Art, Philosophy, and Ideology: Writings on Aesthetics and Visual Culture from the Avantgarde to Postsocialism (Transcultural Aesthetics, 4) 9004697500, 9789004697508

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by aleš erjavec edited by tyrus miller

 479 tca

Emeritus at the Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has published widely on the avantgarde and postsocialist art, including Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements (Duke UP, 2015).

tyrus miller, Ph.D. (1994), Stanford University, is Distinguished

Professor of Art History and English at the University of California Irvine. He has published extensively on modernism and the avant-garde, the Frankfurt School, and Georg Lukács, including Georg Lukács and Critical Theory: Aesthetics, History, Utopia (Edinburgh UP, 2023).

Aleš Erjavec Tyrus Miller (Ed.)

ISBN 9789004697508

issn 2773-0921 brill.com/tca 9

789004 697508

tr ans cu ltu r al aes thetics

aleš erjavec, Ph.D. (1988), University of Ljubljana, is Research Professor

Art, Philosophy, and Ideology

This volume presents a selection of aesthetic and art theoretical writings by the internationally renowned philosopher Aleš Erjavec from the 1990s to the present. Erjavec was an active participant in the artistic revolt in Slovenia throughout the 1980 and became one of the most notable international theorists of late- and postsocialist developments in art. His work also extended to new, emergent forms of contemporary art and visual culture in global art and culture networks. The diverse contexts and artists with which he has engaged gives him a unique critical perspective on major debates in philosophical aesthetics and art theory.

Art, Philosophy, and Ideology Writings on Aesthetics and Visual Culture from the Avantgarde to Postsocialism

Art, Philosophy, and Ideology

Transcultural Aesthetics an International Association for Aesthetics Book Series Series Editor Manfred Milz (University of Regensburg/University of Johannesburg) Editorial Board Enea Bianchi (University of Galway) Murat Celik (Ankara University) Peng Feng (Peking University) Rosa Fernández (University of Málaga) Lisa Giombini (Roma Tre University) Adrián Kvokačka (University of Prešov) Tyrus Miller (University of California, Irvine) Lydia Waithira Muthuma (Technical University of Kenya) Sanela Nikolic (University of Arts in Belgrade) Monique Roelofs (University of Amsterdam) Zoltán Somhegyi (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary) Polona Tratnik (Institute irris & University of Ljubljana) Advisory Board Curtis L. Carter (Marquette University) Rodrigo Duarte (Federal University of Minas Gerais) Aleš Erjavec (Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) Jale Erzen (Middle East Technical University) Gao Jianping (Shenzhen University) Irina M. Lisovets (Ural Federal University) Kostas Moraitis (National Technical University of Athens) Jos de Mul (Erasmus University Rotterdam) Miodrag Šuvaković (Singidunum University) Federico Vercellone (University of Turin) Krystyna Wilkoszewska (Jagiellonian University) Hiroshi Yoshioka (Kyoto University)

volume 4 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/tca

Art, Philosophy, and Ideology Writings on Aesthetics and Visual Culture from the Avantgarde to Postsocialism

By

Aleš Erjavec Edited by

Tyrus Miller

leiden | boston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Erjavec, Aleš, author. | Miller, Tyrus, 1963- editor. Title: Art, philosophy, and ideology : writings on aesthetics and visual culture from the avantgarde to postsocialism / by Aleš Erjavec ; edited by Tyrus Miller. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2024. | Series: Transcultural aesthetics, 2773-0921 ; volume 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This volume presents a selection of aesthetic and art theoretical writings by the internationally renowned philosopher Aleš Erjavec from the 1990s to the present. Erjavec was an active participant in the artistic revolt in Slovenia throughout the 1980 and became one of the most notable international theorists of late- and post-socialist developments in art. His work also extended to new, emergent forms of contemporary art and visual culture in global art and culture networks. The diverse contexts and artists with which he has engaged gives him a unique critical perspective on major debates in philosophical aesthetics and art theory”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2024004729 (print) | LCCN 2024004730 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004697508 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004697515 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art--Philosophy. | Aesthetics. Classification: LCC N70 .E65 2024 (print) | LCC N70 (ebook) | DDC 701/.17--dc23/eng/20240309 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024004729 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024004730 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2773-0921 isbn 978-90-04-69750-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-69751-5 (e-book) DOI 10.1163/9789004697515 Copyright 2024 by Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller. Published by Koninklijke Brill bV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill bV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill bV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill bV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Sources of Original Publication vii List of Figures ix

1

Introduction 1 Tyrus Miller, Ed.

Section 1 Visual Aesthetics in Postsocialism, Postmodernism, and Contemporary Art 2

Why Architecture in Post-Modern Times? (1989) 11

3

Art, Cognition, Knowledge, and Diagnostics (1993) 23

4

Seeing, Painting, and Art (1996) 39

5

Aesthetics as Philosophy (1999) 57

6

Aesthetics: Philosophy of Art or Philosophy of Culture? (2001) 70

7

Art Beyond Aesthetics, or, the Consequences of Promiscuity (2001) 84

8

The End of Art (c. 2003) 101

9

Art and: A Toothless Tiger, a Cuddly Panda, or a Snow Leopard? (2009) 121

10

Aesthetics and the Aesthetic Today: After Adorno (2010) 134

11

Artification and the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2012) 156

12

Art and Aesthetics: From Modernism to Contemporary (2013) 167

vi

Contents

section 2 Aesthetic Revolution and Avantgardes in East, Central, and Western Europe 13

Power, Freedom, and Subversion: Political Theater and Its Limits (2009) 185

14

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge! (2014) 197

15

Art, Aesthetics, and Politics (2014) 215

16

Revolutions and the Avantgardes (2016) 223

17

Ideology as World-View and Two Early Avantgarde Movements (2017) 241

18

The Avantgardes, Utopias, and Clothes (2017) 254

19

(Post)Modern Aesthetics on Trial: Revisiting a Century of Avantgardes, Interview with Oana Șerban (2017) 265

SECTION 3 Spatial Turns: Central/East European Aesthetics in National, International, and Global Contexts 20 Philosophy, National and International (1997) 277 21

Global Aesthetics and the IAA/AIE (2002) 295

22

Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition (c. 2003) 307

23

Locations, Relocations, and Reinterpretations (2006) 326

24 Eastern Europe, Art, and the Politics of Representation (2014) 336 25

Zhuyi: From Absence to Bustle? (Comments on Wang Jianjiang’s Article “The Bustle and the Absence of Zhuyi”) (2017) 361

26 Photography: Of Nation and Mountains (2018) 373

Index 393

Sources of Original Publication “Why Architecture in Post-Modern Times?” JTLA ( Journal of the Faculty of Letters and Arts, University of Tokyo, Aesthetics) 14 (1989): 77–86. “Art, Cognition, Knowledge, and Diagnostics: Art as a Form of Cognition and Knowledge,” Nordisk Estetisk Tidskrift 10 (1993): 71–90. “Seeing, Painting, and Art,” Filozofski Vestnik 17/2 (1996): 25–43. “Aesthetics as Philosophy,” Filozofski Vestnik 20/2 (1999): 11–23. “Aesthetics: Philosophy of Art or Philosophy of Culture?” Filozofski Vestnik 22/2 (2001): 7–20. “Art Beyond Aesthetics, or, the Consequences of Promiscuity,” Nordisk Estetisk Tidskrift 23 (2001): 45–62. “The End of Art,” Tavoos Art Quarterly (Iran) 11 (publication date uncertain, but likely c. 2003). Accessed online; no longer accessible. “Art and: A Toothless Tiger, a Cuddly Panda, or a Snow Leopard?” Art and Social Change: International Yearbook of Aesthetics, ed. Curtis L. Carter 13 (2009): 74–86. “Aesthetics and the Aesthetic Today: After Adorno,” in Art and Aesthetics After Adorno [Townshend Center Papers in the Humanities 3] (Berkeley: Townshend Center for the Humanities, University of California, 2010), 182–209. “Artification and the Aesthetic Regime of Art,” Contemporary Aesthetics [Rhode Island School of Design] 0/4 (2012), online: https://digitalcommons.risd .edu/liberalarts_contempaesthetics/vol0/iss4/8. “Art and Aesthetics: From Modern to Contemporary,” Diogenes 59/1–2 (2013): 148–157. “Power, Freedom, and Subversion: Political Theater and Its Limits,” Monitor ZSA 11/1–2 (2009): 101–112. “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge,” Filozofski Vestnik 35/2 (2014): 157–174. “Art, Aesthetics, and Politics,” in Aesthetics in Action [Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Aesthetics, Krakow, Poland, 2013], ed. Krystyna Wilkoszewska, International Yearbook of Aesthetics 18 (2014): 69–76. “Revolutions and the Avantgardes,” Filozofski Vestnik 37/1 (2016): 179–199. “Ideology as World-View and Two Early Avantgarde Movements,” Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi (Estonia) 26/1–2 (2017): 15–32. “The Avantgardes, Utopias, and Clothes,” Filozofski Vestnik 38/1 (2017): 89–106. “(Post-)Modern Aesthetics on Trial: Revisiting a Century of Avantgardes” (Interview with Oana Șerban) Annals of the University of Bucharest, Philosophy Series 66/1 (2017): 233–244. “Philosophy, National and International,” Metaphilosophy 28/4 (1997): 329–345.

viii

Sources of Original Publication

“Global Aesthetics and the IAA/AIE,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 25–26 (2002): 63–74. “Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition,” Tavoos Art Quarterly (Iran) 11 (publication date uncertain, but likely c. 2003). Accessed online; no longer accessible. “Locations, Relocations, and Reinterpretations,” originally in Slovenian as “Lokacije, Premestitve in Reinterpretacije,” Filozofski Vestnik 27/3 (2006): 67–76. “Eastern Europe, Art, and the Politics of Representation,” Boundary2 41/1 (2014): 51–77. “Zhuyi: From Absence to Bustle?” AM: Časopis za studije umetnosti i medija (Belgrade) 13 (2017): 111–121. “Photography: Of Nations and Mountains,” Annals of the University of Bucharest, Philosophy Series 57/1 (2018): 113–156.

Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Anish Kapoor, Dismemberment—Site 1, 2009. Author: Andym5855 35 Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, maquette, 1920 202 El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge, 1919 203 Nikolai Kolli, The Red Wedge, 1918 206 Walter Gropius, Monument to the March Dead, 1921 207 El Lissitzky working on a stage design of Sergei Tretyakov’s play I Want a Baby in the Meyerhold Theater  209 Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles) showing his tuta, 1920 259 Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles), Tuta, 1920 260 Slovenian two tolar banknote with mountains 387 Slovenian passport 388

Chapter 1

Introduction Tyrus Miller, Ed. This volume, entitled Art, Philosophy and Ideology, presents a selection of interconnected aesthetic and art theoretical essays by the internationally renowned Slovenian aesthetic philosopher and art theorist Aleš Erjavec from the late 1980s to the present. Already with his landmark 1991 book Ljubljana, Ljubljana: The Eighties in Slovene Art and Culture (coauthored and edited along with the artist and theorist Marina Gržinić), Erjavec was a participant, theorist, and chronicler of the extraordinary artistic and cultural surge in Slovenia around the death of Tito and throughout the 1980s. In Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Erjavec and Gržinić presented a multi-faceted account, rich in quotations, photographs, and other documentary material, of emergent art and culture scenes during the “Slovene political spring,” which spanned the death of Tito, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the consolidation of post-Yugoslavian Slovene independence. Covering topics ranging from alternative media, galleries, and cultural spaces to rock music, theater, and visual arts, this densely illustrated book evoked a decade of cultural revolution that transformed the lives—and in a more extended perspective, the critical and philosophical thought—of its protagonists and observers. In their preface to that volume, Erjavec and Gržinić signal their own role as being that of active conservators, constructors, and interpreters of a recent history already, a few short years later, threatened with falsification or neutralization, as the singular events they document increasingly appeared in the rear-view mirror. (This danger of oblivion or distortion has only intensified with Slovenia’s politically and culturally conservative turn in recent years). Closing the momentous year of 1990—with the events of 1989 in East-­Central Europe just behind them and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 still ahead—they wrote: What happened a year or two ago seems separated from our present by almost a decade. To preserve, as far as possible, the authenticity of a part of that time and those events, we have tried to present them in this book at close quarter; to survey and outline the artistically and culturally most important achievements of the eighties by actualizing them from our present vantage point. These events at the same time foreshadow the © Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_002

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conditions of similar exploits and their interpretation in the n ­ ineties. Our selection in this book is subjective, fragmentary and partial. The persons mentioned are not accountable for their statements quoted here, since these are woven into our own conceptual context—which, of course, does mean that we wish to diminish the importance and weight of their viewpoints, for we have quoted them precisely because of their relevance.1 We can look to Slovenia in the 1980s and 90s, with its Neue Slowenische Kunst art collectives, the Laibach rock group, the theoretical activity of such soonto-be internationally recognized Slovenian thinkers as Slavoj Žižek, and its experimental theater and performance scene, as the veritable primal scene of Erjavec’s theoretical innovations in such notions as “postsocialist postmodern avantgardes,”2 the “third” avantgarde distinct from the historical and the neo-avantgardes,3 and his later investigations of questions of art and politics, the avantgardes, and “aesthetic revolutions.”4 Subsequently, Erjavec became one of the most notable international theorists of late- and postsocialist developments in art across multiple (ex-)socialist contexts and the distinctive form of “postmodernism” and “contemporary art” that emerged in their transitional societies. His book Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, nominally an edited book bringing together distinguished international contributors such as Boris Groys, Miško Šuvaković, Péter György, Gerardo Mosquera, and Gao Minglu, really pursues a far more integrated, collective intellectual argument demanding an assemblage of expertise impossible for a single author individually to mobilize. Across diverse late- and postsocialist contexts such as Yugoslavia, Hungary, Russia, Cuba, and China, Erjavec asserted, “these countries … engendered art that possessed strikingly similar features. Its shared traits … arise from specific conditions of possibility, the framework conditioned by the disintegration of various forms of socialism.”5 Erjavec also perceived these “specific conditions of possibility” 1 Aleš Erjavec and Marina Gržinić, Ljubljana, Ljubljana: The Eighties in Slovene Art and Culture (Ljubljana: Založba Mladinska Knjiga, 1991). 2 See his collectively authored volume Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: ­Politicized Art Under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). 3 Aleš Erjavec, “The Three Avantgardes and their Context: The Early, the Neo, and the Postmodern,” in Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003), 35–62. 4 See Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015). 5 Aleš Erjavec, “Introduction” to Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, 7.

