to talk about the shape of the shit cans?
I’m just not going to keep quoting Barthes from “Image Music Text,” trying to convince you that Barthes wants texts to work more like music and images, because he has no problem finding polysemy in music and images. I do realize that poststructuralists don’t like presence and closure, though– I should have augmented my wry sarcasm with a visual emoticon.
I like the Krauss link. It is nice that she takes another critic to task for reading collages as language, and then says, “here’s how you REALLY read collages as language.” Rauschenberg continues in that vein of collage distorting space, but first I think Warhol drives that bus into a wall (not Jeff Wall).
I am sorry I cannot write a detailed “proof” like Derrida or Lacan, though certainly some analytic philosophers and mathematicians are snickering at that particular bastardization of the term “proof.” But they are explanations– descriptions. I think it would not be crazy to call them poems with a propositional structure.
But they do mean specific things about contingency and destabilizing, which the post-avant-garde critique/revision of the avant-garde (like Picasso and Duchamp) in visual art reflected to a large degree. The art used to dominate the space. The artist used to dominate the viewer. Contemporary visual art has demonstrated, by pushing modernist discourse into absurdity, a logic of the supplement so off-putting that it has apparently driven many people into making heroic icons of the once-iconoclastic antiheroes.
I don’t really agree that Polar Diamond is dada. It’s certainly post-dada…but dada was really about randomness, not about power or art as language. And along those lines dada doesn’t actually treat the explanation of the art as art in that way; dada is a joke and the joke is a thing and that’s the art. In Polar Diamond, the explanation is the art. So it’s language; it works the same way a poem does (especially an oral poem.)
And to me it maps onto and illuminates what seem to me fairly complicated ideas about the relationship between technology, language, bodies, and power, all of which are quite compatible with your description of Foucault’s interests in those things — and all of which I find a lot more intriguing than being told for the umpty-umpth time that binaries collapse, at whatever level of detail. (I haven’t read Midnight’s Children — but the sense of hectoring schematic cleverness is part of why I wasn’t into Shame. And actually “hectoring schematic cleverness” also kind of applies to Derrida…who I like better than Rushdie, but who I definitely find annoying at times.)
I talk about brush strokes, bodies, and absence in this piece, which you’ve probably read before. It tries to link formal elements to philosophical ideas (Zizek and Buddhism.) Probably not sufficiently detailed….
Anyway…I’m really probably treading on thin ice here, but…You seem to be suggesting post-structuralism is a philosophical system that puts all of these issues into boxes and solves them. You’ve read a lot more post-structuralism than I have, but…I so don’t buy that. Lacan doesn’t even make consistent sense within single sentences. I like Irigary, but to say she’s systematic in any way is insane. Derrida and Foucault disagree about lots of things — I don’t think Foucault is as obsessed with writing, for example. Meaning isn’t really arbitrary in Foucault, if I understand him (which I may not) — meaning is an effect of power, generally funneled through institutions. Are Foucault’s ideas about discourse compatible with Derridean ideas about writing? Surely there’s more than one answer to that question…and if there are incompatible post-structuralisms, then it seems like asking questions, even big questions, in a post-structuralist context is both post-structural and valid.
I may need to just get a rosalind krauss book, Caro; reading that essay with chunks blipped out is driving me nuts.
She’s not overly linguistic for me though! I don’t necessarily need her to talk closely about those Picasso paintings. Not least because I kind of hate those Picasso paintings. They look like misogynist placemats.
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Bert Stabler says:
Nobody thinks that a movie of Hamlet is the same as a live performance is the same as a book though, right? Form matters– largely because of the content of culture, history, and minds…
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No; but “Hamlet” as a play or movie (I did not mention a book) was – as I questioned earlier – hardly a wholly different thing than a filmed version of that performance.”
Most audiences (being unsophisticates unschooled in Theory) will consider factors like the plot, the Bard’s glorious language, the performances more compelling factors than whether the play is performed live or projected on a screen.
