Tag Archives: Bert Stabler

I Quite Like Art Photography

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A few weeks ago Noah posted a link to an essay by Bert Stabler slamming the medium of art photography. Rankled by the dismissal of a fascinatingly diverse medium I agreed to write a rebuttal. However, rather than address the essay point by point, I’m addressing what I see as the fundamental flaw at the heart of Stabler’s essay, that the small, highly commercial subset of art photography that Stabler critiques is at all representative of the varied artistic power of photography by focusing on the work of several engaging contemporary artists who use photography in their practice.

Susan Hiller’s work often focuses on the poetic systems behind the act of collecting, archiving and organising, perhaps the most striking of her ‘collection’ works is The J. Street Project. Encompassing three years of research, travel and photography, The J. Street Project is a massive collection of 303 photos documenting every street sign in Germany that contains the prefix Juden (Jew). Shot in a workmanlike fashion, the series is displayed in three formats; As a 606 page photo book of sequential photographs, as a 67 minute slide film, or as a monumental installation piece, pictured below.

While the individual photographs would appear as nothing more than a quirk, an oddity, it is the insistent mass and repetition of subject that gives this piece its incredible effect. Over and over, these mundane objects throw in to stark relief the dissonance between these German streets and the historical context of the country. Presented without comment, without drama, the audience is forced to fill the void of absence created by the work, projecting their cultural experiences in to the insistent work.

In the face of a modernity that demands constant efficiency and production, Alys’s Sleepers series forms a documentary of passive resistance. The work, comprised of 80 colour projector slides, depicts sleeper, both animal and human, engaging in an unusual relation to the urban construction.

Alys takes care to address the issue of the camera’s gaze in Sleepers as well, the subjects are always shot from low to the ground, or (or level with them in the case of bench sleepers), by joining his sleepers in such a way, Alys avoids what could have been a carousel of condescending ‘poverty porn’. Alys does not pity his sleepers, doesn’t look down on his subjects but lies with them, praising them for their ingenuity and their willingness to break with the social systems and rules of the modernised urban space.

Alys’s photographic vision in his other work cannot be ignored either. His photographic records of his performative and conceptual pieces is of particular note, here Alys excels at capturing and distilling the ‘defining image’ of a brief, ephemeral event. In ‘Turista’ we see this talent exemplified.

Here Alys strikes a comical figure, lanky, pale and absurd as he tries unsuccessfully to blend in to the line of trade workers in Mexico City. The picture poses a question and a humorous barb at the notion of the nomad artist, travelling between countries, gifting the people with their insights in to foreign cultures. Embodied and mocked by Alys, the notion becomes ridiculous, and we’re forced to ask ourselves, is the artist-nomad really a chameleonic nomad, able to fit in to any society and privy to mystic truths, or are they nothing more than a glorified tourist?

The camera has often been compared to a phallus, a weapon wielded by the photographer against subject. In the work of Jean Francois Lecourt that idea is taken to a delightfully absurd extreme.

The artist wields his camera as a gun and a gun as a camera, all targeted at his own nude body in an act of simultaneous destruction and creation.

Lecourt was inspired by old fairground games that still occasionally pop up around mainland Europe. In the game the participant is given a rifle and must shoot at a target mounted in the fairground stand, if they hit the bullseye, a camera automatically shoots a picture of them shooting the target.

Lecourt created a large, lightproof box to house a sheet of photosensitive paper, a kind of pinhole camera without the pinhole. He then stripped naked and fired a shot at his home made camera, simultaneously piercing the camera and the paper behind.

The resultant picture is a beautifully hazy, moody thing, recalling the dramatic light of a Noir film,. Lecourt’s pictures capture your eye, drawing you in with their strangeness. The eye’s registering of the depth of the photo is constantly baffled by the literal punctum of the gunshot hole, which seems to overlay the image like an abstract supernova, pulling the viewer’s eye constantly to the surface and reminding them of the object hood of the photograph.
The wit of Lecourt’s technique is wonderful to me as well, the idea of the nude male artist wielding the phallus of the gun against the phallus of the camera in an act of symbolic suicide that mocks the narcissistic romance of the self destructive artist, the artist shooting himself in both senses of the word and ending not with oblivion, but with another image of his own body.

Danny Treacy’s work addresses the things we leave behind, travelling to out of the way or marginalised areas, the kind of places where people go to be alone and unseen together. Treacy collects trophies of abandoned clothing found in these areas, turning them in to sculptural subjects for his photographs that harness the suggestive, intimate untold histories behind the abandoned clothes to create a haunting mood that is as sensual and beautiful as it is haunting and inexplicably frightening.