Introduction

3

as time-limited and already set into an historical perspective by more recent developments in politics and culture: Once the political transition was over, as it was by 1990 in most of the cases explored in this collection, so, too, was the unusual combination of political and aesthetic impulses that nurtured their work. As in the case of the classical avantgardes, once their subversive moment was at an end, something intangible was gone, and they, too, passed into history—or sometimes were absorbed into the international art market.6 While the Neue Slowenische Kunst group Irwin went on in the early 2000s to draw up the important East Art Map, an inventory of artistic activities within the politico-cultural formation of the “former East”; and while the Laibach rock group continues to perform today; and while the Russian “Sots” art pair Komar and Melamid have recently had a retrospective exhibition of their works; and while various other protagonists in the postsocialist artistic moment continue to produce art, the significance of their work and often their work itself has drastically changed. Erjavec’s writings tracked and responded to these contextual changes, which were already becoming apparent by 2003 when he published Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition. Increasingly thereafter his work extended beyond the theoretical paradigms of postmodernism and postsocialism to consider emergent forms of contemporary art and visual culture in global art and culture networks. Above all, he lent close attention to the Chinese contemporary art scene—very different from the postmodernist Chinese “Stars” avantgarde of the 1980s discussed by Gao Minglu in his book—that had burst onto the international art scene after the turn of the millennium. Erjavec also turned his attention more closely to the historical phenomenon of the avantgarde in another study, his coordinated, collectively authored book Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements, published in 2015. Although as already noted, he had previously discussed the problem of the avantgarde and its manifestations under different historical circumstances, including those of late socialism, this book deepened both the theoretical and comparative scope of his questioning. In this book he took up the question of “aesthetic avantgardes,” which he defined as seeking “to effect aesthetic revolutions, that is, to substantially affect and transform our ways of experiencing and sensing the world, to change in important ways the

6 Aleš Erjavec, “Foreward” to Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, xvii.

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manner in which we perceive and experience reality,”7 aiming at what Jacques Rancière called a “redistribution of the sensible.” These avantgardes were often coupled—at least imaginatively—with political and social revolutions. The contributors to Erjavec’s account, including myself, took up different moments of aesthetic revolution involving avantgardes with these comprehensive ambitions: Italian futurism, Russian constructivism, surrealism, Latin American revolutionary avantgardism, American avantgardism in the 1960s, situationism, and the Neue Slowenische Kunst. Collectively, and through the comparative interplay of the different individual contributions, which had been worked up collaboratively through multiple encounters over a period of years, we sought to detail Erjavec’s case for a distinct understanding of the avantgardes centered upon the notion of aesthetic revolution. The diverse contexts and artists with which Erjavec has engaged has given him a unique critical perspective on the major debates in European and ­American philosophical aesthetics, from the question of defining postmodernism and “contemporary” art, to the end of the avantgarde or its possible revival in new forms, to the “end of art” itself as a distinct, socially and existentially effective historical practice. His work reveals a consistent, ongoing critical dialogue with major aesthetic thinkers, including—in the essays collected here—­ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Theodor W. Adorno, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Arthur Danto, Jean-François Lyotard, Peter Bürger, Jacques Ranciére, Fredric Jameson, Gérard Genette, Wolfgang Welsch, Nicolas Bourriaud, Boris Groys, and Wang Jianjiang. Along with his activities as a theorist, author, and editor, Erjavec has also made a significant mark on his contemporaries—and not only in Slovenia— through his organizational work in connection with the Slovenian Society for Aesthetics and the International Society for Aesthetics, originally founded in 1913 and formally reestablished in 1984. Erjavec was one of the founders of the Slovenian Society for Aesthetics and its first president, serving from 1983–1999 and again from 2005–2011. Erjavec served as president of the reestablished International Association for Aesthetics from 1998–2001, helping to open aesthetics to a broader international dialogue with new tendencies in art, with the theoretical frameworks of Frankfurt School critical theory and of poststructuralism, and with previously unaddressed or marginal questions such as the aesthetics of avantgardes, politicized art, postmodernism, contemporary art, and new media. We can see some reflection of and reflection on this organization 7 Aleš Erjavec, “Introduction” to Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements, 3.

Introduction

5

work, for instance, in Chapter 21 of this volume, his 2002 “Global Aesthetics and the IAA/AIE,” which offers an assessment following twenty years of activity in the IAA, which we now read from the perspective of a further (more than) two decades of the IAA’s evolution. Between 1978 and his retirement in 2017, Erjavec was a research professor in the Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, publishing several books in Slovenian including: O estetiki, umetnosti in ideologiji (On Aesthetics, Art and Ideology), 1983; Estetika in epistemologija (Aesthetics and Epistemology), 1984; Kultura kot alibi (Culture as Alibi) with co-authors Lev Kreft and Heinz Paetzold, 1988; Estetika in kritična teorija (Aesthetics and Critical Theory), 1995; K podobi (Towards the Image), 1996; Ljubezen na zadnji pogled. Avantgarda, estetika in konec umetnosti (Love at Last Sight. Avantgarde, Aesthetics and the End of Art), 2004; Estetika in politika modernizma (Aesthetics and Politics of Modernism), 2009; and Heteronomija umetnosti in avantgard (Artistic Heteronomy and the Avantgarde), 2017. He also published a previous collection of his own essays in English in 2008, entitled Postmodernism, Postsocialism and Beyond, as well as two volumes in Chinese. Erjavec has been a visiting professor in nine countries and taught on a regular basis in Ljubljana and Maribor in Slovenia and at the Shanghai Normal University in China. Moreover, he was instrumental in establishing the program in Philosophy and Theory of Visual Culture at the University of Primorska in Koper, Slovenia, a novel post-graduate interdisciplinary degree program that provided students from many different academic branches and professional areas the opportunity to study visual art, media, and popular culture using high-powered means derived from contemporary philosophy, art and media theory. Founded in 2003, it was eventually shuttered by the university in the mid-2010s. Along with its innovative curriculum and diverse student body, the postgraduate program in Philosophy and Theory of Visual Culture was also a venue to engage with international visitors from Erjavec’s wide intellectual orbit, including guest seminar-leaders and lecturers from other parts of the ex-Yugoslavia and from Europe, but also from such far-flung places as China, Russia, and the United States. I myself had the pleasure over five years to offer multiple masters’ seminars in art and critical theory to students ranging from philosophy majors wishing to pursue doctorates in philosophy to dancers, photographers, professional journalists, graphic designers, and other creative workers. The program bore clear signs of Erjavec’s influence in its intellectual breadth, its international character, its interdisciplinarity, its theoretical intensity, and its engagement of both academics and creative artists. For a too-brief period of time, Koper—the

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Slovenian successor to the Venetian seaside city of “Capodistria”—became a lively center of discussion and debate in visual critical theory and its applications to and within the arts. The present volume highlights a facet of Erjavec’s intellectual activity that took place in parallel and in close dialogue with his other authorial, editorial, organizational, and pedagogical activities: his extensive publications as an essayist, in turn reflecting and deriving from his tireless international work as an invited speaker and lecturer. Some of the essays in this volume bear the manifest mark of their occasion—such as the aforementioned essay on the refounded IAA or his response to Wang Jianjiang on the question of zhuyi (the “isms”). Yet as a witness to the originally orally delivered version of several of the essays published here, I would underscore that each of them has an at least partially “occasional” character, as an intervention in a present context of philosophical disputation. To be sure, I do not at all mean “occasional” as indicating any lack of seriousness or depth, but rather with this term I indicate the essays’ responsiveness to current and emerging issues and the dialogue of Erjavec’s thought with interlocutors in both the philosophical and art communities. Just as his subsequent theoretical work had responded profoundly to the events of the Slovenian artistic and intellectual revolution of the 1980s, so too he manifested marked philosophical sensitivity—above all in his talks and essays—to the seismic shifts and emergent tendencies of the 1990s, in which “postmodernism” was at its acme, and the further changes in the first two decades of 2000s, when postmodernism in the arts was on the wane and various manifestations of global contemporary art had broken through to new prominence. Reading these essays as responses to an evolving context—which I have facilitated by ordering them, within their thematic groups, chronologically—helps us also to see the consistency among them, even as we track ­Erjavec’s shifts in emphasis and his engagement with new theoretical and artistic sources. Following this introduction, Erjavec’s selected essays have been arranged in three thematic groups (though clearly some essays in one group also address themes from another group as well). As noted, within the thematic groups I have ordered the essays chronologically, to support the readers’ ability to trace the development certain argumentative threads, such as the shift from postmodernism to contemporary art theory, across the group. The first thematic section, entitled Visual Aesthetics in Postsocialism, Postmodernism, and Contemporary Art, presents Erjavec’s major theoretical concerns with the unstable category of art, its historical shifts as it evolves from traditional art through modernist and postmodernist art to contemporary art (or even contemporary “post-art” visual culture), and the evolving role of

Introduction

7

aesthetics as a philosophical discourse of art. The section’s twelve chapters register and reflect upon the growing crisis of aesthetics, which has seen its status thrown into question by the increasing uncertainty of art itself since the 1990s. Through careful critical discussion of various aesthetic and critical theories, Erjavec articulates a more precise, globally informed diagnosis of the changing status of recent art. He also identifies, contrary to pluralist, postmodern or contemporary “anything-goes” aesthetic theories, and contrary to, as well, the jettisoning of aesthetics altogether in favor of a relativist theory of culture, a renewed function for normative theory and criticism in the wake of postmodernism. This renewal includes, in his view, making explicit the diagnostic and prognostic roles for art with respect to latent social tendencies in the present; deepening our awareness of art’s ability to highlight cross-­culturally valid, “anthropological” needs and desires; and evaluating art’s weak but important “utopian” function as a space of imaginative difference from the empirically given world. The second thematic section, entitled Aesthetic Revolution and Avantgardes in East, Central and Western Europe, explores the specific manifestation of early 20th-century art that radicalized the practice of art, often in conjunction with an (at least imaginative) attempt to associate with revolutionary currents in the politics of the period: the avantgarde. The author also considers the phenomenon—of particular importance in Central and Eastern Europe under socialism—of neo-avantgardes, which evolved forms of implicitly “politicized” expression, paradoxically by withdrawing art from the ideologically saturated spaces of official sanctioned culture. This section takes up a number of examples and movements to illuminate aspects of the avantgarde’s classic period and its persistence through revival and reappropriation. Key topics include political avantgarde theater and its contradictions, the iconography of constructivism, avantgarde and revolution, avantgarde and clothes, and the relation between radical art and Marxism. The third thematic section, entitled Spatial Turns: Central/East European Aesthetics in National, International, and Global Contexts, offers complementary perspectives to the temporal, periodizing notions explored earlier in the book (i.e. modern, avantgarde, neo-avantgarde, postmodern, contemporary). Erjavec’s attention to the differences within and between national (e.g. “­Slovenian”), regional and transnational (“Central and Eastern Europe”), and global frameworks reveal the non-homogeneous nature of art-historical “periods” and the ways in which transmission/translation of art across geographical space may also inflect the artistic “events” that disrupt linear evolution, revive forgotten or latent tendencies, and encourage new creative impulses. Erjavec argues for a nuanced mediation of national and international perspectives in

8

Chapter 1

both art and philosophy. Key topics he takes up include the articulation of new national philosophical orientations in Slovenia and in China, the increasing integration of the former Eastern Europe into a more homogeneous global ­artworld, and the creative element of geo-cultural displacements and even “misinterpretations” of ideas and practices from elsewhere. Erjavec’s vigorous engagement with contemporary aesthetics through his publication, talks, and organizational efforts has been a constant inspiration for his colleagues and contemporaries. He has, through his own work, transformed our understanding of radical artistic politics, both postsocialist and avantgarde, and opened up a wider space within aesthetics for a more international, interdisciplinary, and artistically informed approach to aesthetics. Through his activities as an editor and institution-builder, he has elicited new thought and writing from many other scholars who have had the honor to find themselves in his intellectual orbit. I can only hope by making an extensive selection of his essays readily available—including some difficult to access pieces—this volume will extend his inspiration, so evident to his contemporaries, to future readers as well.

Section 1 Visual Aesthetics in Postsocialism, Postmodernism, and Contemporary Art

∵

Chapter 2

Why Architecture in Post-Modern Times? (1989) 1

Aesthetic Relativization

In many respects romanticism can serve as the beginning of what we call modern art and literature today. “Romanticism implies a conversion of culture, whose center of gravity is displaced from exterior towards interior.”1 This interiorization is simultaneously a historical fact and a psychological phenomenon and finds its many foundations in ideas preceding the French revolution and stemming from it throughout romanticism. The Revolution itself is important also because “writers and artists discovered … the feasibility … of altering political action by the action of art”2—a fact of utmost importance for romanticism and modernism. This goes hand in hand with another essential change: The literate of previous periods, whatever their country of origin, met on a neutral terrain. In the Middle Ages … there was circulation of ideas and people, of teachers and pupils without these being necessitated to leave the Latin lands. The renaissance discredited the vulgar medieval Latin and substituted it with the unitary language of the humanists … Romanticism breaks this cohesion … The path of unity passes … by the way of diversity, which, far from constituting a regrettable deficiency, must be considered as a richness. Each national culture finds itself in a state of interdependence with all the others, with which it is tied in the past and in the present. The romanticist mutation implies a relativization of aesthetic values, a self-denial of aesthetics of the universal and of the absolute.”3 It we jump a hundred years ahead, we come to the age of the avantgardes as the extreme case of modernism. At the same time another sort of art exists: the literature of Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke, of Virginia Woolf and many others. A similar relativization as in romanticism is going on, only this time it is often linked explicitly to the “truth.” If the truth of romanticism was mostly 1 Georges Gusdorf, Fondements du savoir romantique (Paris, Payot, 1982), 65. 2 Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1983), 3. 3 Gusdorf, 305–306. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_003