Back to the “TheorySpeak”:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Foucault argues that people’s language is made of discourses. Somebody typed the thing, but it’s discourses speaking through them, not individuals creating discourses.
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Caro says:
Here’s Barthes again:
‘ …in the total system of the image the structural functions are polarized, on the one hand there is a sort of paradigmatic condensation at the level of connotators, that is broadly speaking, of the symbols, which are strong signs, scattered, ‘reified’; on the other a syntagmatic ‘flow’ at the level of the denotation — it will not be forgotten that the syntagm is always very close to speech, and it is indeed the iconic ‘discourse’ which naturalizes its symbols. Without wishing to infer too quickly from the image to semiology in general, one can nevertheless venture that the world of total meaning is torn internally (structurally) between the system as culture and the syntagm as nature; the works of mass communications all combine through diverse and diversely successful dialectics, the fascination of a nature, that of story, diegesis, syntagm, and the intelligibility of a culture, withdrawn into a few discontinuous symbols which men ‘decline’ in the shelter of their living speech.’
Now, I also disagree with you that the object has to signify its own materiality in this particularly insistent way. It’s much easier to see the places where a novel resists its embodiment, because the words themselves are abstractions.
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Abstractions to the illiterate, anyway. (Is there anyone who knows English and reads of a “white horse” who doesn’t think of a white horse?)
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Resch comments ‘Althusser is defining and defending a theoretical space between the naive objectivism of reflection theory and the sophisticated relativism of positivist concepts such as Weber’s notion of ‘elective affinity’ and postmodern formulations such as Derrida’s notion of différance.’ I think that theoretical space is closer to where you’re coming from, but you tend to move pretty quickly away from it toward Jameson (and Eagleton) — and Althusser is still more materialist than Derrida (or Lacan).
And the extreme exteriority you describe is nothing but a really big interior that shifts the edges of the object of art from the material Thing to the cultural plane. For Foucault and especially for Derrida, interior and exterior are a foundational tension that cannot be resolved. If there’s no outer boundary, there can be no tension, and there can be no interpretation or signification. Here’s an excellent summary from the University of Chicago’s school of media theory:
‘Whereas Foucault, like Stiegler, embraces the idea that human existence requires an exterior field, Foucault says less about the act of exteriorization itself. For Foucault the tension between interior and exterior drives the signification process, but it is not the case that interpretation constitutes an exteriorization so much as that the act of interpretation assumes the existence of a stable interior space. This assumption deserves scrutiny. Jeffrey T. Nealon, in his article “Exteriority and Appropriation” argues, in fact, that Derrida and Foucault’s essential compatibility rests on their common impulse to scrutinize this assumed interior field of criticism. He writes, “Derrida’s notion of text, then, seems to have at least this much in common with Foucault’s notion of the exteriority of a network of statements: both posit a discursive field or network in which no term can rule from a privileged place of interiority” (103). Derrida and Foucault make evident that interiority and exteriority are always intertwined.’
And here is Deleuze on the same topic:
In all his work, Foucault seems haunted by this theme of an inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a folding of the sea…As Blanchot says of Foucault, ‘He encloses the outside, that is, constitutes it in an interiority of expectation or exception.’
…all you do if you remove the tension and allow the exterior side of the binary to ‘have no outer boundary’ is reinstate the position of privilege, now for ‘exteriority’ rather than the traditional interiority. You’re only shifting the boundaries — you CANNOT remove them unless you abandon form altogether and only have thought. You’re essentially asserting that you can reify the Outside into a ‘form’ of art.
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Yeah! I can really see artistic folk reading this stuff and getting excited; being inspired by “the tension between interior and exterior drives the signification process, but it is not the case that interpretation constitutes an exteriorization so much as that the act of interpretation assumes the existence of a stable interior space” and such to go forth and CREATE!