In ‘Those’, Treacy’s first series, the artist created a series of organically suggestive sculptures using found fabric. These sculptures are all what Danny calls ‘protuberances’, the things that stick out from us, that enter the world and, through their orifice like openings, invite the world to enter them, to gaze in to the soft folds of their innards. Named as Those, they become empty, out of place things, without noun, signs awaiting an object, as alien as they are enticing.

The bizarre, erotically charged organs are shot intimately, close up against a plain black background, leaving the eye to wander over the sensual surfaces of the soft fabrics that Treacy employs. Through the forensic eye of Treacy’s camera, the erotically charged sculptures discharge their intimate history and morph in to a proxy of the human flesh they once covered. One wishes they could reach out, to touch the sculptures, to reach inside and feel them.

Treacy’s other series, ‘Them’, continues the artist’s obsession with the discarded skins of our clothes, the ‘Them’ are different however, the name itself recalls horror movies of bygone eras, and the ‘Them’ indeed are a kind of monster. Constructed from mended and sewn together pieces of clothing, the Them become sad, tragic figures, haunting and frightening as they loom from the darkness, filled with the body of the artist himself, who claims to feel a kind of protection and comfort from within the shambolic, anonymous suits he constructs, a connection with an intimate history of the abandoned garments in to which he has breathed a new and unnatural life. To us on the outside though, the figures are threatening presences, each unnameable stain evoking the hidden histories of the things we carelessly abandon, reminding us that every piece of clothing was witness to the fate of their owners, whatever that may be.

Criticism Before Art; Lizards Riding Pendulums

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I’m probably overly pleased with this comment from the ongoing theory vs. art debate…but, hey, it’s my blog, and I will highlight it if I want to:

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.

And, just to make this a little less solipsistic…here’s Bert Stabler talking about radical and conservative art.

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 an 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.

Bert Stabler: Girl Germs

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The following essay is by Bert Stabler, an art critic and sometime contributor to HU (when I can browbeat him into it!) Bert’s own blog is here. His website is here.

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Carolee Schneeman’s “Meat Joy,” performed at The Plagiarism Festival on February 6, 1988 @ Artist Television Access, San Francisco, CA.

Girl Germs: Nature as Abjection in Early Feminist Performance Art

Bert Stabler

Immediately after confessing her “ambivalence” about the politics implied in her re-staging of Carolee Schneemann’s classic 1975 performance “Interior Scroll” (in which Schneemann read aloud from an unrolling script contained in her vagina), Gretchen Holmes goes on to summarize her recent review of Tina Takemoto’s alternately ironic and therapeutic work at SFMOMA thusly: “Takemoto simultaneously engages feminism’s politics and its steaks, and this dual presence argues for the importance of both. “ A more fortuitous typo could not be imagined. Possibly Schneemann’s second most well-known work was the more lavish 1964 performance “Meat Joy,” in which several mostly nude performers cavorted with raw fish and chicken meat, as well as sausage, paint, clear plastic, scraps of paper, and various other items. Schneemann’s use of inert objects alongside exposed flesh in “happening”-style improvisations was established in the 1962 piece “Eye Body”, in which she covered herself in grease, chalk, and plastic, and performed in a “loft environment, built of large panels of interlocked, rhythmic color units, broken mirrors and glass, lights, motorized umbrellas.” This dynamically grotesque and erotic theatricality, typical of Schneemann’s assertion of gendered embodiment, was conceived of in direct confrontation to the uninhabited female bodies in high- middle- and lowbrow art, film, and publishing.


Carolee Schneemann, from the performance “Eye Body.”

Pioneering “feminist body art” is widely recognized as Schneemann’s artistic legacy, which has now been handed down through the gruesome sculptures of Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman’s grotesque theatrical self-portraits, and Patty Chang’s identity-themed actions. But in a way different from these artists, Schneemann, as well as other early performance artists, seemed to take on language itself, not as a weapon but as a target. Much of Schneemnann’s contribution to art may seem to many viewers both now and in the past as simply some sort of empowering avant-garde appropriation of pornography—from her 1965 erotic mixed-media film “Fuses,” to her 1981-88 “Infinity Kisses” photo series, in which she makes out with her cat. The ritual aspects of what Schneemann repeatedly referred to as “shamanic” gestures have been largely smoothed over in the process of her institutional canonization. But despite the anti-essentialist language games of postmodernity, the connection between ecstasy, flesh, faith, and sickness is not hard to see. Indeed, Genesis offers the first female rebel, and a vision of punishment not for nakedness but for shame in nakedness. Connections between femininity, sacrifice, animals, and blood continue throughout the Bible, with the Gospels of Mark and Luke narrating the healing of a man possessed by a legion of demons, dispersed by Jesus into a herd of pigs, followed immediately by that of a woman who had bled ceaselessly for twelve years, and the resurrection from the dead of a young girl. While Schneemann’s attitude toward Christianity is hardly congenial, that hardly mitigates the importance, within a Western religious paradigm, of staking out a religious space within fine art in a way that few others have, in performance art or otherwise.