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the truth of man’s interior, based on a sort of Kantian transcendental idealism, it was a truth of his uniqueness, the result of his individualization. Then perhaps, it could be said that the avantgardes were obsessed with expressing the truth of “reality” itself as it could be shown now in a new and stimulating way on the basis of scientific discoveries and similar marvels from the turn of the century. This can be said of futurism, of constructivism, of Kandinsky and even of surrealism with its links to psychoanalysis. A similar striving to reach the “truth” and thus also “reality” has also, of course, been present before: in impressionism, in cubism’s search for pure forms, in the attempts of artists to attain truth—that which cannot be discerned from the academic art of the age, for this, in their opinion, presents the “untruth.” Scientific discoveries fascinate artists as well as technological developments and inventions. They offer on one hand a new way to “reality” or “truth” and they offer a new subject, a new theme to the artists. They also offer a new means that thus far have not been at art’s disposal and many of which represent revolutionary breakthroughs, ranging from early abstractions in painting to earlier technological advancements in architecture: Gustave Eiffel’s tower for the Paris exhibition of 1889 meant the conquest of such new materials, and was thus not only a triumph for the architect but also for the engineer. Different although in certain respects similar words could be said of Hector Guimard’s entrances of the Paris Métro, which are one of the best examples of the new role of iron in art nouveau. But the same engineering has another side. When Peter Behrens built the AEG turbine factory in Berlin in 1909 he wanted to build the building in such a way that it would have the appearance of a classical edifice, for he was a proponent of new classicism. He thus built the interior support with steel, while the exterior is really just a ‘front’ serving not constructional but “aesthetic” purposes only. An opposite case is the case of a building by the Slovene architect Joże Plečnik, who worked in Vienna, Prague and Ljubljana and began as a student of Otto Wagner. In the proletarian surroundings of Ottakring in Vienna he built the Church of the Holy Spirit from 1910 to 1912, which in accordance with its modest environment as well as a conscious attempt to use new materials, was built from reinforced concrete, preserving a neoclassical monumental exterior appearance, but had also an unsupported “floating” interior contrary to the then accepted logic of architecture, especially sacral. The building provoked such a protest that the archduke Ferdinand, the protector of the Royal Central Commission for Protection of Monuments had the works stopped. Behrens is considered to be one of the precursors of modernism in architecture, while Plečnik is more tied to symbolist and even art nouveau style in his

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early works and to a sort of classicist or neoclassicist style later on, the latter of which never took hold in modernist architecture of our century, although it retains the symbolist elements (especially those with sacral connotations). The main difference between the two is that the first aimed at making a factory seem something different from what it was at first sight and that the appearance was more important than the means of attaining it, while the second wanted to symbolize the sacral ambiance in the interior of the Vienna church and at the same time leave an ordinary and unpresumptuous exterior, thus stressing the spiritual difference between the two. It is common in philosophy and also in aesthetics to identify romanticism with revolutionary and leftist ideas and classicism with conservative ones. This distinction appears to be confirmed by developments in art and especially architecture in the 20th century, for did not the official architects of national socialism and Italian fascism, and also of Stalinism—let us just bring into mind the many buildings of this sort throughout the Soviet Union and certain other socialist countries—use some sort of “neoclassicism” to practically and symbolically present and materialize their political ideas and their historical basis? This distinction that appears in the writings ranging from Franz Mehring’s to those of the leftist authors (mostly of Marxist orientation) of the sixties and the seventies is starting to seem somehow outdated and—why not say it—unfashionable. As all other artifacts ideas, too, can become “automatized” as Victor Shklovsky pointed out in 1914, and certainly the distinction between classicism and romanticism in art may turn out today to be thus automatized and uncritically accepted. That which has previously been acceptable inside a certain historically determined “grand narrative” may be losing ground nowadays. It may tum out that it has prevented us to see that the classicism is really the style in architecture which forms the most substantial building tradition in Western history. Also, we should be aware of the fact that here we may be dealing with another function of architecture, ie. the representative function, for these “classicist” or neoclassicist buildings were public buildings. They were not made for private investors, but for the state and were materialized symbols of political institutions. In this respect, there is not a very great difference between certain buildings ranging from ancient Greece through monuments in Washington D.C. or in imperial Rome to planned and partially built edifices in Berlin before the second World War. The main difference which probably came into being with romanticism was already discerned by Hegel in his Aesthetics. When he speaks about architecture of romanticism he writes that the basic form here is an absolutely isolated house, and if buildings of the classical architecture extend in width, the romanticist character of Christian churches makes them grow from the earth and reach upwards. What man needs here

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cannot be given to him by the outside nature, but can be found only in a world which he created by himself and only for himself.4 With this in mind we return to our introductory remarks about modern art and its origins in romanticism. What romanticism brought with it was individualization, the interiorization of human subjectivity, the Kantian Copernican revolution. It is not a coincidence that with the decline of the “grand narratives” Kant is getting to be much more interesting than Hegel.5 2

Postmodernism and Deconstruction

It is often said of postmodernism that it has rejected the avantgardist or at least the modernist legacy (which in many respects was romanticist, meaning also revolutionary, connected to different revolutionary ideas of our century) and pushed to the forefront the academic art of the 19th century, the classicist and the neoclassicist art and architecture. In this respect this did not differ much from the precepts of the avantgardists at the beginning of our century,6 who also rejected the preceding art, in certain cases just that art being brought back today by postmodernism and defended by it. To a large extent this was also the manner of modernism in general, ie. it used certain old forms, especially in architecture, in new revolutionary ways. Nevertheless, postmodernism discarded the basic terminology of modernism: it did not want to be “revolutionary,” “avantgardist,” provocative, intellectual etc., but usually had more modest aims. It was sometimes considered kitschy and not serious enough, also because it did not try to express fundamental truths. It was not tied, as was the practice in the first half of the century, 4 See G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II (Werke 14) (Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 1970), 332. 5 It would bring us too far to enter into the question why with the renaissance of Kant, the concept of the ‘sublime’ was reintegrated into discussions about artworks. We may only suggest that, due to the identification occuring already in Schelling, Hölderlin (whom we paraphrased in the title of this article) and Hegel between the beautiful and the sublime this term was driven from aesthetics discussions until its reactualization in the past years. It should also be mentioned that although it is today usually traced only to Kant or it is considered in the context of discussions on him, the treatise on the sublime by Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1757) is more relevant than Kant’s, who in his Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, is not very consistent. But then this might also be the reason why his observations on the sublime offer a more stimulative basis for today’s discussions. 6 The literary aspect of such processes was analyzed in the many works of Russian formalists.

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to the great philosophies, the “grand narratives,” including the great social philosophies and ideologies. What this meant in modernism concretely may well be discerned from Nikolaus Pevsner’s statement in his Sources of Modern Architecture and Design: The twentieth century is the century of the masses: mass education, mass entertainment, mass transport, universities with twenty thousand students, comprehensive schools for two thousand children, hospitals with two thousand beds, stadia with a hundred thousand seats. That is one aspect: the other is the speed of locomotion, every citizen being an express-train driver on his own, and some pilots travelling faster than sound. Both are only expressions of the technological fanaticism of the age, and technology is only an application of science.7 And Pevsner continues: ‘’Architecture and design for the masses must be functional, in the sense that they must be acceptable to all and that their well-­ functioning is the primary necessity.”8 Just by reading this not-so-very old text we are shown the apparent discontinuity between modernism and postmodernism. The “mass” approach is gone, although paradoxically the population has become much larger than it was when these words were written, to say nothing of previous periods, when they perhaps rang true even more so than 20 years ago. Obviously, the structure of the population has changed. This fact—and not its number—has greatly influenced our approach and stance towards the arts, applied or other. The basic modernist approach towards art was defined by the author. The author or the creator of a work of art was the person who basically determined the meaning of the artwork. Perhaps architecture is the best example for this: the architect was the person who “knew” what the needs of the occupants and inhabitants were supposed to be and his aim—as in many other aspects of the social life—was to bring together large segments of the population (“the masses”) and often to form the utopias on a smaller or a larger scale, ranging from apartment houses to whole communities and even cities. The first among such projects was Tony Garnier’s plan for the Cité lndustrielle (1899–1904). As an antipode of such projects we may take Bernard

7 Nikolaus Pevsner, Sources of Modern Architecture, 2nd ed. (London, Thames and Hudson, 1986), 7. 8 Pevsner, 9.

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Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette in Paris. Tschumi himself explains his intentions in the following way: The La Villette project … attempts to dislocate and de-regulate meaning, rejecting the “symbolic” repertory of architecture as a refuge of humanist thought. For today the term “park” (like “architecture,” “science,” or “literature”) has lost its universal meaning: it no longer refers to a fixed absolute, nor to an ideal. Not the hortus conclusus and the replica of Nature, La Villette is a term in constant production, in continuous change; its meaning is never fixed but is always deferred, differed, rendered irresolute by the multiplicity of meanings it inscribes … The Parc’s architecture refuses to operate as the expression of a pre-existing content, whether subjective, formal or functional … The endless combinatory possibilities of (Parc’s architecture) gives way to a multiplicity of impressions. Each observer will project his own interpretation, resulting in an account that will again be interpreted (according to psychoanalytic, sociological or other methodologies) and so on. In consequence, there is no absolute “truth” to the architectural project, for whatever “meaning” it may have is a function of interpretation: it is not resident in the object, or in the object’s materials … La Villette looks out on new social and historical circumstances: a dispersed and differentiated reality that marks an end to the utopia of unity.9 As Tschumi himself stresses, his project is only one of the possible projects of postmodernism in architecture and pronounces that “it can be allied to a specific vision of Post-Modernity,”10 which is deconstruction; and as we know, Jacques Derrida aided him in making the Pare de la Villette. Although, as Tschumi says, deconstruction is just one of the “specific visions” of postmodernity, it should be pointed out that it is at the same time a “privileged,” we might also say “typical” or even “essential” vision or facet of postmodernity and postmodernism—in architecture and elsewhere. Before we explain ourselves, it might be useful to at least passingly, define deconstruction. Charles Jencks defining deconstruction, writes: If there is a “Neo­Modern” architecture, as many architects and critics have been quick to claim, then it must rest on a new theory and ­practice 9 10

Bernard Tschumi, “Pare de la Villette, Paris,” in Architectural Design (Deconstruction in Architecture, Profile 72) (London, Academy Editions, 1988), 39. Tschumi, 38.

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of Modernism. The only such development to have emerged in the last 20 years—known as Deconstruction or Post-Structuralism—takes Modernist elitism and abstraction to an extreme and exaggerates already known motifs, which is why I would continue to call it “Late.” But it also contains enough new aspects which revalue the suppositions of cultural Modernism to warrant the prefix “Neo,” “New” or “Late”—it is a matter of debate, and of whether the emphasis is on continuity or change: but the fact of a Deconstructionist movement in architecture has to be accepted. Reflecting changes in the literature of the 60s (Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” and, later, “pleasures of the text”) and changes in philosophy (Jacques Derrida’s notion of critical “deconstruction” and “différance”), the movement has been most comprehensively developed by Peter Eisenman as a theory and practice of negativity (“not-classical,” “de-­composition,” “de-centring,” “dis-continuity”).11 The same theme is approached by Hal Foster: Now, postmodernist art is often termed “deconstructive,” which is to say that it enfolds a contradiction: it must use, as methodological tools at least, the very concepts that it calls into question. It may be too much to assert that such complicity is a conspiracy, but a convention, form, tradition, etc. is only deconstructed from within. Deconstruction thus becomes re­inscription, for there is no “outside” (except in positivist sense of “outside the mediums”—a transgression that reasserts the limit). That is, there is no way not to be in a field of cultural terms, for these terms inform us presumptively.12 The difference between Pevsner’s position or Garnier’s project (and many similar projects, based on socialist ideas of different sorts may be found in the next twenty years) and Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette as one example of postmodernist architecture and architectural project marks the difference between modernism and postmodernism. If the former was “for the masses,” whose needs the architect presupposed, “function” being the main password, then, with late modernism, the modernist phrase “less is more” began changing into “less is 11 12

Charles Jencks, “Deconstruction: The Pleasures of Absence,” Architectural Design (­Deconstruction in Architecture), 17. Hal Foster, “Re: Post,” in Art After Modernism (Rethinking Representation), ed. Brian Wallis (New York and Boston, The New Museum of Contemporary Art and David R. Godine, 1986), 197.

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a bore.” What happened with postmodernism is best illustrated with deconstruction: as Tschumi says, meaning is a function of interpretation, which means that the· meaning of architecture is not fixed. Thus architectural space may have different functions, it allows the user to create functions, to invent them and does not predetermine the use more than necessary. Postmodernism “reinvented” architectural approach based on “practical” values, the foremost among them being to take into consideration the indeterminate needs of the occupants. The aesthetic is not equated with the functional, as at the time of the International Style, and “pure’”forms which were supposed to be functional and aesthetic at the time, originating in the ideas of buildings for the masses, turned out to be impractical. Modernist architecture, and especially the one stemming from the Bauhaus tradition, was an architecture tied to the modernist project in the extreme: the ideological, political and philosophical. As Tom Wolfe humorously showed, in buildings originally meant to be built for the workers were hardly ever lived in by them, for they could not afford them.13 The bourgeoisie could finance them, live in them and bring fame to their architects. In this respect the postmodernist discovery is a sobering one. To quote Charles Jencks, the great strength of the Post-Avantgarde is to recognise what its predecessors couldn’t admit to themselves; that it is a small part of the powerful middle class which is indefatigably transforming the world in ways that are simultaneously destructive and constructive … All the avantgardes of the past believed that humanity was going somewhere, and it was their joy and duty to discover the new land and see that people arrived there on time; the Post-Avantgarde believes that humanity is going in several different directions at once, some of them more valid than others, and it is their duty to be guides and critics.14 Before we continue it might be useful to clarify a point which might turn out to be problematic. When we discuss postmodernism we have two options: either we situate it inside modernism, like Jürgen Habermas did, or we consider it as a separate and qualitatively different period defined precisely by its break with modernism in the manner of Jean-François Lyotard. This dilemma is far from being resolved, and as we sometimes see, the term is used very imprecisely and arbitrarily, mainly as a synonym for contemporary “neoclassicist” or figurative 13 14

Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to our House (New York, Pocket Books, 1982). Charles Jencks, “The Post-Avantgarde,” Art and Design (The Post-Avantgarde) (Profile 4) (London, Academy Editions, 1987), 20.

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orientations in art and literature. It has gained wider popularity through literature, the visual arts and especially architecture, the latter being in the forefront also due to Jencks’ writings. For him postmodernist movements “are, at once, a continuation of Modernism and its transcendence.”15 But postmodernism, at least in architecture, although we could claim similar properties also for other arts as well, is distinguished from modernism, among other things, in one previously mentioned feature: “Art, ornament and symbolism have been essential to architecture because they heighten its meaning, make it clearer, and give it greater resonance. All cultures, except the Modern one, have valued these essential truths and have taken them for granted.”16 3

Postmodernism and the Turn to Visuality

We see that postmodernism is here defined as a sort of paradox: it is at the same time a part of modernism and something else; it is a period of transition into something as yet unknown, which may turn out to be, and this is a realistic possibility, much less important or singular as it was expected and thought of only a decade or two ago, when the ideas of postmodernism sprung up. Nevertheless, it seems to us that postmodernism is a distinctive period and style and that, in architecture, there is an essential difference between “late modernism” and “postmodernism,” the latter englobing features typical also for other arts ranging from the visual to literature. Furthermore, the visual arts, ranging from painting and design to architecture, form the core of postmodernism, while literature served as a paradigm of modernism of the twentieth century. We would not like to press this thesis too far and would not want to claim that literature or verbal expression always formed the central part of modernist art. But it seems that if we take into consideration modernism as situated inside modernity, it was the context of the “grand narratives” which defined the spiritual and epistemic space of modernism. This assertion may seem a dubious one, for is not, in the whole modern era, vision the master sense?17 Vision here plays an essential role, for it is also one of the ways in which the subject is formed.