This “TheorySpeak” makes medieval theologians pondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin seem hardheadedly commonsensical…
Mike, I don’t think anyone said that the film version and the staged version would be completely different. But they’d be different in content as well as form, because form and content aren’t separable in art.
You’re also assuming form=medium. But form also includes the poetry and the plot. In part this is because form=content means that content is form as well as that form is content.
Caro’s very comfortable with technical theory terminology, so she shifts into it easily. But what she’s saying isn’t really super-complicated, and I think is closely related to artistic practice.
She’s just saying that art has to have a form; if it’s just a thought it doesn’t count as art. And that statement — seen as a challenge — has actually been enormously inspiring to many, many visual artists. (For the worse, according to Caro, and presumably Franklin.)
I think the Deleuze quote is quite poetic, actually — but you’re certainly right that almost no one, artists or otherwise, is interested in poetry.
Having read through the exteriority harangue yet again, I can’t help but kvetch that it hardly seems fair to suddenly accuse me of shifting my presence-privileging to the exterior just because I pointed out a tension between an object and its environment that, as I repeatedly point out, is a primary concern in postwar art.
The whole thing with Spinoza substance is that nothing is privileged when you invoke the exterior– which is pretty totalizing, and I’m not a huge Spinoza fan. But it’s a welcome supplemental corrective in the window- and platform- themed interiority of humanist art.
The Minimalist object, so excellently limned by the Zeppelin album cover, riffs on Presence. A prefabricated rectangle of steel is obviously reproducible, but it also clearly has boundaries. It is sophisticated, and complex, in its disposable yet weighty post-formalism.
Bert and Noah, on the methodological issue: I’ve never said that visual art can’t or shouldn’t be interested in the kinds of themes and structures and philosophical questions that you’re saying it’s interested in, nor have I said it’s wrong to do so. I also didn’t mean to say that it isn’t influenced by poststructuralism in legitimate ways; only that the art/art theory you’ve described does not constitute an example of a rigorously poststructuralist text.
I’ve made no secret that I am most interested in the ways in which art can enrich and speak directly back to theoretical constructs. That takes a more specific, precise and historical, engagement with the theory, because otherwise the response back from theory to art’s intervention is too readily available. A lot of the concepts that you’re saying visual art is playing with are concepts that people have already talked about in the explicit theoretical context, because literature tried to do them to. The explosion of the interior, for example, was the project of works like The Soft Machine. The tension between the object and its environment was tackled in Kathy Acker’s marvelous zines, which are themselves conceptual art (and owned, I believe, by the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh.) These are not new, specifically visual, challenges for theory.
My opinion is that the materiality of visual art is in a unique place to challenge the conclusions that theory has reached — but if the materiality is just a free signifier for a bunch of discursive thinking, it’s much less likely to provide that challenge and more likely to simply invoke some aspect of the thinking that’s already been done.
Your end aim is interesting art, that provokes people to think about theoretical things, so that’s fine. But my end aim is interesting theory, provoked and expanded by art that speaks directly to it and challenges it, in a very similar way to how literary writers challenged it during literature’s experimental period. These different projects require different methodologies and different engagements.
W the Whore is a good example — I don’t know whether it was intentional or not because de Vries’ novel is not translated into English, but I feel like it was because the engagement with feminist embodiment is sufficiently detailed and precise that the artwork itself opens up and suggests revisions to and developments in the theory. That’s what I’m looking for. I’m not saying all art should do that. All I’m saying is that I think it’s really great when art does.
“a rigorously poststructuralist text.”
See, but…”rigorous” and “poststructural” really aren’t necessarily things that go together in the way you want them to go together. If you told Feyerabend that the result of his poststructrural work (and I don’t know what he is if not a poststructuralist) would be that people would be able to think syllogistically about art, he probably would have hung himself. Derrida got all prickly when people suggested to him that deconstruction was a method. And I’m damned if I can see anything rigorous in the work of Lacan, who was avowedly and intentionally incomprehensible. Derrida and Foucault and Lacan — these people just are not Kant, much less mathematics. You’re setting up this standard for meaningful engagement with theory which seems to fly in the face of the most basic principles of the theories you’re claiming to champion.