The influence of Antonin Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” runs throughout Schneemann’s work but also throughout the history of “edgy” performance, from Allan Kaprow’s Happenings to Joseph Beuy’s “social sculptures,” through the ecstatic bloody festivals of the Viennese Actionists, to G.G. Allin, the Survival Research Laboratory, and the good old Blue Man Group. But by unabashedly casting herself not only as a feminist but as a “shaman” (not of the crystal-healing variety, mind you), Schneemann marked as both spiritual and political a practice of staged self-destruction and resurrection that illuminated a particularly female psychic crisis that was no mere reflection of or supplement to the Oedipal scene. Ana Mendieta smearing blood on the wall or immolating her own excavated silhouette, Marina Abramovic enduring the experiences of staring into an industrial fan until passing out, carving a pentagram into her flesh, having a strung arrow pointed at her chest for twelve hours—these melodramatic but thoroughly sincere acts differed in important ways from the Duchampian hijinks of their male performance counterparts like Vito Acconci and Chris Burden (or today, William Pope L or Santiago Serra), the esoteric shrines of Beuys or of Paul Thek, or the brutal austerity of object makers like Richard Serra or Carl Andre (the latter acquitted of Mendieta’s 1985 murder).


Ana Mendieta from the 1982 performance “Body Tracks (Rastros Corporales).”

The bluntness and savagery of Schneemann, Mendieta, and early Abramovic even distinguishes them from the more unambiguously positive performance gestures of Suzanne Lacy, Yoko Ono, or Annie Sprinkle, or the open-ended, research oriented, socially-engaged art of recent years, from artists like Paul Chan, Rikrit Taravanija, Trevor Paglen, and Walead Beshty, or groups like the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Futurefarmers, or Temporary Services.

Indeed, there has been quite a bit of utopian imagining since the millennium, both within and outside the art world, now that the memories of revolutionary massacre, even viewed from afar, are at least a generation removed for most young people. It’s a commendable project, since maybe the greatest thing the art world can offer, and the real world cannot, is a vista of endless possibility within grasp, a horizon brought near by the omnipotence of fantasy. Ideas can be brought forth and realized with few negative consequences– except for perhaps the debilitating psychic effects of narcissism and solipsism, as well as the general alienation and transgression fatigue engendered by the ceaseless breaching of propriety. Nonetheless, spreading blood on the wall or rolling in meat are probably incapable of losing their impact—they are as clear and democratic as a mystical gesture can be. The pre-linguistic vulgarity of early feminist performance is what, in some way, makes it some of the most successful work of the last 100 years.

Every phase of the last century has seemed to singularly exemplify one of the aspects that has made the modern period such a rich antiquity for contemporary art to plunder. The twenties had the technologically sublime and abject, the thirties had apocalyptic populist authenticity, the forties had spastic mystical authenticity. After the alleged end of modernity, the zeitgeists marched onward. The eighties had self-aware commerce, the nineties had identity pastiche, and the oughts had virtual communities. And In between the classical and the decadent, the seventies simply offered charismatic brutality. There was Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Jim Jones, Henry Kissinger—but, more to the point, there was the rise of pulp horror cinema, a vivid and vicious ethos crystallized in films like “I Spit on Your Grave, “The Last House on the Left,” “Lipstick,” and other films of the “rape revenge” genre, which made the castration of patriarchy explicitly public. Similarly, the theme of homicide was certainly a presence in religiously-inflected performance. In “Revolution in Poetic Language, “ Julia Kristeva says, “Opposite religion or alongside it, ‘art’ takes on murder and moves through it… Crossing that boundary is precisely what constitutes ‘art.’…(I)t is as if death becomes interiorized by the subject of such a practice(.)” The ideological weight of such aggressive feral gestures as those of Schneemann and the artists she influenced was momentous, and seems no less epic from here. Going forward, it is worth remembering how political art was temporarily not confined to the linguistic and cerebral, and eroticized pantheistic death-worship was for a moment neither ironic or gleeful, but deadly and political.


Therese Neumann, a Catholic mystic stigmatic who was threatened and intimidated by the Nazis, and reportedly ingested nothing but the communion wafer, once a day, from 1922 until her death in 1962.

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Have a Poignant Day!

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As part of HU’s ongoing series of critics talking about art and criticism, I’m reprinting an email conversation between myself and artist and critic Bert Stabler. We start off by talking about Marxism and Christianity, but if you stick with it, we make our way over to art (garfunkel) partway through.