15

Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 5th ed. (London, Academy Editions, 1987), 5. 16 Ibid., 7. 17 See for example Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, Bay Press, 1988), especially Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 3–23.

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Interpretations of the role of vision, in this respect, range from Condillac who ties the role of vision to that of the sense of touch, up to the so-called “mirror stage” in psychoanalytic theory. On the contrary, we speak here not of vision, but of visuality, which plays a central role in post­modernist art and culture. There are a few reasons for this development. The essential reason may be the development and re-evaluation of mass culture from the sixties on, which was certainly based on visual arts and visuality, ranging from pop art to musical performances and their visual effects. Another reason was the development of technical means. If at the beginning of our century people were fascinated with the current scientific discoveries, then video, the computer and communication technology, and their accessability constitute an important step towards the contemporary art and culture. Thirdly, and philosophically most important, the above-mentioned end of “grand narratives,” including great social philosophies, philosophies of history and most political ideologies of the modernist era (with perhaps the exception of liberalism) due to their practical social failure had an enormous impact upon art. What this process meant in architecture is well described by Andreas Huyssen: The modernist utopia embodied in the building programs of the Bauhaus, of Mies, Gropius, and Le Corbusier, was part of a heroic attempt after the Great War and the Russian Revolution to rebuild a war-ravaged Europe in the image of the new, and to make building a vital part of the envisioned renewal of society. A new Enlightenment demanded rational design for a rational society, but the new rationality was overlaid with a utopian fervor which ultimately made it veer back into myth—the myth of modernization. Ruthless denial of the past was as much an essential component of the modern movement as its call for modernization through standardization and rationalization. It is well-known how the modernist utopia shipwrecked on its own internal contradictions and, more importantly, on politics and history. Gropius, Mies and others were forced into exile, Albert Speer took their place in Germany. After 1945, modernist architecture was largely deprived of its social vision and became increasingly an architecture of power and representation. Rather than standing as harbingers and promises of the new life, modernist housing projects became symbols of alienation and dehumanization, a fate they shared with the assembly line, that other agent of the new which had been greeted with exuberant enthusiasm in the 1920 by Leninists and Fordists alike.18 18

Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1980), 186.

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But why should the end of “grand narratives” and the failure of the modernist projects have as their consequence a change to visuality and the visual arts? We would argue that all these processes happened simultaneously, as a part of a global transformation and what they had in common, among other things, was their consciousness that they should have a strong communication with the public. In contrast to the avantgardes, which often despised the public, or to the modernist stance where only the author’s expression was important— the public having to “adapt” to it—postmodernism took into consideration the user. It is not a coincidence that Robert Venturi discovered in the commercial architecture of Las Vegas cultural values which led to the postmodernist architectural dictum that it must keep a continuous dialogue with its users. Postmodernist architecture stresses the user’s values, as well as various sorts of architectural expression. It takes into account the urban context and regional specifics, all which do not have to be subordinated exclusively to criteria of efficiency, functionalism and expression of technological achievements. In addition, we should make certain distinctions inside modernism itself in its relationship towards postmodernism. As previously mentioned, Peter ­Behrens is one of the precursors of modernism in architecture, although probably not of that architecture we consider “modernist” as opposed to postmodernist. His work, as well as that of Plečnik and many others, did lead to certain projects identified with modernism. But modernism in architecture as we understand it today, especially as opposed to postmodernism, is really the modernist tradition stemming from Le Corbusier and particularly Bauhaus. Thus, it turns out that postmodernist criticism of modernism is actually oriented only towards its extreme form, personified mainly by the International Style, while other orientations, especially those of early 20th century modernism, are sometimes even integrated into postmodernist architecture. We witness a similar phenomenon in painting, where the avantgarde art of the twenties is “re-made,” but re-made not as an art object but as an “art context”: avantgarde works are put in a different setting, are “copied” and thus lose their former meaning, gaining a new one in which their aesthetic function, not their provocative and artistically or socially revolutionary value and novelty, plays the central role. In this sense, they retain only one of their functions, which enlarges itself and pushes away most of the others. This aestheticized element is the second important element in postmodernism, hence the details, the ornaments, the renewed interest in symbolic elements in art and architecture and the integration of art nouveau into postmodernism. A similar case is the relationship of postmodernist art and nature: if modernism behaved as if nature did not exist, with postmodernism and postmodernity, consciousness of the necessary coexistence with nature returns.

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Revising Modernism

“Modernism has lost any claim it may once have possessed to modernity. It finds itself in the position of an ageing dictator whose power, influence and. credibility have already failed, and from whom international support has fallen away. Modernism resembles a teetering oligarch in another way, too. It has always tended to re­interpret the past from its own perspective, even when that has necessitated the most willful of misrepresentations.”19 It is obvious that defending the project of modernism today is a task that would fall under the above-cited description of modernism. Nevertheless, as it has been said, this holds true only for a part of the modernist project in art and especially in architecture and the arts connected to it. Because in architecture modernism is equated mainly with the period from the thirties on, i.e. with the International Style, quite a lot of developments happening at the turn of the century and later on of more classicist orientation are not taken into consideration. If they were, then perhaps the picture and criticism of modernism would not have such strong points as it seems to have at the present moment.20 Romanticism had, on the one hand, established the interiorization (after which the author could take himself as the basic point of reference and judge the external reality only insofar as it was a simulacrum of himself), and, on the other hand, established the right (and sometimes the curse) of the author to “change the world,” i.e. to be politically or ideologically active through art. Romanticism is important in literature and music, less in painting and even less in architecture. In developed modernism, the discursive or theoretical foundation of art is of utmost importance. In short, we witness the reign of an idea. With postmodernism, the idea (“the grand narrative”) disappears and the visual arts gain the upper hand. In this respect—taking into account design, various visual communications as well as painting and installations—­ architecture, in the sense of our “living space” and our environment (for we are increasingly urban creatures) gains in importance. We would, therefore, dare to put forth the thesis that, in postmodern times, architecture in its different forms shall become the most universal if not the major art. It shall be an everyday art, an art to be lived in, to be lived on, under and amongst. In this respect, architecture is becoming the foremost public art. 19 20

Peter Fuller, “The Search for a Postmodern Aesthetic,” in Design After Modernism, ed. John Thackara (London, Thames and Hudson, 1988), 117. It is typical for this situation that a few sketches by Antonio Sant’Elia (who in real life built only a few tombs and cemeteries) are taken as one of the starting-points of the modernist architecture.

Chapter 3

Art, Cognition, Knowledge, and Diagnostics (1993) 1

Art as a Form of Cognition and Knowledge

It is an obvious truth that art has a cognitive value, whether it appears in the form of the cognitive function or as a form of truth. Truth is one of the key concepts of modern and modernist art. In modernist art it doesn’t refer to what we see in its immediacy but to what exists behind the representation—a hidden or implied reality, which points back at some truth of the outer or phenomenal world. To explain this question of truth and reality, one would have to go back to Hegel and his Phenomenology of Spirit which, not surprisingly, was not only one of the main philosophical products of romanticism but also one of the sources of the Frankfurt School and many of those who defended twentieth-century avantgarde art such as Ernst Bloch. Let us consider the view that between art with a small and with a capital “A,” and between art and culture, there is dimension of fluctuation. Works, trends, styles, and genres are transformed and drift in and out of the contemporary meaning of the common denominator “art.” Despite this, however, art has some claim to an essential function and role in human existence and is not just an object of sales and of ideological manipulations. It is one of the main means for attaining that distance towards oneself or towards a real or mental object, which at the same time, engenders consciousness of the existence of the designated object and of the distance itself, all this happening especially in matters of an existential nature. Given these points, can we then claim that this paramount function involves the attainment or presentation of truth— pertaining to human being or that of society or, indeed, both? If we define art as an artifact or activity that provides a specific existential experience, this necessarily concerns some sort of “truth.” It can be in the shape of “authenticity,” “immediacy,” or the beautiful with its links to the good and the true, or it can be, for example, an Althusserian “aesthetic effect” which “makes ideology visible” in spite of being a form of ideology itself. In short, in aesthetics and areas related to theory and philosophy of art, truth of a certain kind plays almost always a central role. This truth can be of different kinds. The way in which I would apply the term would be to describe the “truth” offered by art through artistic experience as a form of “recognition” that can apply to material and spiritual as well as to figurative and abstract works. As such it depends upon the experience of this “recognition.” A criterion for © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_004

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determining whether this recognition is warranted or not is the broader context of the artwork and our own perceptiveness and insight. This applies to works of “Art.” Works of “art” do not fit this description and, rather, declare an “objecthood.” They do not posess the distance created between, let us say, a certain material or object which was designated as an artwork and our consciousness of its unique existence (as occasioned by the work being placed in a specific context). The establishment of such a mode of “objecthood” might be seen as a certain truth of this very material or object. I would, however, strongly disagree with such as view, for when speaking of truth, we apply the term to a relation. The tradition of the Frankfurt School (which in many places is still the dominant tradition) views avantgarde art as the basic instance of expressing truth. In this respect its view is just the contrary of, say, Georg Lukács: The modern literary school of the imperialist era, from naturalism to surrealism,which have followed each other in such swift successions, all have one feature in common. They all take reality exactly as it manifests itself to the writer and the characters he creates. The form of this immediate manifestation changes as society changes. These changes, moreover, are both subjective and objective, depending on modifications in the reality of capitalism and also on the ways in which class struggle and changes in class structure produce different reflections on the surface of that reality. It is these changes above all that bring about the swift succession of literary schools together with the embittered internecine quarrels that flare up between them. But both emotionally and intellectually they all remain frozen in their own immediacy; they fail to pierce the surface to discover the underlying essence, i.e. the real factors that related their experience to the hidden social forces that produce them. On the contrary, they all develop their own artistic style—more or less consciously—as a spontaneous expression of their immediate experience.1 In his later comparison of Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, and in the case of his criticisms of expressionism, Lukács sees such “avantgarde” works as prisoners of their own blindness—of an immediacy which prohibits them from seeing below the surface. Thus the very feature which, according to Adorno or Walter Benjamin for example, is the merit of avantgarde art, is in Lukács’s opinion its 1 Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 36–37.

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main drawback. Not to point to the distortion of the depicted social reality but to show it in its immediacy is a failure, not a virtue. Art should tell and present the global social truth according to its means and possibilities, and not be the victim of the distorted class society. This “truth” is something very different from that which the avantgarde artists had in mind. They referred not to the truth of class society (even if they believed in it) but to an idea of artistic truth hidden either within the objective world itself, or in society on its microlevel of individual experience. Ideology and instrumental reason are, looking from a contemporary distance, something far removed from their endeavors. This does not mean, though, that many of them did not have such general aspirations. Indeed, politicized avantgardes like futurism or constructivism were to a large extent built on such desires. Nevertheless, such works usually contain another facet which not only balances the first but, by counterpoising it, attains an aesthetic effect typical for an artwork. The works of Malevich or El Lissitzky are good examples of this artistic device. By ascribing to art—mainly literature in Lukács’s case—the role of a truthteller in society, his whole aesthetic project is here to affirm the social function of art. Art is one of the three spheres which shows the truth of society, with science and philosophy being the other two. The basis for such a view is 19th-century realism: “Realism is … the basis for all Art, and its antithesis is not Idealism, but Falsism. When our painters represent peasants with regular features and irreproachable linen; when their milkmaids have the air of keepsake beauties, whose costume is picturesque, and never old or dirty; when Hodge is made to speak refined sentiments in unexceptionable English, and children utter long speeches of religious and poetic enthusiasm; … an attempt is made to idealize, but the result is simply falsification and bad art … Either give us true peasants, or leave them untouched; either paint no drapery at all, or paint it with the utmost fidelity; either keep your people silent, or make them speak the idiom of their class.”2 The opinion just quoted is somewhat different from the view that Lukács requires of realism, but this is so because the statement above concerns mainly painting and Lukács mainly literature. The partisan credo to present in art “­typical characters in typical situations” does sound vulgar, but in the 19th century, before the appearance of socialist realism, it had no political consequences as it did in the middle of this century. Still, art of the realist kind fulfilled a rather specific social function. When its time had passed and society changed, a lot of that art passed away as well. Or rather, it became a chapter in 2 G. H. Lewes, writing on “Realism in Art” in 1858, quoted in Linda Nochlin, Realism (­Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 35.

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the history of styles and significant forms. The works which retained their artistic value and importance were those which did not simply apply the principles of realism, but at the same time transgressed their depicted immediacy. They thus attained and retained an artistic and not only a documentary relevance. In this sense artistically successful realism was actually just using a different technique to “capture presence.” But can this “presence” be universalized? Or is it true, as Linda Nochlin claims when comparing a painting by Manet and one by Goya that “for the realist, horror—like beauty or reality itself—cannot be universalized: it is bound to a concrete situation at a given moment of time.”3 Now, this may be true as far as depiction of an event is concerned; nevertheless as soon as we try to comprehend the event and identify with it, a certain universalization occurs. Otherwise, the artwork would remain “on the other side,” without any communication or transfer of meaning occurring. Needless to say, much of the discussion about realism in this century has been political. For example, in the sixties Roger Garaudy proposed the thesis of “realism without boundaries,” according to which all contemporary art was realist in some sense.4 Art shows a certain truth by depicting the historical and social world and its events. It is one of many possible truths. In different historical periods it captures the presence of these worlds and also their essence, if the artists see one. It also shows existential truths which involve the aforementioned “recognitions.” Such truths are not experienced on huge canvases showing numbers of people but always individually, even if these individuals are but details of a larger picture. Many attempts to build “frescoes” have perhaps succeeded in presenting a certain “truth” or presentation of the depicted historical events, but all had to rely upon individual characters, destinies, and events to supply “flesh” for the broader “truths” they strived to present. This applies equally to fine arts, literature, or cinema. At the same time, art also shows another truth: its material truth, its nature as an object made from different materials, exhibited, and sold. Also, an artwork shows what Walter Benjamin would call a “trace”: that unique presence of authenticity which could just as well be found in real objects and remnants invested with meaningful potential, but which is much more accessible in certain artworks or just plain works. As Terry Eagleton writes, “When Benjamin looks at a photographic portrait what fascinates him is precisely not the composed aura of stillness and distance in which the subjects bathe, but those stray, tell-tale irreducible symptoms of ‘reality’ that flicker on its edges—symptoms 3 Nochlin, 32. 4 Roger Garaudy, D’un réalisme sans rivages (Paris: Plon, 1963).