I kind of think it’s nonsense to suggest that Kathy Acker or William Burroughs gets anywhere near the kind of messing with exterior and interior or with the boundaries of art and theory that you see in a work like Polar Diamond, or for that matter in Andy Warhol’s oeuvre. Besides, as you sort of suggest — Acker and Burroughs are *heavily influenced by visual art movements such as dada and fluxus*! Burroughs didn’t invent the random hijinks that explodes the interior; Acker didn’t initiate thinking about the object and environment — to the extent they are engaged with that stuff, it’s because they’re engaged with visual art! (In fact, Wikipedia says that Burroughs was a popularizer of dada techniques, which I think is right in every sense.) So pointing to Acker and Burroughs and saying, well, this has already been done in literary work, but visual art hasn’t taken up that challenge — they got their best moves from visual art! You’re asking for this dialogue that you say doesn’t exist and then pointing to decades-old examples of the dialogue occurring; dialogues in which visual art led the way by 30 years at least!
And… I really like your review of W the Whore…but Anke is absolutely part of a visual art tradition linked to bodies and abjection. Bert would know her antecedents better than I, but certainly Weimar seems like an important influence; people like Otto Dix and so forth. To the extent that she is engaged with the theoretical issues you want her to be engaged with, it’s because she’s linked *to a tradition of visual art*, not because she’s an exception to it.
I agree that visual art’s materiality offers a challenge and an important dialogue partner for theory. I know this is true because *it’s been in meaningful and productive dialogue with theory for the entire time theory has existed.*
Also…you’re just really wrong about my investment in theory vs. my investment in art. I’d much rather read theology than comics at this point. I’m disagreeing with you not because I think you’re emphasizing theory or language too much, but because I think your take on the theory is wrong, as well as your take on the art.
Yeah, I think that take on theory’s a cop out. I thought it was a cop out when people used it justify riffing on Derrida et al. without reading them rigorously when I was in graduate school, and I think it’s a cop out when you use it. It takes something that’s even more complex than Kant and turns it into Kermode. There’s nothing wrong with Kermode (i.e., self-contained texts that can be read individually from start to finish and comprehended), but it just simply avoids a great deal about what makes Derrida et al interesting and compelling and a “mastertext” rather than just something opportunitistic and simple.
Derrida’s objection to deconstruction being a method is precisely that — it is not a “method”, something that can be applied as a tool; it’s a philosophy. The quote you’re referring to says this:
Not just the functioning but the disfunctioning. Not just what the art thinks it is doing, but where it fails to do it. Not “from the outside”, but inside. In the formal abstractions of the concrete material text. To pull out the kind of axiomatic, broad engagement with “inside and outside” that you’ve been describing here and then claim that such an engagement is in any way comparable to what Derrida and Deleuze accomplished with the topic — probably the two 20th century thinkers who wrote the most on this topic, each of whom produced hundreds of pages on it — that’s just ridiculous. Your investment here is in defending visual art against the claim that it’s not ambitious and complex enough, rather than in actually proving that it’s ambitious and complex.
My point is that Acker and Burroughs’ work, because it’s linguistic, has already brought those themes that you are saying visual art is all about directly into the poststructuralist conversation, and so as themes they’ve already been addressed. Treating them thematically is insufficient to further the conversation. The only way that visual art can continue to challenge on those issues is to move past thematic material to specific textualities and that requires an engagement with form — the formal differences between the linguistic medium (or Derrida’s writing) and the visual one. Because deconstruction happens inside, not in the exterior.