If you don’t blink, you’ll see comics get sneered at a couple of times too.

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Bert: Random conundrum… I know Eugene V. Debs is one of your favorite punchlines. Did you know about Jane Addams passionately condemning the Pullman strike? Do you have any thoughts on that, now that you’re feeling sympathetic toward teachers’ unions?

Noah: I didn’t know that about Jane Addams. I don’t know much about her. Checking Wikipedia quick, I see that her father was a banker, though, which makes her anti-union sentiments not all that suprising….

Bert: I ‘m deciding to suck on the idea of non-revolutionary radicality as a coherent thing, if it is. Nonviolence is clearly a great solution (especially when you have a strong central government and TV), but Eugene V. Debs was certainly not opting for that, which Jane Addams was deploring him for, as an ultra-pacifist.

In one sense, Jane Addams is Obama and Debs is a Tea Party protester. In another sense, Debs is an isolationist and Addams is a free-trade advocate. It’s definitely a great example of the materialist-pragmatist split I’ve decided to harp on as the key divide of liberal democracy.

Noah: That’s interesting that Jane Addams was sticking to pacifism. Debs actually went to jail as an opponent of WWI — though he wasn’t a pacifist in all situations, obviously.

You can also see it as part of the ongoing battle between marxism and feminism….

Bert: Well, a pragmatic Marxist is a democratic socialist, and a materialist feminist is (often) a psychoanalysis-ist, but it’s obvious that neither precludes pacifism. Bertrand Russell was a pacifist too, and he was as materialist as humanists come (bowing before the altar of math is absolutely the variety of gnosis materialists favor)– his association with Whitehead and Wittgenstein must have frustrated him terribly.

Materialists and pragmatists can disagree about desirable outcomes, but means and meaning are likely to be strikingly different. That’s why Marxism really is never capitalism by other means– it’s freedom through law rather than outside of it.

Noah: I think Marxism and capitalism are maybe closer than you’re allowing for here. I think there are materialist capitalists — which I take to mean ideological capitalists, at least to some extent. The invisible hand isn’t that much different than the impersonal forces of history. I think C.S. Lewis would see both as giving up your will to the demonic, essentially. Putting your faith in material processes is putting your faith in material processes. Whether or not those processes are supposed to work through freedom or dialectic doesn’t necessarily make that much difference.

And on the other side…it seems you could fairly easily be a pragmatic Marxist — someone like Gorbachev, basically, working within a Marxist system but who didn’t want to be all ideological about it and hoped to basically make things better by getting them to function better. Or there’s China — lots of pragrmatic marxists there, yes?

I wonder if the pragmatic/materialist vibe you’re seeing is more pragmatic than materialist in origin. That is, capitalism throws up a lot of folks who are pragmatic because, well, they’re in power, and folks in power tend to be more interested in manipulating power than in ideology.

Bert: Capitalism is pure ultra-organized de-ideologized biopower. Chinese capitalists and Russian capitalists just aren’t real Marxists. Hardcore American conservatives– Sarah Palin, Francis Fukayama, that fairly smart pastor who ran for President– don’t believe in modernity. They believe in a halcyon era without all these competing cultural narratives. Their urge to dismantle the central government is a negative response to biopower. It’s neo-agrarian retrenchment, just like Mao.

C.S. Lewis is a Christian materialist, and, like all materialists, he’s a pessimist. In a sense all materialists are conservatives, but calling Marxists conservative kind of stretches the definition of the word. He deplores modernity for its ruthless worship of power, which is certaily how Marxism can seem from the outside.

But Marxism is not nihilistic, capitalist, or pragmatic. Marx loves capitalism, make no mistake. But there is no reason the workers should take over, except– they just should, damn it! They do all the real work, they shovel shit, they are the last that are to be first according to, well, the Christian tradition.

Dialectics are, other than being a description of the magical astrophysics of history, a pale imitation of the invisible hand, despite being more elegant. Hegel is much closer to Kant’s moral law, which Lewis loves.. a real solid thing– the spirit as a bone. The invisible hand isn’t really a concept at all, it’s just a throwaway line. Capitalism knows that all language is a transparent game, a marketing ploy– you can write rambling psychotic poetry about it if you want, or you can just get a job and claim what’s coming to you.

Eschatology is the materialist core of Christianity– the present is in flux, but the future is solid. And this element is in capitalism– it can market the hybridity, the expansion of decentered homogeneity. it promotes, but it can also market the exact opposite. Capitalism doesn’t care. In a way, Christianity is proposing tangibility as existing exclusively outside of lived immaterial reality. Immanence isn’t tangible- only the infinte really exists. The Kingdom of God. But this is Caesar’s world here and now, which deserves our patronage but not our respect.