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which, in linking the photographer’s present to a putative ‘real’ future for its subjects, constrain us, viewing the photographed past from the future, into constellating our own present time with its.”5 If the orthodox Marxist theory—of Lukács, for example—held that art (and especially literature as the privileged form of art) is a reflection of reality, supposed to capture its typicality, then the emerging theory of the production of knowledge and the critique of meta-narratives from the sixties on diminished the influence of the theory of reflection. This was built on the erroneous epistemological assumption that to art too, a correspondence theory of truth as a kind of reflection applies without any residues. This might work if the Marxist philosophy of history really did amount to a “science” or if a similar rigid framework could be established. This has not been the case, for the very idea of a science of history that could forecast and thus essentially influence the future was based on the mistaken presupposition that something like purely objective historical truths existed and that knowledge of society could function as mathematical or experimental sciences. Thus, paradoxically, those philosophers who stressed the productive and creative nature of the cognitive processes at the same time committed the fallacy of sticking to the opinion that in history too, rules applicable to mathematics could hold true. The important point for the cognitive function of art in this context was that it was viewed only as a cognitive means, as a way of seeing the world, society, and the individual in it. As general rules were searched for, typical characters in typical situations served as the declared ideal. This description applies to orthodox Marxism. Contrarily, the so-called “western Marxism” (and among its representatives, especially the Frankfurt School) stuck to the opinion that only avantgarde art could show the truth of a society ensnared in fascism and later in consumerism. As in the romantic epoch art again played a special role and was deemed to be one of the rare truth-tellers in capitalist society and thence one of the bastions against repression. Now, looking from today’s vantage point, this description applies well to totalitarian societies,6 rather less to authoritarian societies, and even less still to parliamentary democracies. In these, economic wealth and civil liberties cause an aestheticization of everyday life and eliminate the basic conditions for the creativity and existence of avantgarde art as a relevant art form. The dominant trends within the western Marxist tradition were detailed studies of art and culture as vehicles of truth or untruth on the one hand, and 5 Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin (London: Verso, 1981), 33. 6 I have analyzed the way in which culture and art function in a totalitarian society in my Ideologija in umetmost modernizma (Ideology and Art of Modernism) (Ljubljana: Partizanska knjiga, 1988).

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sometimes, especially with the emergent structuralism and the later so-called “critical theory” of the poststructuralist kind, dissolution of literary discourse and artistic creation into other forms of symbolic and discursive production. In this context, artworks retained only a small part of their previous individual and privileged artistic status. It is no coincidence that Marxist analyses that attempted to establish rather direct links between society and artworks functioned best when confronted with mediocre works. (As for example, in the case of Pierre Macherey’s analysis of Jules Verne.7) At best they achieved a sociologistic analysis of art. They told us something about the society in which such works were created but very little about the works themselves. Actually, this is the cognitive aspect or function of consumer culture of which the Frankfurt School wrote: such works tell a lot about their author and public as well as about the society in which they both live but are devoid of the existential features of art. Such works tell us about the society and environment in which they were made (which of course was not their intended function) and actually do function as a product of the culture industry. What changes then, with the advent of postmodernism? Art is often becoming less avantgarde, more figurative, and less isolated from society at large. Why is there a plethora of works being designated as art, while there is nobody claiming a universal artistic value for them? What do these works tell us, if anything? Mostly, they speak about themselves and offer an aesthetic effect which has often more to do with the material that was used for their creation (and which could be called their objecthood) than with existential truths embodied in them. If Kandinsky could claim in 1913 that his aim was carrying over to the public or the viewer his emotion via the picture,8 then with contemporary installations this is hardly the case. We could paraphrase Michel Foucault’s observation that history has “transformed monuments of the past into documents,”9 but today, the situation is often reversed. What appeared to be documents of the artist and his emotions are often transformed into monuments and treated as meaningfully opaque entities. The majority of works proclaimed as art tell us very little, proffer very little knowledge about their creators, the way they see the world, their emotions, feelings or thoughts or those that they create. In front of such works we do not experience that “gaze” which through its very distance offers us identification or empathy. At the most, we find a unique use of materials. We experience an aesthetic feeling or become 7 Pierre Macherey, Pour une production littéraire (Paris: Maspero, 1968). 8 Wassily Kandinsky in Der Sturm, quoted by Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), 171. 9 Michel Foucault, L’archeologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 14.

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aware of their thinghood and its seen presence, i.e. of their separateness from other things and of their individuality, be this material or contextual. In such a situation, it is understandable that institutional or neo-institutional theories abound and that generally, normative aesthetics are absent. Institutional theories attempt to include such works into the accepted notion of the term art, but on the other hand, also try to avoid the normative imperatives of an aesthetics and accept the given (or designated) sense of what art is. For if we want to claim that something is not art we would have to advance strong arguments. Since, however, we can with considerable certainty conclude on the basis of previous experiences that almost anything or even anything at all can be proclaimed as art, the only road open is to find out how such “anythings” can be included in the class of phenomena already accepted as art. This also shows that aesthetics has lost any hold it may have once possessed upon art, artists and the public or upon the artworld or artworlds. In the critical tradition and especially in the tradition of anthropological Marxism of the sixties such a relativistic approach was certainly not envisioned as the consequence of its endeavor to defetishize the institution of art and creativity. However, it was perhaps necessary in so far as the orthodox Marxist tradition is, if anything, rigidly normative. Discarding normative aesthetics and replacing it with a descriptive one, i.e. accepting as art all that was socially accepted as such (on the basis of being designated “art” by some fraction of the art-world) allowed such theories to distinguish themselves from the orthodoxy and also to accept very varied emerging (neo-)avantgarde phenomena. One of the side effects of this situation was that many works became acceptable as artworks on the basis of their non-artistic features. Such works appeared primarily as criticism of a certain reality, and thus, through such a critique, as a certain “truth” of the social reality in question. Only a minority of such works also contained the existential features deemed to be the necessary precondition for a work to be art. On the other hand artworks are turning into pure objects intended only to be aesthetically contemplated, becoming thus equal to objects of nature. The history of the separation of artistic beauty from natural beauty seems to be reversing itself: artworks are more and more becoming like objects seen in nature or, if not that, they contain the same ontic hollowness existing in nature and its creations after the death of God. Natural objects too are only invested with meaning; in them, as such, there is none. What cognitive value do such works have? Presumably none or very little. What knowledge do they offer? Probably none, except about the materials and procedures used for their execution. Can they thus be counted amongst artworks? This depends, of course, upon our criteria.

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Much art offers existential experience. (This may even be described as a typical function of art, although I would disagree with Heidegger that the experience offered by art is not only unique but also practically the only one that enables us to regain our authenticity.) For art to be understood as a form of knowledge we have to accept Gadamer’s view that “knowledge here means recognition.”10 The precondition for art to be a form of knowledge is its status as mimesis. And this is exactly what Gadamer has in mind. For the above statement actually refers to Aristotelian mimesis: “Mimesis is a representation in which we ‘know’ and have in view the essential content of what is represented.”11 Or, if it is not direct mimesis, it should offer us a key for its reading, i.e. for enabling us to treat it as a form of language. In cases of abstract art, as in the case of Kandinsky or Malevich, matters are still relatively simple in so far as, to a certain degree, we are acquainted with the intention of the artists. On the other hand, with late modernist works and especially with postmodernist ones this trait, this contact with the author vanishes or diminishes to such an extent that we cannot speak of shared experience or any form of identification. This is true especially where we are confronted with research in materials that an artist uses for his artifact. (This line of reasoning would perhaps even bring us back to Roland Barthes’s thesis of modernism itself as mainly a mode of research into its own language—a thesis that would cause additional problems for knowledge construed as being the main feature of art.) If we take knowledge to be the essential and necessary feature of what art is, then such works do not fall under the category “art.” They may be aesthetic, but not artistic in the same way as the former, although they were created to serve as artworks. Perhaps then, they are simulacra of artworks. Or perhaps knowledge can be taken as a significant and essential trait only in some forms of art. For we probably do experience works of both a representational nature, and of a non-representational nature (including those that explore the many aspects of objecthood in itself, i.e. installations or compositions playing upon possibilities offered by different materials, shapes, colors, textures and dimensions) in a rather similar way. Thus applying the label “art” to works that do not contain or were probably not invested with a symbolic meaning, we presume that they do include such a meaning, although all that we can be sure of, or perhaps, more concisely, all that we care about, is that they were made by a human hand. Similar shapes in nature often attain a similar spiritual and aesthetic effect. This would mean that only in some art forms and only in certain artworks 10 11

Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: ­ ambridge University Press, 1986), 119. C Gadamer, 119.

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(although they certainly form the majority of existing artworks) knowledge represents an essential feature. For some form of mimesis occurs in them, whether this mimetic element is based on figurative semblance or on a hidden one, based on abstraction. Others have predominantly an aesthetic function and are devoid of an invested symbolic meaning. The fact that a recipient might invest them with such a meaning shows only that art is always a form of exchange—of symbolic exchange, exchange of meaning—between an object (and not necessarily another human being) and a specific person. Can the term knowledge be used for such a form of communication? It can, as long as undistorted communication is not its precondition and as long as knowledge is not understood as discursive knowledge. Knowledge as recognition can even be based on misunderstanding, on misunderstanding the artistic discourse or imagery, but understanding it, nevertheless, in the broader human framework. This applies to relationships between artworks and people and people among themselves, as Jean Baudrillard suggests: The really interesting relations between people don’t occur in the form of communication. Something else happens: a form of challenge, seduction, or play, which brings more intense things into being. By definition, communication simply brings about a relationship between things already in existence; it doesn’t make things appear. And what is more, it tries to establish an equilibrium—the message and all that. Yet it seems to me that there is a more exciting way of making things appear: not exactly communication, but something more of the order of challenge. I’m not sure this would involve an aesthetic of communication strictly speaking.12 If art is not founded on a communication, on an understanding, if there is no necessity for “somebody” to be at the other end of an artwork, can we still claim that we encounter an existential experience when we deal with “Art”? Gadamer can speak of art as knowledge offering a “recognition” because he bases it in mimesis. Suppose we put ourselves in front of a work or an activity which appears in a context on the basis of which we can presume that we are dealing with a work of art. In such a case, it depends upon our response, our experience and insight whether we encounter a form of communication, even if this communication is devoid of that representational content which is typical of mimetic art. When it comes to installations, land art, happenings, etc.— as well as to bottle-racks and bicycle-wheels—it is the context that enables 12

Jean Baudrillard, The Revenge of the Crystal (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 24.

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us to distinguish between, let us say, stone and a sculpture. But this does not suffice. It is not enough to have a context, we must also have the existential experience when confronting a work. We are talking here of gradations and not about absolutes. As I stated before, as long as nature could be invested with a meaning (as was still the case in romanticism) then for that time aesthetic value was shared by nature and art: they were two sides of the same coin. Today we have to know that an object or activity has been invested with a meaning, otherwise we view it as an aesthetic (or unaesthetic) artifact that can function as an artwork but is not subjected to value judgments within the realm of existential experience. Rather it is the focus of such judgments within the realm of materiality and objecthood. If it offers this latter experience it offers at the most an aesthetic experience (as does a sunrise, or a human body, or an object of nature). It does not, however, enable us to make the identification that I consider to be necessary—not for a “real” work of art, for all these artifacts are “real” artworks—but rather for a certain crucial and central type of artwork, the type which brought about other, nowadays probably predominant types of art. It goes without saying that all that has been said is crucially dependent upon historical, social, cultural, and individual values, distinctions, perceptions, and even namings. Still, all these variables do not force us, I think, to accept the relativist nature of the institutional theory. What the institutional theory does is to diminish the role of the existential experience, conflating Art that offers it and art that does not into a non-descript whole. 2

The Diagnostic Value of Art

Today avantgarde art has retained its aesthetic function only and has lost its truth-value. It has emptied itself of the meaning that it contained in the past. Perhaps all this signifies that in highly developed societies art as Art is dead, serving in most cases only the function of an ornament. This applies mainly to its creation; its reception may still be similar to the one it offered before. In those cases that the institutional theory primarily addresses this is probably often the case. Contrarily, in situations where art is bound up with existentially significant situations, it has retained the role of knowledge as recognition. In such situations art can also offer a kind of insight, usually associated with other fields of knowledge. In some cases, indeed, art provides such insights much more efficiently. I am referring to the diagnostic function and value of art. In certain cases art has a distinctive way of forecasting social events. (­Science, especially the so-called “science of history” supposedly served such a role in

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the past.) Lukács’s evaluations of contemporary literature were based on his belief that it is only a question of time before the capitalist world collapses. Thus his normative framework was essentially dependent upon a broader philosophy of history that embodied the Marxist view that history follows a certain progression which, although it is not guaranteed (Rosa Luxemburg used to say that the future will be either communism or barbarism), tends towards the realization of communism. In this sense Marxism is a philosophy of history and essentially tries to determine the necessary steps to achieve a certain aim: the classless society. For this reason the five-year plans were necessary and the whole edifice of planned economy and of strictly organized society as a whole was crucial. It was believed that history finally attained the level of “hard” science and that the future could be, if not forecasted, then certainly influenced in an essential way. The global social plan followed lines sketched in advance and the role of art in this environment was to serve as a vehicle for attaining this aim. Lukács’s own change of views in his later works and his “re-philosophication” could be viewed as a pessimistic acceptance that scientific socialism had failed. We find a similar view amongst other writers in the sixties. At the same time, however, Althusser was still able to speak of history as that continent of science which was rediscovered by Marx and which is, with mathematics and physics, the only real science. Despite such beliefs it turned out that history is unpredictable. Moreover, history as a science was not able to predict the collapse of socialism in Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. But was the situation different in the case of art? What I am now asking, in other words, is not whether art has a cognitive value (a problem which I addressed in the opening part of this essay) but rather, the question of in what way it can provide knowledge about the present—a mode of knowledge distinct from that of more “reliable” scientific sources. 3