I don’t think you’ve read Derrida closely enough to make the kinds of conclusive overarching claims about him that you’re making — I don’t think I have read Derrida closely enough to be able to do that. Fortunately, however, the specific overarching claims you’ve made are ones that Derrida himself disputed.
Here’s John Caputo, from our earlier discussion, in his commentary on the passage I quoted above:
Scrupulous. Gravely in earnest. Deadly serious. Passing through the classical discipline. Derrida is extraordinarily rigorous. Lacan is absolutely positively not avowedly incomprehensible — the texts are spoken, which adds difficulty, and they are extremely intertextual. But they are also quite precise. Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze are more rigorous than Kant, not less. Saying otherwise illustrates exactly the problem I’m having with the way you’re talking about this — you don’t understand what this Theory is trying to do. It is not loose and poetic. It is logic, otherwise.
You can’t make claims that tie a visual artwork to Derrida, or to the poststructuralist tradition, unless you are willing to make this type of engagement with BOTH the poststructuralist texts and the visual art ones. I’m not making claims about the visual art’s aims or goals — the claim I am making is that the engagement with the poststructuralist texts is insufficient. And Derrida’s my source. Foucault and Derrida and Lacan would mock you heartily and sneer at your laziness if you said to them that the difficulty and obliqueness and intertextuality of their prose gets you off the hook for the incredibly difficult task of reading them closely.
I think a reading of W the Whore has to account for de Vries’ committments. AF herself took pains in the comments to my post ensuring we acknowledged KdV’s role. KdV’s novel can be translated as “The Body of the Ladies”, which in literature is a crystal clear reference, and her husband is the very literary, even prize-winning, writer Georg Klein. So W the Whore is, materially, specifically, at the interstices between artistic and literary ideas. That is not to say that the visual art perspective on abjection is not part of it. But it’s BOTH. What makes it valuable to me is that combination and confrontation — the specificity of its engagement with literary ideas. You’re saying that specificity is not required, and you are wrong. It may not be required for art, but it is required for Theory, even poststructuralism.
But beyond that, we’re disagreeing here about how meaningful visual art’s engagement with theory has been for Theory. I don’t disagree with you about how engaged visual art has been with it. But visual art hasn’t made that engagement in a way that’s given theory anywhere near as much fodder to run with as literature has. That’s the missing piece: putting visual art in the place that literature and film have heretofore occupied in the Theoretical conversation. And that just will not happen unless visual art is at least a little more systematic and rigorous in the engagement, because the art will be read by Theory as a text, and if the text is primarily themes, primarily “in the exterior”, the theoretical response will be too pat to be a meaningful challenge to Theory. The complexity of the visual text is key. And thematic texts are not complex texts — even if the themes they invoke are very complex, because textuality is conceptual, historical, AND formal.
Hah! “Anything goes” indeed. Of course, Feyerabend, who I will maintain to my death is a poststructuralist, said exactly “anything goes” in reference to science — a much more material discourse than Plato.
(And Feyerabend neatly upends the reference to gravity at the end too. The link between engineering and the law of gravity is entirely ad hoc. Derrida’s care is then not in the interest of technical efficiency and structural exactness, but in the interest of a congenial myth which is, precisely, from Feyerabend’s view, silly, and not a little sloppy. The engineer who does his job because of the law of gravity isn’t following any law, any more than are his less rigorous (but contradictorily more accurate) colleagues.)
I like this too:
“So, the only way to be really loyal to a tradition, that is, to keep it alive, is not to be too loyal, too reproductive; the only way to conserve a tradition is not to be a conservative.”
You don’t think this could be a critique of the way you’re using theory in reference to art? By, for instance, insisting that thought can’t be art, thereby allying you with Franklin (who is surely a proud conservative in these matters.) Are you reading these quotes?