Noah: I think that’s right about Christianity; the world is worthwhile because there’s a real outside it that exists. I guess if you go far enough that way you get gnosticism.

There is a way in which Marxism is more like that than like capitalism; there’s a belief in something that’s real (the revolution.)

At the same time…there are people who really believe in capitalism. I wonder if Milton Friedman can get into heaven just like the people who sincerely worshipped the vulture headed god in Narnia? Or are you saying that you can’t actually belief in capitalism in that way?

Bert: You’re going to get gnosticism either way, of a sort. Capitalism offers a final referent– all outlooks and experiences are valid insofar as they are “cashable”– a term William James used as philosophical terminology. Or perhaps, as long as they promote “buy-in” to the larger project of individual striving. Absolute knowledge is outside any one experience, but is manifest in a thousand professional specialites. Milton Friedman just slapped a label on this, “neoclassical economics,” and his professional specialty threw Nobel Prizes at him. As opposed to Adam Smith, who probably had to have someone else brand his genius for him after the fact. Tautologies are the only arguments pragmatists can make, like a bunch of sparks that can’t make a circuit. Beliefs are anathema.

Whereas in materialism, tautologies are anathema. As you suggest, there is a hidden authority, a genuine thingness, lurking beneath and beyond the everyday, in the more perfect past from which these mere shadows were spawned. But the true scholar can hermeneutically divine essential being.

People combine these all the time, perhaps everyone always. But it’s a major source of hypocrisy, slippage, differance, however you like it. Being pragmatic and being material seem equally transparent. They are both branches of humanism. And they both only (but continuously) allow the supernatural in bracketed forms.

Noah: There’s something profound about the fact that there is no actual Nobel Prize in economics; only a simulacrum created by bankers. The soul doesn’t exist, but the body is created by money, and that ends up being the same thing to everyone but dyspeptic cranks. I mean, Milton Friedman I’m sure felt more validated by getting a banker’s money than he would have by receiving the philanthropy of some guilty do-gooder.

Bert: Milton Friedman creates theories about how it is inevitable that a corporate-academic state infrastructure will pursue its self-interest by not interfering with its own free desire to congratulate Milton Friedman for theories such as this.

Noah: What about a caveat “unless evil uinons interfere”? Isn’t there something like that?

Bert: Closer to your sphere of interest, I just read this Matthew Collings thing in Modern Painters about how the Turner Prize (the big British art award) is going to second-rate hack entertainers instead of real artists who have been dead for half a millenium like Fra Angelico.

The classical-standards-of-beauty argument is like the forces-of-history or the nature-of-drives or the power-of-math arguments. It’s materialist, it’s pessimist, it’s always backward-looking. It’s somewhat impossible to be a critic (or a philosopher) and not be caught up in materialism, even if the critic is mouthing all sorts of statements about “effective” and “successful” art (or truth, or therapy, or politics). In fact, I admire Matthew Collings for straightforwardly doing what a critic does– offering a standard in plain, fluent, and even amusing terms. And, in the end, that’s what he’s banking on, to give him his edge in the marketplace of ideas, which does undermine his materialism to some degree, Language is frustratingly imperfect and ultimately should be unnecessary for materialists, whereas it is disposable and superfluous for pragmatists.

At the same time, it’s naked hypocrisy dressed up as plainspoken wisdom (a handy definition of ideology, perhaps)– if Collings’ only positive example is a Renaissance painter (with some grumbling token acknowledgement of Chris Ofili), it seems quite possible that his standards are not actually objective. As with this guy Bret Schneider on the dismal Chicago Art Criticism blog, who writes at staggering length about the aesthetic bankrupcy of relational art practice (and, while we’re at it, contemporary sculpture), with no structural insight whatsoever, there is just no firm foundation for big general complaints about the relentlessly capitalist cultural milieu without some kind of appreciation of what it is that art is supposed to be doing now. All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. And really, the least attractive responses to that situation are generally the conservative ones– cf. my broad general complaints about fine art photography.

Noah: Ideology doesn’t have to be plainspoken, though. Marx writes ideology, but it’s not necessarily framed as plainspoken wisdom…. Same with any economic thoery, really. Or much theology.

“All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. ”

I think this is true of visual art, maybe. Other things (comics, books, even film) much less so. I mean, there aren’t any laws about what art can or cannot be, but there are historical expectations about materials, context, even subject matter. And those expectations tend to have ideological components which you can contest or not. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to look at photography and say, in general this medium does this and that and the other and I don’t like that for this reason or that reason.