Art and the Present

In traditional aesthetics and art or literary criticism the cognitive feature of art was highly valued. The theories of the post-war period brought to the fore the idea of an artwork—or “work”—as an entity in itself, not to be viewed or valued on the basis of its cognitive value but as a “monument.” Also, the general trends in art ran counter to such demands. The new, neo-avantgarde or avantgarde art had to be either discarded and ignored or had to be taken as the basis of value judgements that solely concerned this art itself. Art finally attained a position in which it served not as a vehicle for some extrinsic aim or depicted

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subject-matter, but as a reality per se, worthy of claiming its own existence and identity according to its own standards. If the existential approach claims that art must show some inner (subjective) truth, then the orthodox position—of orthodox Marxism or any other utilitarian and eschatological theory—would claim that art has to show the truth of the outer (objective) reality: the reality of a certain society, environment, or epoch, viewed through different eschatological eyes. The defenders of the early avantgardes (Adorno, Bloch, Benjamin and a host of others after World War II) argued that these avantgarde presented not the immediate truth (as Lukács would claim) but the hidden and essential reality of contemporaneity. Such a tendency, in their eyes, served a special function, for it retained its autonomy and did not succumb to consumerism and the industrial nature of mass culture and the market. Instead, avantgarde artists retained the upright stature of those who, by consciously rejecting market values, with artistic means thereby painted the “truth” of a capitalist society in which opposition had all but disappeared. From this position, morally acceptable and artistically productive (but otherwise fallacious), emerged those artforms which worked on matter not on the basis of providing knowledge of what an existence is, but so as to present the viewer with insight as to what a material or what the material is. Such legitimate endeavors bring together two disparate meanings of art: the first moving from the artist through his work to the audience, and the second offering the audience material that is an aesthetic object or activity in its own right—having almost the same status as natural objects. With the death of God, natural objects have lost their spiritual content. Now we know that they are just objects of the physical, animal or vegetative world. We know that we invest them with meaning and that the only unity among them and us is to belong to the same planet and perhaps to share a similar destiny when it comes to suffering or death. The very use of these terms, we know, already signifies an anthropocentrism. With artworks existing as material objects in which their basic trait is to represent a search in the materials themselves something similar happens. Here too, we view them in their objecthood or thinghood, we become aware of their existence and of the existence of their texture, composition, color, shape and nuances, of their cracks or other individual features. The only features distinguishing them from similar works of nature is the context in which they appear and the fact that they are man-made. In one respect they are similar to art that offers existential experience: they offer the experience of uniqueness, of also “de-automatization” of an ordinary object or activity. These or similar works can also offer an existential experience in a more direct way. Works, for example, by Anish Kapoor are instructive here. By using

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Figure 1 Anish Kapoor, Dismemberment—Site 1, 2009. Author: Andym5855 Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/andym5855/15771133420/. Permission for use by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Generic License

simple materials, with the now common necessary interpretation or self-­ explanation, he attains an artistic as well as an aesthetic effect. But in such cases the expected effect is much more difficult to determine than in the case of figurative and traditional works. Again, the theoretical and explanatory context is the important one that enables us to “read” the work. With certain contemporary societies or their segments (“artworlds” included) becoming more and more stable and unproblematic, art becomes more and more ornamental and unproblematic itself: its existential role has diminished. In such contexts, life itself has become aesthetic. Art correspondingly becomes more of a social reality rather than a symbolic representation, i.e. a fictitious and aesthetic mirage. Life itself, indeed, has become a kind of stale art, aesthetic rather than genuinely artistic. It cannot be genuinely artistic, for this would mean that the existential elements formerly represented and even forced upon us by art had become interiorized; that our life became so much “fuller” and “richer.” This is, in fact, just the opposite of what the Spanish surrealist playwright Fernando Arrabal once said: “Why do I write plays? Because I cannot live them in my own life.” Looking for the diagnostic value in art is strongly linked to past attempts to see in artworks a “mirror” of society. All these objectives can still be valid,

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although today they fall under the research carried out by sociology of art and literature. As mentioned before, there is no doubt that art does have a cognitive function. Artworks tell us about their creators, their public, the art establishment and the society or environment in which they are created and consumed, about the symbolic space they inhabit. But does that knowledge exceed their immediate present? Could it be that at least some artworks (obviously not many of them) announce the future? That they escape the destiny of the “science of history” which follows the destiny of Minerva’s owl? Art is not systematic or as detached as the results of historical research. It is much more susceptible to the environment in which it is created. If this environment is detached from everyday events, so too is art of an aristocratic, classicist, or academic sort. Art “from the other side” (i.e. created amidst social upheavals, even if they are not yet discursively detected) is different. It often detects and presents in a symptomatic way significant events and processes, even before they are diagnosed by scientists, politicians, and others. Now, we may claim that looking at some artworks from a temporal, cultural, or social distance enables us to discern certain traits of an environment which somebody living, creating, or appreciating such a work amidst that environment would not be aware of. It is true that such a distance, which also signifies a “difference,” enables us to see things which would otherwise escape our eyes. But this is not what I have in mind here. What I am referring to are works which tell us an essential truth about present and perhaps future (and not only past) events in a certain society. To discern this, the distance mentioned above is usually necessary. For a person living in an environment of this sort would be too caught up in and overwhelmed by that environment to recognize fully the significance of events surrounding him. In encountering the art that I have in mind here, we are usually dealing with a body of works that represent a minority or subcultural phenomenon. Rap music in the Los Angeles area in 1992; art in Slovenia in the eighties;13 punk music in Britain, Poland, and West Germany in the eighties; or art of whites in South Africa even today, all present us with a violence which is one of the basic traits of such art. To be precise, this art does not forecast events, nor does it predict them. What is does is point out that something crucial is happening in a certain society, that a certain environment is going through a profound change and that this change is being registered by artistic means. Now, this may not seem much. For is it not always the case that art to some degree mirrors a certain society or environment? This is manifestly true. Nevertheless, the basic difference arises in our case not from this art being essentially different from other kinds, but from it diagnosing enormous social and personal crises 13

See Aleš Erjavec and Marina Grzinić, Ljubljana, Ljubljana: Slovenian Art of the Eighties (Ljubljana: Mladinska Knjiga, 1991).

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which people submerged in schematic—often scientific—ways of thinking would simply never register as a crisis situation and which would thence never be diagnosed as such. There are certain limits that constrain a human being, and the same is of course true of any society or community. In individual creativity there are physiological limits to our abilities; in the case of a collective body there are limits to what it can bear. In such cases, ranging from children’s pictures of life in concentration camps to L.A. rap music, art may also have a therapeutic effect. But besides this it may discursively materialize deep existential crises. These crises can be purely individual—as in the case of Franz Kafka, whose work is still profoundly opaque to interpretation. Or it can be collective—as in the case of samizdats in the former Soviet Union or in the case of violence expressed in the works of white South African artists who, although shielded from the direct impact of the apartheid system, have nevertheless indirectly and emotionally responded to its existence. It is the incessant danger lurking behind apparently harmless everyday errands that seeps into the individual and re-emerges in pictures by William Kentridge, in sculptures by David Brown, on in the cut-off pieces of flesh hanging as artworks in the sculptures of Jane Alexander.14 Obviously, these artists and their work are not forecasting what will happen in their countries. In the case of South Africa it has been abundantly evident that the apartheid system is inhuman. But on the other hand, in some of the other previously mentioned cases (such as the significance of punk and rap music for certain European countries and Los Angeles respectively, or of postmodern art for the break-up of the socialist countries) the wider social, political, and historical connotations of the events that art expressed and practically announced was not at all obvious, although a sensitive social scientist would have been able to use it as a diagnostic device to gauge the social and political temperature of the societies in question. All the aforementioned countries experienced a period of profound social and political conflict, and the “grass roots” art and culture reacted against them in specific ways. That art can tell us a lot about such states of affairs is witnessed by the story about an ancient Chinese emperor who ordered his staff in different provinces to collect folk tales so he could discern from them the political situation there. Art can obviously be an excellent source of information about a society, communities, social classes, or simply “types” or characters that then serve as archetypes for people in our everyday lives. But can it predict events? The answer has to be negative. In this respect art is somewhat better off than “­science,” whether this be the science of history, the political sciences, etc. Not 14

See Sue Williamson, Resistance Art in South Africa (Claremont, South Africa: David Philip, 1989), especially 30–33, 56–57, and 42–45.

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only does contemporary art (at least in the recent past) follow emergent events more closely and more synchronously than the sciences or philosophy, which has mostly discarded such a role. It reacts to events simultaneously, even when they are not even visible on a broader scale. One of the reasons for this may be that art is more susceptible to such phenomena than science, because it is not hindered by rigid conceptual frameworks. Such frameworks often prevent the recognition of new phenomena simply because, with conceptual tools formed in a different situation and context we cannot see what is distinctive about current events. We try to reduce them to the existing, ill-fitting conceptual frameworks. It takes something extraordinary to open our eyes. In certain cases, such as rap music in California in 1992, the music showed the emergent social tensions much before they erupted. Indeed, if we bear in mind Michel Foucault’s claim that Marxism was like fish in the water in the 19th century, then it is notable that some of the texts written and performed by IceT, Public Enemy, and other rap groups witness a markedly “Marxist” analysis of concrete social situations. In an implicit way we perceive the social context in which such groups arise as analogous to socially highly stratified environments, with a marked level of class conflict. In the era of Marx and industrialization, social classes of course existed, but they have now been transformed: in the postmodern age society is more complex and thus socially more diverse. The same claims could be made about works by artists who were social critics in the previous century (ranging from Dickens and Zola to Jean-François Millet and Daumier). The public’s eyes were opened by what these artists showed about society. In our contemporary globalized situation the same applies to cases from very different countries, but with a similar result. Art shows us—in California, the former socialist countries, and South Africa, for example—the hidden reality, a reality covered by pre-existing views and one which is only made visible by the work of certain artists. This critical stance in art, starting with romanticism when the artist felt for the first time compelled as an artist to be a critic of the society or of the existing order and to fight for freedom and liberty, has become an inherent feature of art. The ideas of freedom and liberty, perceived as ideas (and not as ideologies) have enable art to be viewed as one of the paramount forms of human freedom, in terms of both its creation and reception. Is there in postmodernity still an art that would fight for such aims? There is no reason to believe otherwise. But we should not look for a similar mode of partisanship as was common in modernist times. Rather, a critique of the microlevel of ideology is present, with a re-evaluation of modernist truths and myths. It is in this way that there exists a continuation of the existential role and mode of art.

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Seeing, Painting, and Art (1996) 1

Beyond the “Essential Copy”

In his now already classical book Vision and Painting from 1983 Norman Bryson disputed what he saw as some of the standard tenets of art history. His opening argument concerning traditional art history was that from their very beginning in antiquity Western views on painting consist of the desire to create a “perfect copy”: from Pliny through the Renaissance and from Dante to Ernst Gombrich, Bryson detected this desire to create a painting—to discover the perfect technique for its execution—that would enable us to reproduce the perceived in a truthful way. From the time of Zeuxis’s pictorial rendering of grapes that misled the birds into believing they were real, to the modern age, painting is “thought of as a rivalry between technicians for the production of a replica so perfect that art will take the palm from nature … The difficulties confronted by the painter are executive and concern the fidelity of his registration of the world before him.”1 The painter’s task is to mirror the reality before him, to carry out in painting what in geometry and in optics the Renaissance development—or, in accordance with such thinking, “discovery”—of perspective offered to the painter. It is understandable that within such a context painting is a craft, and that the notion of creation is reserved for the divine being. The perceived and the represented are one and the same. All human beings possess in principle the same perceptual faculties and share the same visual field, a common technique of rendering a representation of the perceived is therefore possible. Renaissance developments in the arts and sciences—the latter offering the former tools for a truthful rendition of the perceived world, for the so-called “construzione legittima, the perspective called ‘correct’ or ‘exact’”2— offer the hope of the further diminution of the chasm between the painting and what Bryson calls “the Essential Copy,” the perfect replica. For Bryson the problem with art history is its holding on to opinions such as the ones presented above. Illustrating this with the work of Ernst Gombrich, although at the same time presenting the latter’s writings as “a transitional aesthetics,” Bryson pointed out that Gombrich, by accepting as his epistemological 1 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) 1 and 3. 2 Hubert Damisch, L’origine de la perspective (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), 107. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_005

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credo Karl Popper’s theory of verification and falsification, effectively subscribed to and developed an art history which found its evaluative criterion in a hypothesis of continuous progress towards the Essential Copy, a progress driven by novel demands upon schematic conventions of image-making,3 and which hence postulated a “provisional and interim improvement on the existing corpus of hypotheses or schemata, improved because tested against the world, through falsification.”4 Art history is firmly rooted within the modern epistemological horizon. It also ascribes to an Aristotelian poetics which is also visible from resemblances between Aristotle’s and Gombrich’s presentation of mimesis. For Aristotle mimesis is one of the features that distinguish humans from beasts, by mimetic activity we learn, and “a reproduced object invokes pleasure in all people.”5 Gombrich expresses the same thought: “The pleasure is in recognition.”6 Problems concerning art history, such as those discussed by Bryson, are related to its epistemological status since its constitution a century ago and its inclusion into a modernist scheme of reflective thinking. In other words, art history, like traditional aesthetics, has as a modernist discipline emptied itself in the form we have become used to in the first half of this century and has been, like rationalist philosophy, caught in that same tradition which is most often identified with Cartesian perspectivalism and its dependency upon monocular and abstract vision and optics, not to mention its philosophical dualism. Since the aim of the painting under discussion is primarily cognitive—the rendering of a representation in such a way that a recognized meaning is established, since Alberti, accomplished with the use of perspectival mechanisms—the aim of the artist is to accomplish a pictorial technique which will, as a procedure, be hidden from our scrutinizing eyes and will offer to our gaze only the picture itself as a complete whole. What is then called “perspectiva artificialis,” the “perspective of the painters as it is distinguished from the perspectiva naturalis of authors of the Middle Ages, the theory of direct vision, reflected or refracted …, is as such confused with that of optics.”7 Nonetheless, perspectiva artificialis had to be assisted by the two-point perspective (or “construzione legittima”) for it was found insufficient by itself, when confronted with continuous attempts to appropriate it within the conceptual field of the monocular and static eye of optics. Hence even Descartes 3 Bryson, 21. 4 Ibid. 5 Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b. 6 E. H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), 122. 7 Damisch, 90.