Also…you don’t think Caputo’s protesting too much? You don’t think reading it as a series of systematic propositions is maybe not exactly the point? Whether or not intentionally…Caputo sounds totally pompous and self-impressed as he tells people that this theory is the absolutely most careful theory in the whole wide world precisely because it’s the most unconcerned with meaning, because the anarchist is the only truly systematic philosopher, yes indeed. I mean, I think Derrida’s pretty smart in general — I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that yes, he was intentionally deconstructing himself. Not sure Caputo really got it, though.
So…if you’re using this to tell me that Derrida has to be rigorous or else he means nothing, I would say that if Derrida means anything it’s that he means nothing. I mean, sure Derrida and Foucault and Lacan would mock me and sneer at my laziness. And they would (even more?) mock you, and sneer at your hagiographic elevation of all of them — even as they lapped it up, no doubt. I mean, I’m as other-directed as the next fellow, but looking to Derrida and Foucault and Lacan as ethical measures of any sort? Uh…no thanks. (I may be influenced by just having read Foucault on the Iranian revolution, admittedly.)
And if you want to tell me that my engagement with any of them is insufficient; that’s cool. Charles and Jeet feel I’m not sufficiently engaged with comics; you feel I’m not sufficiently engaged with theory; manga folks feel I’m not sufficiently engaged with manga — I’m a fairly ad hoc sort, I’ll admit, and if that’s means I don’t have the credentials to be in the discussion — eh, I’ll live. But lots of folks who write about visual art don’t have substantially less engagement than you do, whether it’s Andrei or Bert or whoever. You want to pull rank on me, go ahead, but I don’t see how it in any way advances your point (which does seem to be switching around a bit, incidentally.)
“But beyond that, we’re disagreeing here about how meaningful visual art’s engagement with theory has been for Theory.”
Bert’s listed lots of examples of theorists being engaged with visual art. I’ll add Stanley Cavell, because why the hell not (his discussions move back and forth between film and visual art constantly.) Oh, and Feyerabend too; he talks a lot about Greek art, for example to think through his theoretical points. Your claim, if I understand it, is that all of those encounters between theorists and visual art don’t count because …because why, exactly? Because Cavell and Feyerabend aren’t in the pantheon maybe? Because Derrida on photography doesn’t count, because it’s about art and also that’s an article by an artist (found in thirty seconds of googling)?
Speaking of cop outs; claiming that the stuff in W the Whore that you like is only there because of the writer seems pretty weak to me. Visual art has tons and tons and tons of collaborative work; more than literature by a good bit. Much of it involves writers and for that matter — *much of it involves text*. I mentioned that the dadaists wrote poetry, right? Most video art includes language. Lots of sound art includes language. Performance art includes language. Visual art is way, way more happy to include words than literature is to include pictures, as far as I can tell. Why doesn’t all that stuff count exactly? And, moreover, how does the inclusion of text in W the Whore in any way make it *not* part of the visual art tradition, which has incorporated collaborative work and textual work for decades?
To sum up, you seem to be saying various things at various times. Either the claim is:
—visual art is not sufficiently ambitious, in which case I’d like to see you actually take down a major figure in contemporary art like Warhol or Duchamp, rather than pointing at my very ad hoc blog comments and claiming they’re not sufficiently theoretical and that that therefore somehow undermined contemporary art ;
—visual art has not inspired theorists, in which case you need to explain in a much more convincing way why all these theorists who have written about visual art don’t count (bonus points for explaining this away.);
—you, Noah, don’t know what you’re talking about, which is probably true, but doesn’t seem to have any implications for either theory or art that I am able to see.
Too bad Matthias will probably never read this; it’d be fun to be on his side for once.
I haven’t read your whole comment yet ’cause I’m multitasking, but
At this point the “thought is art” thing is 100 years old. If that’s not a well-established tradition that you’re defending, I don’t know what it is.
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I honestly thought we were talking about contemporary art and artists trying to establish themselves or make a living today, the kind of really recent stuff Franklin was knocking in his satire piece you liked, rather than any and all visual art ever…I tried to push us up in time even from Pollock but we stuck with him because he was familiar. I thought you were referencing Warhol and Duchamp as genealogies for what contemporary artists are doing now with regards to theory, not speaking to what Duchamp himself did, in his historical moment. Is that wrong?