I mean, you’re not saying photography isn’t art. You’re saying it’s bad art. I guess you could argue that since there’s not really any agreed upon actual value in the arts, then distinctions like good and bad don’t make sense — but then that leaves you merely talking about utility or other pragmatic concerns…or not talking about anything at all, I guess.

Bert: My whole argument about Fine Art Photography (not all photos– quite the contrary) is that it’s tethered to classical painting ideals, technology fetishism, and exploitive sociological tropes in order to validate itself in the anarchic ocean of photography in the unwashed techno-universe. Art has to represent its context, and representing by repressing is generally quite unattractive– as is the case with literary comics, which are all about not being comics while being comics.

I’m not talking about utility, I’m talking about pleasure– which has surprisingly little to do with attempts at metaphysical content.

And Marx is absolutely writing ideology, insofar as he is saying this and that are scientifically valid claims about society, which is a load of hooey, versus this and that are worthwhile principles on which to organize society, which has more than a little merit. This can basically be extended to other forms of modern writing– it’s just crystal clear in Marx and Freud, both of whom I admire.

As you suggest, a real utility argument isn’t really even an argument. It’s a true/false hypothesis and thus pointless to speculate on.

Your “like this for that reason, like that for this reason” approach is absolutely pragmatist. Nothing has to cohere– as long as the argument is elegant, functions on its own terms. My approach is always somewhat mired in materialism, on the other hand, because I want to suggest some larger picture– that’s a limitation I’m trying to deal with somehow.

Noah: Okay, two things.

First I got a little confused earlier. You said:

“All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. And really, the least attractive responses to that situation are generally the conservative ones– cf. my broad general complaints about fine art photography.”

I thought you were saying that your complaints themselves were conservative, and therefore unattractive (it seemed odd for you to be dissing yourself in that manner, but not impossible or anything.)

Anyway, I think it’s kind of an interesting confusion. To the extent that you’re right and art can be anything, then any negative response ends up being conservative; an effort to proscribe the jouissance or to sit in judgment on the gay utopia. I see what you’re saying in general — if anything is possible, then you should take advantage of that, not hanker after a past when fewer things were possible. But…that starts to look like a fairly pragmatic argument, doesn’t it?

I guess the question is, if art can be anything, what’s the point of criticism? From your material standpoint, it seems like art is too amorphous and empty and, ultimately, predicated on and redolent of capitalism to really even bother with. Whereas, from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s use is in its existence, and arguing about whether it’s good or not is pointless (except for the phatic pleasure of argument itself, of course.)

I think that ties in with your point here:

“Language is frustratingly imperfect and ultimately should be unnecessary for materialists, whereas it is disposable and superfluous for pragmatists.”

You could substitute “art” for “language” there, right? Christians or Marxists shouldn’t need art, ultimately (except as a mistrusted venue for propaganda or apologetic), whereas pragmatists don’t need art except as another exchangeable commodity. For materialists, only the meaning matters, in which case you should say what you mean and not dump it in this odd container; for pragmatists, only the form matters, so you’re reduced to figuring out whether it “works”, i.e. “sells”. There doesn’t seem to be a place from which the melding of form and content, which is what matters in art, can be said to matter to anybody else.

Bert: Ooo, nice move on the “art” for “language” swap. Yeah, the form/content problem is really tough for critics, especially since they keep trying to interpret form *as* content so that they have something to write about, here in the endless suburbs of customized big-box mass hallucination.

But materialism ruins art, as in the case of Fine Art Photography. I don’t necessarily think materialist criticism has to ruin art, since art can mine that as well as anything else, but beauty requires motion, the self-overcoming that pragmatism is always failing to express in its transparency-fetishizing penchant for klunky descriptiveness.

The trick is to find material in practice that is actually material, not just a flat deism of the ephemeral. Setting out to whittle a Christian twig will just yield a shitty twig. But what if you point out the twig and call it Christian? Criticism might actually work best if it is pragmatic– but treats its content as a meaningful part of its form.

Noah: Form is content in art, though. I mean, that’s what separates art from religion or political statement or anything that actually matters, is that the form bleeds into the content, so what’s important isn’t “love God!” but that you’re saying “love God!”

Does materialism always have to ruin art? I mean, the point of materialism is that the content matters more than the form, so you’d think that Marxist materialism would have a different formal effect than a materialism that was about how great old paintings used to be. I mean, Brecht is cool.