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himself in Dioptrics pays special attention to visual errors, mentioning that often circles are better represented by ovals and that are “often to be more perfect as concerns the quality of images and to better represent an object, they must not resemble it.”8 A related story is recounted by Pliny in connection with a competition between Alcamenes and Phidias for a sculpture of Minerva which was to sit on top of a tall pillar. “Alcamenes sculpted a harmonious sculpture and Phidias a figure with deformed limbs, with a gaping mouth and a stretched neck. On the day of the exhibition the first received the votes, while his rival was stoned. But the situation was reversed when the sculptures were put in their place. Installed on top of the pillar, Phidias’s statue acquired great beauty, while the other became an object of derision.”9 As even a hasty glance upon the elevated sculptures and facades of churches and medieval towns attests, the practicing sculptors and architects were very conscious of the need to accommodate the observer’s gaze and its peculiarities, which often diverged from the geometrical and optical laws imposed by the monocular static gaze and even from the two-point perspective. The limitations of the “perfect copy” were imposed also by the intrusion of the body. In paintings, engravings or drawings a special case were the anamorphoses, today the best-known among them being that of a skull on Hans Holbein’s “Two Ambassadors.” Anamorphism is a case of pictorial representation requiring a different perspectival vantage point. Other “scopic regimes” range from Dutch and baroque painting to El Lissitzky.10 Examples such as anamorphoses reveal that perceived objects, if they are to offer “true” representations, i.e. such that our perception will accept them as such, must often resort to devices that visibly diverge from rules that are in accordance with the monocular static gaze. Artists have to resort to all kinds of gimmicks to make adjustments for the pair of human eyes which gaze at their works from various positions, distances and angles: heads of sculptures lowered more or less than normally, eyes in different positions within the face, taller or shorter figures, adjustments for different vantage points, etc. These are

8 9 10

René Descartes, La Dioptrique (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 204. Quoted in Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses: Les perspectives dépravées II (Paris: ­Flammarion, 1996), 19. This topic was most fully developed by Martin Jay in the essay “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Force Fields (London: Routledge, 1993); see also Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983; Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La folie de voir: De l’esthétique baroque (Paris: Flammarion, 1986); on Lissitzky see Damisch, 51.

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all compensations artists have to make for the fact that human sight is not a mechanic optical instrument, but an integral part of the human body. Bryson based his critique of the “natural attitude”—the belief that perspectival painting is through most of history of painting considered the most appropriate, exact, scientific and true—on Husserl’s description of such an attitude within sciences.11 Husserl’s attempt to retract the Cartesian dualism and “return to things themselves” was related to his belief that philosophy is essentially seeing. Wesenschau, intuition, is visual, although it is far removed from the ocularcentrism of modern science and Cartesianism. Instead, phenomenology wants to regain the unity of the object and the subject which was obliterated by that very same Cartesianism and which, furthermore, caused also the emergence of the “natural attitude” of modern sciences criticized by Husserl. What Bryson seems to have offered as an alternative to the art of Western art history as a history of the development of the “Essential Copy,” was a history of art as that “of painting as a material practice.”12 For art history, or any theory for that matter, to have attained this aim, Bryson points out, it should have taken into consideration the role of the human body in the execution of a painting: it no longer suffices for us to perceive a painting as a result, ignoring at the same time the procedure (“material practice”) that led to it. Instead, we should heed this practice as well as the bodily framework within which and with the visible help of which this deed is accomplished. Bryson suggests traditional Chinese painting as a positive example of the way in which the bodily determination of a painting is to be perceived. He notes the visible way in which brushstrokes were executed and the fact that the strokes are not only vehicles of a technique but are simultaneously also directly the expressive means of painting as such. Western painting, purportedly, is instead offered to our gaze as a static scene, presented to our monocular vision. Classical painting, executed in accordance with the perspectival rules, furthermore offers what Kaja Silverman ascribes to the still photograph: “Whereas the moving image consigns what it depicts to oblivion, the still photograph gives us access to a stable and durable image of self.”13 It is this feature of painting as well, i.e., the representational stability which it can offer to the subject, that precludes classical Western painting from traveling the same path as its Chinese counterpart. Bryson argues that European painting disclaims what he called “deictic markers,”14 marks of the bodily inscription into the repre­sentation: “Western painting is predicated on 11 12 13 14

Bryson, 4–5. Bryson, 16. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 198. Bryson, 89.

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the disavowal of deictic reference, on the disappearance of the body as site of the image; and this twice over: for the painter, and for the viewing subject … [I]f China and Europe possess the two most ancient traditions of representational painting, the traditions nevertheless bifurcate, from the beginning, at the point of deixis.”15 If, then, one of Chinese painting’s salient features is the visible trace of the existence of the artist’s body within the picture itself, from whence does then this feature arise? Why is it that “[t]he work of production is constantly displayed in the wake of its traces; [that] in this tradition the body of labour is on constant display, just as it is judged in terms which, in the West, would apply only to a performing art”?16 Far from wishing to engage in a discussion concerning Chinese art, however, I would nevertheless like to point out that obviously the European tradition, or at least its more recent part, is not necessarily thus far removed from the kind of painting that Bryson is here opposing to the more classical Western painting. I shall develop this argument further later on. As François Cheng explains, Chinese art— always tends to recreate a total macrocosm where the prime unificatory action of the Breath-Spirit, or the Emptiness itself, far from being synonymous with the vague or arbitrary, is the internal place where the grid of vital breaths is established. We witness here a system which proceeds more by integration of successive contributions than by ruptures. The Stroke of the Brush, the art of which is carried by painters to an extreme degree of refinement, incarnating the One and the Multiple in the measure in which it is identified with the original Breath and with all of its metamorphoses, contributes no less to this permanence of a tirelessly pursued signifying practice.17 Since a painting is a microcosm related to the macrocosm and is simultaneously its integral part, the emptiness within a painting is not “an inert presence [but] is traversed by breaths link­ing the visible world [the painted space] with the invisible one.”18 As the author explains, the empty space of the picture mediates between its various elements—between the Mountain and the Water, for example—the relation between which would otherwise appear rigid and static. An additional element is brought into the picture since the 15 16 17 18

Bryson, 89. Bryson, 92. François Cheng, Vide et plein. Le langage pictural chinois (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 10. Cheng, 47.

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T’ang dynasty (618–907), when painters commenced to introduce poems into the white empty space of their pictures. The poem “is not a simple, artificially added commentary; it inhabits a real space (there is no hiatus between the calligraphed signs and the painted elements, for they both come from the same brush), introducing into the picture a living dimension, that of Time.”19 The world is a whole, therefore the emptiness in the picture, which depicts a fragmentary part of this wholeness, represents the invisible which structures relations within the visible itself, and is consequently just as crucial as the painted surfaces. In this way painting witnesses to the cosmological unity; it is hence no wonder that [i]n China, of all the arts, painting occupies the supreme place.”20 2

Merleau-Ponty and Painting

Reading Bryson, especially his book Vision and Painting from which I quoted above, as well as Tradition and Desire (1984), arguing for a painting and theory of painting that would take into consideration not only the optically “deficient” gaze of the viewer but also the corporeal marks of the painter, one is continuously reminded of a philosopher and a painter who both pursued a similar aim: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Cézanne. As with Bryson, ­Merleau-Ponty likewise criticizes the “natural attitude” admonished by ­Husserl and carries this out not only in the realm of science but foremostly in the realm of painting,21 which he sees not only as related to the first, but as ­showing its 19 20 21

Cheng, 105. Cheng, 10. “[T]he classical perspective is only one of the ways humanity has invented for projecting the perceived world before itself, and not the copy of that world. The classical perspective is an optional interpretation of spontaneous vision, not because the perceived world contradicts the laws of classical perspective and imposes others, but rather because it does not require any particular one, and is not of the order of laws.”—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1993), 86. A perhaps even more revealing passage concerning perspectiva artificialis can be found in the “Eye and Mind” essay: “[T]he painters knew from experience that no technique of perspective is an exact solution and there is no projection of the existing world which respects it in all aspects and deserves to become the fundamental law of painting. For example, the Italians took the way of representing the object, but the Northern painters discovered and worked out the formal technique of Hochraum, Nahraum, and Schrägraum. Thus plane projection does not always stimulate our thought to rediscover the true form of things, as Descartes believed. Beyond a certain degree of deformation, it refers us back, on the contrary to our own vantage point; as for the things, they flee into

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inherent truth, a truth which was distorted in the Renaissance artistic tradition. Merleau-Ponty’s aim was and remained Husserl’s credo to “return to things themselves”: “To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-­language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.”22 For Merleau-Ponty it is foremost painting which offers a privileged access to what he will later start calling Being. Although philosophy is, like art “the act of bringing truth into being,”23 “art, especially painting, draws upon this fabric of brute meaning which operationalism would prefer to ignore. Art and only art does so in full innocence … [We want] the writer and the philosopher … to take a stand; they cannot waive the respon­sibilities of humans who speak.”24 It was very consistent with such views that Merleau-Ponty’s (as well as Heidegger’s) existential phenomenology had to end in a poeticized discourse which attempted to emulate the world, to avoid the “abstract and derivative sign-language” which is always a discourse on the world. What philosophy can do is open our eyes to the world and make us conscious of its own limitations and limits: “A philosophy becomes transcendental, or radical, not by taking its place in absolute consciousness without mentioning the ways by which this is reached, but by considering itself as a problem; not by postulating a knowledge rendered totally explicit, but by recognizing as its fundamental transcendental philosophic problem this presumption on reason’s part.”25 A part of this “presumption on reason’s part” is also the belief in what Bryson will later call the “Essential Copy,” a belief that an authentic and universally valid rendering of the perceived world is possible through pictorial representation. To constrain the attempts of reason to distance itself, as absolute consciousness, from the perceived world which not only surrounds it but of which it is, itself, an integral part, philosophy must start at the closest possible starting point, which is one’s own body. Contrary to Descartes, who established an infinite a remoteness out of reach of all thought. Something about space evades our attempts to survey it from above.”—Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 135.) An analysis of the decentralized organization of visual space of the “Northern painters,” implying links between such painting and optical developments of the time, is offered by Svetlana Alpers in her book The Art of Describing: Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century (see note 10). 22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1995), ix. 23 Ibid., xx. 24 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 123. 25 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 63.

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distance between the res extensa and the res cogitans, Merleau-Ponty is one of the first philosophers not only to emphasize the necessity of theorizing consciousness as a part of our corporeal being—incessantly presenting this argument throughout most of his oeuvre—but also, furthermore, to “embody” his views within his interpretations of works by painters and sculptors, hence arguing for a perceptual and corporeal inscription of a painter within his picture and, also, of its viewer with whom the painter purportedly shares the visual field. As in Chinese culture, in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy too, painting is a privileged art form. As Merleau-Ponty argues in his preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, “[t]o seek the essence of perception is to declare that perception is, not presumed true, but defined as access to truth … We must not … wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive.”26 A privileged form of perception is vision. In this respect Merleau-Ponty follows in Husserl’s steps and shares certain traits of Heidegger’s philosophy. Although Heidegger criticizes in 1938, in the essay by the same name, the modern “time of the world picture” and privileges the word and hearing over the image and vision, a few years earlier he not only had used a picture—a Van Gogh painting—to explain his understanding of an artwork, but generally regards the Greek cultural universe as that of an unsurpassed existential authenticity, the same culture within which commenced the ocularcentrism of Western civilization. Still, for Heidegger, the word—­language— remains the most authentic form of communication and, of course, the precondition of thought. In Merleau-Ponty’s similar, but differently-oriented philosophy, an authenticity such as that which Heidegger finds in poetry, is revealed in painting. It is not language that is “the house of Being”; instead “the eye lives in this texture [of Being] as a man in his house.”27 Both in the case of Chinese painting and in Cézanne’s case (as interpreted by Merleau-Ponty, but often explicitly supported by citations from Cézanne’s own statements) the painter is someone who strives to present and represent the holistic unity of the invisible and the visible, the presence of a temporal or spatial absence in what is perceived as presence—this also being the reason for Merleau-Ponty’s disavowal of photography.28 When Bryson discovers 26 Ibid., xvi. 27 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 127. 28 The most explicit disclaimer of Marey’s photography as a prototype of photography as such is probably that from the “Eye and Mind” essay. It could be argued though that Merleau-Ponty does a disservice to photography, for he views it only as an impartial (“­scientific”) visual recording device, hence ignoring the fact that in his own time (the essay was written in August 1960) photography surpassed the perceptual (and creative)

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in a Chinese landscape painting the landscape to be the subject and, equally, the subject to be “the work of the brush in ‘real time’ and (…) a[n] extension of the painter’s own body,”29 may we not say that something similar is true of Cézanne’s juxtaposition of individual brush strokes30 or Rodin’s practice of rendering visible the connecting welds of his sculptures? It would seem that Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of Cézanne’s paintings (as well as Rodin’s or ­Giacometti’s sculptures) shows certain similarities with that which Bryson offers in connection with Chinese painting and which he simultaneously ­presents as a positive alternative to the stance of traditional art history and of classical perspectival painting in Europe, an alternative he tries to complement with a different reflective vantage point, one which will accentuate the “deictic reference,” and therefore the body as an uncircumventable theoretic subject. It would therefore seem that (at least in the 1983 book) what Bryson attempts to propose or defend, is to a large extent already present in Merleau-Ponty’s own early work. It may be that although Merleau-Ponty has adumbrated many of Jacques Lacan’s theses in his Seminar XI and elsewhere, his philosophical stature may have been reduced by the poeticized language (or what Bryson called the “heights of lyricism”31) of his late writings and, finally, by the waning of interest in phenomenological aesthetics or philosophy of art in recent decades. A good case in point may be Lyotard’s early phenomenological work Discours, figure (1971) whose aim was, as Lyotard explains much later, primarily to challenge the onslaught of Lacanian privileging of the Symbolic and of relegating all art to the domain of the Imaginary and hence ideology.32 Lyotard later abandoned phenomenology, obviously sensing that it did not offer the appropriate

29 30

31 32

horizon of Marey’s photographic experiments and that it was therefore rather simplistic to reduce it to the stature of Descartes’s engravings and camera obscura. Bryson, 89. Bryson’s accentuation of the traces of the brush strokes perhaps warrants a comment, for while in European painting the “deictic markers” may not be as omnipresent as in the Chinese one, it is nonetheless true that the artist’s style or painterly writing is often quite unique. Merleau-Ponty thus mentions that “[t]he writing of Michelangelo is attributed to Raphael in 36 cases, but is correctly identified in 221 cases. We therefore recognize a certain structure which is common to voice, to physiognomy, to gestures and to the walk of each person, each person is for us nothing but this structure or this manner of being in the world.”—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le cinéma et la nouvelle Psychologie,“ in Sens et non-sens (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 68. Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 65. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 10–11.