What I haven’t seen is a lot of good Theory inspired by contemporary art from the last couple of decades — even though I think you’re right that those artists intentionally “use” Theory more than the earlier generations. There is theoretical criticism of artworks and there is art theory but there is precious little actual primary-source Theory, (i.e. writing genealogically embedded in the philosophical tradition of post-structuralism or the same philosphical tradition as poststructuralism, writing like Derrida or Deleuze or Zizek, writing whose genre is philosophy not critical theory) that takes contemporary art as its scrutinized text. That Derrida text you link to is about 17th and 18th century painting.
But, that said, even that specifically does turns them into “writing” in Derrida’s sense (the one that includes visual signs), as well as in the sense of Oedipus and the Bible. Classical and neo-Classical texts aren’t going to provide a lot of resistance and pushback to Derrida, whose theory is so based on his reading of Plato, so I don’t see art speaking back even there — I see Theory starting from art, but not contemporary art, which is the best placed to challenge it.
I don’t think you read what I said about W the Whore. It is specifically the images that make the contribution back to theory. But my reading has it speaking back to something that is specifically Theory — not the visual art tradition of abjection, not even really the poststructuralist version of abjection in Kristeva, but the poststructuralist version of feminist embodiment in Irigaray. My reading makes it an intervention in a specific theoretical text. I think it lends itself extremely well to that, and I have said before that it is the art that speaks back — that’s why I accidentally left KdV out when I wrote the initial reading. But I think it’s naive to assume that she made no contribution, especially when AF reminded us that she did. It’s not either or — it’s a conversation, and a very successful and ambitious one. That doesn’t make it not visual art — but it doesn’t make it not literature either. It is dialectically both.
I’ve read this which does engage very contemporary art and I think is pretty good criticism. But the object there is still the artwork, rather than philosophy. That’s not a contribution to Theory; that’s a contribution to Theoretical Criticism. It’s not a reorientation of theory in which the insights of visual art are taken into account. I’ve also read this, which has a series of wonderful essays on contemporary visual art from a Theoretical perspective and is really some of the closest work in this vein I’ve seen by a well-known Theoretical writer.
But I think that Matthias would see both of those as too literary, so I remain in a state of anticipation about how Theory might transform in response should a more visual “reading” of visual texts be first articulated and then put into conversation with things like the linguistic first principles of poststructuralism. To be honest the only person I know of who is even trying to do this, other than Deleuze, who is not satisfying to me because he steps too far away from linguistic poststructuralism, is Andrei Molotiu — and he’s coming at it at least in part from comics (he’s too skeptical of post-Lacanianism for my taste but that’s part of the fun). I still think comics is vastly better suited for this project than contemporary visual art, due to their shared liminality. The only work that’s even touching on it is coming out of comics, and it’s extremely exciting. I think part of what you’re missing about what I’m after is that I am anticipating an outcome that will identify the absolute smallest number of changes necessary to linguistic poststructuralism to incorporate insights from art: not simply a theory of art that is genealogically related to poststructuralism.
Thought as art is old, old, old…but not as old as thought can’t be art.
So old art can offer something to theory, but new art can’t? That seems a little weird; like Bert says, contemporary art is obsessed with the history of art…so if you’re happy to let the history of art have something to say to theory, it’s not really clear to me what the problem is.
But yes, you seemed to be saying that dada and Duchamp and Warhol aren’t sufficiently ambitious because they don’t speak back to theory. You’re not saying that? Because when you claim that we need Kathy Acker to theoretically validate Fluxus or Burroughs to theoretically validate dada, it sounds to me like you’re saying that.