It seems like pragmatic art is going to be soulless art, which is the quandary of capitalist art in the first place. That is, art’s pragmatic function is to deliver soul — or to convert soul into value. But you can’t get soul through a pragmatic operation (in part because soul is pragmatically defined as “that which you cannot get through a pragmatic operation”.) So for pragmatism to function in art, you need to pragmatically commit to, or search out, materialism (or authenticity.) I think the point is that, rather than art being pragmatic (capitalist/jouissance/moving) or materialist (static/proscribed/unitary), in capitalism art is the intersection of those two modes. Art is kind of capitalism’s safety valve; the place where pragmatism acknowledges and integrates its repressed other. (Which ends up making art look like an opiate from a materialist standpoint.)

In a similar vein…I think criticism has to “work” best if its pragmatic, just because “working” is a pragmatic yardstick. If you want to tell somebody whether they’ll enjoy a movie and/or whether they should shell out 10 bucks to see it, I think it’s clear that you want a pragmatic criticism that isn’t wandering off to talk about whether the twig is Christian and how many Marxists can dance on the head of Art Garfunkel. On the other hand, if you’re a materialist, you could judge criticism on the basis of truth…which tends to make criticism as a discipline or a coherent form vanish, since everything is judged on the basis of truth.

Bert: Sure, form is content. And I’m more than happy to let Marxists dance on Art Garfunkel without interference– I would even offer mild encouragement. But you haven’t described or related or conveyed or reproduced anything by saying either “infectious pop hooks,” or “buy these two tracks on iTunes but by all that’s holy ignore the rest of the album.” The ideologically naturalized role of the cultural product is reasserted, but the ineffable jouissance, the nature of the power of the cultural product isn’t amplified or expanded in any way.

Chesterton said that people who reject belief end up believing in anything– while that may sometimes be the case, I would say that people who reject belief are the ones who are the most fixed in their ideas. Nobody knows what God thinks (to the extent that statement makes sense), even institutional religious authorities. But the Institutional authorities of instrumentalized culture can prescribe proper therapeutic remedies for the entirety of reality– or they can refer you to a specialist, or they can reassure you that your concerns are meaningless.

Still, the role of criticism is pragmatic. Art doesn’t need criticism to create content, but it needs something like criticism to cultivate a receptive community. It’s like a friendly parasite that helps exfoliate dead skin cells. It’s okay as long as art doesn’t pay too much attention to its parasites. That’s how you end up with moribund pretentious crap like high-end photography and alternative comics.

And, in much this same way, the freedom required for functional capitalism is fenced in by guns and cameras and touchingly ironic signs saying “Please ignore and love the nonexistent and revered guns and cameras Have a poignant day.” Perhaps making the signs more enjoyable to viewers is a worthwhile task, since we certainly aren’t going to get rid of the guns and cameras with our own signs, let alone our own guns and cameras. I just would like there to be something else for signs to say, as well as a reason for people to read the signs.

I’m meandering into the imagery of “They Live,” so I’ll just leave it there.
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It occurred to me that the primary target of most modern philosophy is religion (even if God is okay), and that the way you can tell whether a thinker is pragmatist or materialist is whether she makes religion a purveyor of illusion (materialism) or of reification (pragmatism).

Another critical moment I thought worth mentioning was the discussion in Artforum about this Seth Kim-Cohen review of a Doug Aitken piece (originally proposed by Bruce Nauman) where he dug a hole a thousand feet or so into the earth and then hung a microphone down into the hole, to the very bottom, and set up speakers in a small room at the top of the hole to transmit whatever sounds were audible at the bottom of the hole. Because he was all, “this is cool, but it’s so reified.” And this other art historian wrote in to argue and called Kim-Cohen an idealist and was like “our physical being has meaning.”

And Artforum had another battling critics thing where they published a piece of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s book all about the forging of dynamic future communities of niche utopian resistance via the magic of love and Spinoza, and this Marxist responded that he didn’t know about all that, but perhaps it’s that kind of fluffy thinking that caused the financial derivatives mess.

One lesson is that materialists always win if they get to be negative. Another lesson is that Deleuze can be interpreted as a materialist (as he was in the first discussion about Doug Aitken) and a pragmatist (as he was in the Negri book). But even though I kind of like that Heideggerish guy who stuck up for Doug Aitken (mostly because I like that piece and I like the earth not being meaningless), Deleuze is totally a pragmatist. Desiring machines? Come on, Madison Avenue, dig him up and have him lead a creativity seminar!

Noah: I think my ability to respond to all of that is limited by my not knowing much about any of the artists in question. But I’m curious about reifying religion. Who do you think does that? I’m also curious as to why the digging hole thing is supposed to be reified.

Does Deleuze call individuals “desiring machines”? That is totally something you’d think an economist would say. I’ve often thought it’s kind of funny how Freud and Adam Smith are more or less obsessed with the same thing; for both of them and their heirs man is defined by desire.

Bert: Desire– Of course Freud and Adam Smith are not the only people who ever wrote about desire. But they are both uniquely influential secular modern theorizers of the politics of the individual in society. Bataille seems like the obvious go-to guy for analysis of the “libidinal economy,” in which he does a good job of talking about how aspiration manifests itself in history, and the tension between power and law. Adam Smith is much more interested in aspiration and power, and Freud much more interested in history and law, but Bataille and Lacan use the idea of libido not as a fragile emotional category, or even just an empirical fact of existence, but as an unstoppable force, the power that changes everything, the sun and everything it stands for, the positive matter existing in the void of time.

Soul– Meister Eckhart talks about soul on one hand as totally passive utterly detached completely naked zero ground of existence, and also as completely embodied and expressed in the will. Art has to deal with being a representation of the soul in language (not that the art has to use language, but it is never without symbolic context), which is the ego, and the soul in imagination, fantasy, aspiration, which is the superego, and the soul in lizard-brain id, material physical existence and, importantly, mortality and self-negation. Art wouldn’t be recognizable as art if there wasn’t a component of mirroring the soul in material, symbol, and fantasy, but very few people mistake a mirror for an alternate dimension.– except, of course, philosophers and political figures. Does capitalism change that in some way? Yes– it makes the mirror look at itself, since the only pragmatist knowledge is self-evidence. There is no materialist capitalist art that “succeeds” as art in a capitalist context (critically or commercially or whatever) and remains materialism. Criticism can mirror that mirror-mirroring, or it can critique it.

Which beings us to Brecht. Who was certainly a materialist in his philosophy, but in his art could only trumpet the values of experimental progress by self-consciously mirroring the tropes of literary forms. Was he not a postmodern auteur ahead of his time? Him and any number of modern auteurs– Tarkovsky, Bunuel, and everyone Deleuze writes about in his Cinema books. Did he break through boundaries and smash sacred antiques? Indeed he did. Did he thereby impede the cause of capitalism? I should think not.

Noah: I don’t disagree about desire or Brecht.

I wonder about soul. I don’t know that defining soul or breaking it into different Freudian manifestations really makes a ton of sense to me. Freud doesn’t believe in the soul; people that do believe in the soul aren’t so sure about Freud.

Perhaps relatedly…I’m not so sure that the point of art is to represent soul. And I’m really not sure about this: “but very few people mistake a mirror for an alternate dimension.– except, of course, philosophers and political figures.”

I think lots and lots of people see/use art for soul. Art is really central to the identities of lots of folks. Terry Eagleton talks about how art has become a substitute for religion. In societies that aren’t capitalist, art often doesn’t just represent or point out soul, but actually is involved in soul more or less directly — the ideological/material implications just are a lot clearer (whether it’s the Odyssey talking about Greek gods or Brecht shilling, however ineffectively, for communism.) It seems to me that the dilemma of capitalist art is in fact that art does not represent soul, but actually is taken for/is supposed to/must be soul. It’s function is to embody the ineffable so that the ineffable can be safely ignored. That’s why it can be the site of so much angst/energy/conflict while simultaneously being completely beside the point.

Bert: I don’t need Freud to believe in soul or Christians to believe in Freud. I live in a capitalist anarchosphere of ideas. You seem perfectly happy to engage both of those idioms in your own arguments, sir.

And, as long as you’ve reduced me to second-person attack, you, YOU, (or should I refer to you by your last name to a projected reader of your blog?), Berlatsky states that the point of art is not to represent soul. Or at least to him (you). But then he/you say/says it IS to represent soul, — at least to pre-industrial societies– or it is to embody soul– at least to the false-consciousness modern herd described by Terry Eagleton.

I think you really hit it at the end, though, when you talk about it being meaningless and controversial at the same time. Its appeal has a lot to do with its safety. Like that thing Zizek says, as a true materialist, about how culture is everything that we revere without believing in it– which he contrasts with the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas in Bamiyan.

But I don’t know if I really go all the way with the Frankfurt commodity-fetish argument about our collective stupidity. Appearances and representations are different from mirrors of reality, but they can approximate reality in a very appealing way, Mirrors of soul are sort of the same. But neither materialists nor pragmatists believe in souls, because for there to be a soul there has to be something intangible that both “is” and “does,” and I’m contending that that is an either-or distinction in our current milieu. If people overinvest in culture, either in an aesthete or a fundamentalist vein, it’s because they’ve been deprived of the option of believing in more than two options.

One more thing– Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that if the dead cannot be raised, then Christians “are of all people most to be pitied.” There’s something in there about holding an impossible beautiful thing directly before your eyes without blinking, as a liberating act of will, that could definitely be reflected in rational reverence for culture.

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If you felt that this was not enough Bert/Noah conversational action, you can find more such over at Bert’s blog.