To me a lot of contemporary art has interesting things to say to theory. That would include W the Whore, which is for all practical purposes contemporary art — not contemporary art plus text, not contemporary art with an asterix, but contemporary art. I think Jeff Wall has stuff to say to Stanley Cavell (and I’ve talked about this specifically). I think the Museum of Jurassic Technology has stuff to say to Foucault and Feyerabend, about institutions and discourses. I think Polar Diamond has things to say to Zizek about Christ, Christ being something Zizek cares about quite a bit.
But yes…it’s a very different discussion if you’re willing to say that art in general has stuff to say to theory. Then it’s just that you don’t like much contemporary art — for reasons that aren’t really as clear as why Franklin doesn’t like contemporary art, but that’s okay. For that matter, I don’t like much contemporary literature. The idea that Salman Rushdie or Kathy Acker have lots of brilliant insights to offer theorists — well, I don’t see it. But mileage varies, I suppose. Hauerwas had a really interesting essay about Anne Tyler, which made me almost think she was worth reading, even though I know she isn’t. Which brings up the fact that…I don’t really see how there being interesting theory about something has anything to do with whether the work itself is good or bad. Those connections seem pretty arbitrary to me.
I mean, what “good theory” are you talking about? Zizek doesn’t use a lot of contemporary art…but he doesn’t use literature either. He’s more interested in film. But…here’s an instance where theory by Zizek was presented as contemporary art. Here’s Badiou on contemporary art, which looks fairly interesting.
That seems promising, and even insightful about this conversation with Franklin.
Kristeva’s got some things to say about contemporary art here.
And, hey, here’s Marguerite on Bill Viola.
And Bert on feminist performance art.
And what the hell, me using Wall to talk back to Cavell.
It just doesn’t seem that hard to find examples…. Though maybe none of them are sufficiently rigorous?
Here’s somebody using Derrida’s discussion of drawing as applied to contemporary artists. I guess you could claim this isn’t pushing back…but surely it doesn’t suggest a huge gap between older art practices and newer ones in terms of their ability to be discussed by theorists.
I never said the writer made no contribution. I said having contributions from writers is very common in visual art. So common that you don’t need to make a reference to literature. Visual art has swallowed text whole. So while you can see W the Whore as a combination of visual art and literature *if you want*, it remains nonetheless true that *that’s your choice.* You don’t need to make any such reference. It is just visual art, period, because text and art together absolutely, without any trouble, read as visual art, period, no claim to be a hybrid form necessary. Which means that you’re welcome to believe that it addresses these issues in ways never heretofore seen, but to claim it does so because it has a leg up from literature on the usual incapacity of visual art does not make a whole lot of sense.
Cavell uses contemporary art in philosophy. Badiou is using contemporary art for philosophy. In the example I gave above, Zizek in the example above is actually philosophy turning into contemporary art, which seems like it’s relevant.
For that matter, Marguerite’s piece and Bert’s piece seem more interested in how art speaks to theory than in how theory can interpret art. So’s my Cavell piece for that matter. I mean, I wrote the thing, for what that’s worth, and I definitely started from, Cavell has this thing to say, let’s see how different images accord or don’t accord with his thinking. It’s not post-structuralism, I guess…but Bert’s and Marguerite’s pieces are.
“am anticipating an outcome that will identify the absolute smallest number of changes necessary to linguistic poststructuralism to incorporate insights from art”
See…you’re not talking about contemporary art here, right? You’re talking about all art. Despite the fact that poststructuralists have written extensively about art. Somehow none of that counts because Matthias (who isn’t I don’t think that interest in either the methods or the goals you’re hoping for) feels those critiques aren’t sufficiently visual? That seems really weird, Caro.
And finally — “the smallest number” — that’s just so bizarre to me. You really do think of this stuff as math.
I have a 6pm meeting and will have to come back and read what you sent me more carefully before I say anything I want to be committed to, but what strikes me on a cursory read is that all of these are still fundamentally about art.
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…
Maybe move the discussion over here?