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theoretical apparatus for analysis of radical artists of our century, such as Duchamp. As Forrest Williams writes: Due to whatever common cultural formations that may serve to link philosophical thought and artistic insight, the dominant philosophical system in France today known as “phenomenology,” and in particular, that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on the one hand, and the art of Cézanne, on the other hand, appear to agree in origin, method and outcome. Their common origin was a response to a certain subjectivism of much of nineteenth-century art and philosophy; their common method, to search by minute scrutiny of their own experience for the outwardly given, objectively real; and their common achievement, to have avoided the opposite of extreme subjectivism, by discovering the real as the invariant structure of a given appearance.33 Nonetheless, while Cézanne retained his place in contemporary art history, Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of him, his work, as well as his own philosophy of the perceived and the seen, both appear problematic, for they offer an analysis and a presentation that increasingly appear caught within the confines and limitations of its own phenomenological framework. After initial ingenious applications of Husserl’s (and partly Heidegger’s) phenomenology to the realms of perception, combined with perceptive insights into the logic of painting and the gaze, in his late work Merleau-Ponty increasingly strove to attain the impossible discursive articulation of Being, drifting in this way into the direction of a potential silence.34 His discourse on Cézanne often appears caught within the realm of that very same undifferentiated framework of the Cartesian subject and, consequently, within the discourse on the artistic genius of the first half of this century that preceded psychoanalysis.35 Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of the body and of the corporeal 33 34 35

Forrest Williams, “Cézanne, Phenomenology, and Merleau-Ponty,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 165. For a discussion of this issue in Merleau-Ponty and its relations to Schelling, see Robert Burch, “On the Topic of Art and Truth,” in Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 353, as well as Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996), esp. 50–51. In Merleau-Ponty’s late writings such issues appear obfuscated, as in the following note from October 1959: “[T]o paint, draw, is not to produce something from nothing, the trace, the touch of the brush, and the visible work are but a trace of a total movement of the Speech, which comes from the total Being and this movement embraces expression by strokes, as well as expression by colors, as well as my expression and that of other painters.”—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 265.

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features of the act of painting appears insufficient when confronted with the formidable task of presenting the absolute, for all he seems to have at his disposal—or offers—is a philosophy which privileges the visual as presented to us mainly through the pictorial representations of a modernist painter. With his late, especially the posthumously published writings, he furthermore gives the impression, just as in the late Heidegger, of his discourse closing upon itself. His Being is static, his rejection of science universal, his discourse intentionally more and more ambiguous and cryptic, while the previously conceptually clear notions related to perception, painting, visibility and the gaze, although perhaps burdened with a “metaphysics of presence” when endowed with an ontological status and transposed into extra-perceptional realms, are replaced by those of the flesh, with philosophy becoming “Being speaking in us,” and literature being analyzed as an “inscription of Being.”36 How can “a meaningful human world be constituted out of pure visibility”37 and how can the quest for the reunification of the subject and object, devoid of an historical perspective as it is, transgress the limits of existentially designated artistic and aesthetic experience? I shall return to this topic in the closing part of this paper. 3

Late Merleau-Ponty

In March 1945 Merleau-Ponty held a lecture on the “Cinema and the New Psychology,” which he ended with an observation similar to that made in 1954 by Forrest Williams; it concerned not Cézanne but the cinema: “If … philosophy and the cinema are in agreement, if reflection and technical work go in the same direction, this is so because the philosopher and the cinema maker share a certain manner of being, a certain view of the world which is that of the same generation.”38 The “new psychology” from the title of the lecture is equal, or essentially related, to Merleau-Ponty’s own philosophical work, for in his early work both psychology and philosophy constitute the same phenomenology. The “philosopher” mentioned at the end is therefore Merleau-Ponty the phenomenologist who finds congeniality with Cézanne, Matisse, Paul Klee or Rodin whose works exemplify to the highest degree his views on perception, which is our entry into the lived world of which we are an indissociable organic part.

36 Ibid., 250–251. 37 Burch, 367. 38 Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, 75.

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What the art of these artists has in common with the cinema is that now they both represent traditional art forms. The cinema today is one of the very few art forms that retains its technically and ontologically distinct status, just as does classical sculpture and easel painting. Much of visual art or visual culture today is incessantly disrupting our established notions of art, limiting the unreserved ascription of the status of “art” primarily to the art of the pre­modernist and modernist period. In such art it is not difficult to discover the existential attributes perceived and described by Merleau-Ponty in paintings, sculptures or even cinema. In modernism and high modernism the seen—although in certain cases criticized or opposed, as in Duchamp or conceptual art—is not yet problematic. “Anti-ocular” discourse is only emerging and Merleau-Ponty’s “celebration of vision,” supported with concrete psychological analyses and experiments, is a helpful theory which attracts and influences aestheticians and philosophers as well as painters and sculptors. His theory in this respect shares the special place phenomenology in general and existential phenomenology occupies until the advent of structuralism, for existential phenomenology in particular not only views art as an exemplary but also as a privileged eruption of authenticity in the modern technological world.39 It hence answers to a deeper need of artists and their public for a discourse that pays attention to what could be called the “specificity of art.” It assigns to art works either a central ontological position or an independent ontological status—a designation of paramount importance in a century of ideological master narratives. Phenomenology furthermore acknowledges the interchanging role of experience and talent, the interplay between consciousness and subconsciousness and the driftings of the mind between the future, the past, the present and fantasy, the latter being conflated in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the static “Being.” The location of this “primordial” exchange is what is now usually described as the domain of the Imaginary, a distinction which effectively relegated the whole realm of art to this domain. A good example of perception that Merleau-Ponty has in mind and on which he bases the privileged status of painting, is an example he offers in “Eye and Mind”: “When through the water’s thickness I see the tiled bottom of the pool, I do not see it despite the water and the reflections; I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without that flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as 39

A similar position, but emerging from a very different background, is that of Adorno, Marcuse and the line of defenders of avantgarde and neo-avantgarde art in post-war Germany, who all view art as a unique locus of authenticity in an otherwise commodified world.

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it is and where it is—which is to say, beyond any identical, specific place.”40 It is such scenes that the painter paints and understands beneath the words depth, space and color, continues Merleau-Ponty. How to capture such a vivid presentation with theoretical notions? It is obvious that the only possibility open to us is to emulate the very nature of such an image, that is to say, render it poetically, “lyrically,” non-theoretically, in short, proving by this very gesture Merleau-Ponty’s thesis about the totalizing nature of our experience and showing that the cogito can never exist within the same reflective framework as the perceptual experience. The opposition to a purely scientific description of this view draws him into a defense of art and into an attack on the Cartesian tradition which would see in the above scene the refraction of light as the only relevant aspect. It was the advent of Derrida’s criticism of an ahistorical “presence,” on which hinges the phenomenological tradition depended, and of psychoanalysis, the growing philosophical influence of which called in question the relatively stable transcendental nature of noematic reflection, which signaled the decline of phenomenology and its privileging of art, be it poetry or painting. As mentioned, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology contained an inbuilt self-­ destructing mechanism which emerged only slowly from his early works that had offered an insightful analysis of perception and deficiencies of its past theories (and sometimes practices). It is only later, and especially in the posthumous works, that the need to clairify perception and overcome Cartesian dualism is replaced with an explicit aim of transcending the split between the authentically experienced and its philosophical reflection. Yet in doing so, Merleau-Ponty fails to offer any historically, socially, empirically and therefore extra-artistically determined reality as its final aim, and thus his late thinking increasingly reveals itself to be a pure form of transcendental philosophy. It is to the discourse of philosophy that is assigned the difficult and yet limited task of endowing the direct and primitive contact with the world (as it existed before the split into subject and object) with a philosophical status. “I found,” writes Merleau-Ponty in 1952, “in the experience of the perceived world a new type of relation between the mind [ésprit] and truth. The evidence of the perceived thing lies in its concrete aspect, in the very texture of its qualities, and in the equivalence among all its sensible properties—which caused Cézanne to say that one should be able to paint even odors.”41 It appears as if here Merleau-Ponty is primarily concerned with a novel approach to perception. It needs nonetheless be mentioned that this perception is first and foremost 40 41

Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 142. Quoted in Burch, 357.

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experience and that through this notion Merleau-Ponty at the same time introduces phenomenology into his discourse on perception, while simultaneously distinguishing himself from Husserl. For Merleau-Ponty, experience of phenomena is an evidently empirical and embodied “experience of the perceived world” and its phenomena, while for Husserl phenomena come “from within the immanent history of consciousness.”42 In his late writings the phenomenological analysis of perception, especially in its relation to painting, is (with a few exceptions, such as most of the “Eye and Mind” essay) almost wholly replaced by an existential phenomenology in which the author’s discourse strives to express the unsayable. 4

Towards a Reevaluation of Art

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in practice never disclaimed the traditional belief into a unified subject; although it was not cogito, it remained transcendentally conceived. The problem as such could not really arise within such a philosophical framework, since in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology Husserl’s noematic reflection, which the former wholeheartedly accepted, “remains within the object and, instead of begetting it, brings to light its fundamental unity.”43 The problem of the subject is hence dissolved in the eter­nal transcendental unity of the subject and the object, a unity, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, so well carried out by painting. It is up to philosophy to reveal it, bring this unity to light and continually keep our eyes open to it. Nonetheless, the person perceiving is an empirical and an embodied subject, who retains his/her psychological unity of the Gestalt. It is here that psychoanalysis stepped in and deconstructed the actual transcendental ego of Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology: even if Merleau-Ponty enthusiastically quoted Cézanne or Klee saying, “Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me,”44 Jacques Lacan interpreted the relation between the gaze and the perceived world very differently, arguing in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI), applying the same Sartrean metaphor of the voyeur which Merleau-Ponty also used, that the gaze and the look are in an incessant exchange, causing the subject to be an unstable and 42

Galen A. Johnson, “Introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Painting,” in The MerleauPonty Aesthetics Reader, 8. 43 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, x. 44 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 129.

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continuously deconstructed and reconstructed entity and that it is the mediating role of language, the Symbolic, which also determines the visible and the gaze.45 Lacan’s interpretation of the gaze and the look from this 1964 seminar has been subjected to innumerable and divergent interpretations. In it Lacan gives his due to Merleau-Ponty and to his insistence that objects return the gaze, but he ascribes to the object the function of the “look” which imaginarily looks at us from the position of the Other. Lacan furthermore points out what MerleauPonty has also insisted upon, that is, that the geometric space of our perception—not necessarily a visual one—differs from that of our gaze which ­conceives its specific visual field on the basis of which we perceive the world and objects in it. It is for this reason that, as Merleau-Ponty shows on innumerable occasions, in paintings the visual field causes Cézanne’s tables to spread out or curve, or that the painter shows us the interior of an ashtray that would normally be invisible to us, etc. The picture, to represent in such a way that our visual perception will abide by perception proffered by language, must show presence through absence, must represent or render it visible indirectly. MerleauPonty twice approvingly cites Cézanne46 explaining how he must paint a motif from Balzac’s novel: not by showing the most eye-­catching element and its traits, but those that surround it. The invisibility thus rendered, will bring forth the “tablecloth white as a layer of fresh-fallen snow.” This may be the same kind of mediating visibility as that to which François Cheng was referring.47 In other words, and as already observed, Cézanne’s or Rodin’s works (or those of Francis Bacon, for example), reveal similar “deictic markers” as those that Bryson pointed to in the case of Chinese brush painting. This similarity points to a changed relation between the world and the transcendental ego than was the one that existed within the Cartesian tradition. In other words, the previously mentioned similarity between Cézanne’s work and MerleauPonty’s phenomenology reveals a deeper similarity between the work of some of the key figures of modern European art and phenomenology to which Bryson ascribes “the greatest maturity” when it comes to what he calls “the human dimension of visuality.”48 The reason for Merleau-Ponty’s description of Cézanne’s work in terms which so much resemble those of Chinese painting is his understanding of the relation between the transcendental ego and the 45 46 47 48

See also Bryson, 66–67. Phenomenology of Perception, 197–198; “Cézanne’s Doubt,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 66. See note 18. Bryson, 65.

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world, for they both represent a whole which is, at least in this respect, very similar to the Chinese perception of the world and of our own place within it. It therefore appears that Bryson could well discover examples of art as “material practice” already within the modern and modernist tradition of European painting and sculpture. It is at this point that I would like to introduce the question of authenticity of seeing. Bryson is correct in stressing the “Western myth of seeing”49 and its ­historical construction, which were both also so forcefully criticized by MerleauPonty. What Bryson finds lacking in Merleau-Ponty is what Lacan introduced into his analysis of the gaze, namely the social dimension of seeing, the vehicle of which is language. “We can never directly experience the visual field of another human being, that much is certain: the only knowledge of another visual field, which we are able to acquire, is that which comes through description. Such description proves that others also see what we see, but the definition of what is seen originates, therefore, not in the visual field itself, but in language: originates outside sight, in the signs of the description …”50 The “conscious experience ha[s] a strictly individual character, in the double sense that it is the experience of a situated and dated individual, and that it is itself an experience which cannot be reproduced.”51 Could not the desire to achieve a perfect copy, to achieve “the pleasure of recognition” be at least partly explained also by the consciousness of the impossibility to achieve such an aim? The inability to “directly experience the visual field of another human being” in no way prevents identification and an essentially similar or “shared” experience. What I therefore see with my own eyes is even within my own experience a fleeting event, but one which can nonetheless be, within such an individual or even collective experience, immediately and eternally recognizable. The gaze or the glance of my own eyes is determined by the specific features of sight and our shared visual history. It is within these that our common experience—of painting, for example—is perhaps, when it comes to more recent art, not dissimilar to that offered for example by Chinese art. If this is true, this signifies some broader common denominator which transgresses culturally determined borders. It may be time, once again, instead of seeing differences, to distinguish certain common features in art. Merleau-Ponty’s account of painting leaves one thing unaccounted for and that is how to establish any qualitative relationship within the fine arts or 49 50 51

Bryson, 64. Bryson, 66. Jean-François Lyotard, Phenomenology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 77.

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painting as such, even when it comes to an individual painter. Since he ignores the historical and the social dimensions of art, the only aesthetic evaluation possible is one that is based on existential experience of us being one with the world. For this reason, and since in his works he mostly talks about art either in very general terms or comments upon individual artists, mostly when they support his phenomenology of perception and related philosophical theses, it would be actually difficult to call his phenomenology aesthetics in the traditional sense. We cannot dispute though, that his presentation of visual and pictorial representation and perception strongly influenced artists and aestheticians (from early Lyotard to Mikel Dufrenne) and that in spite of his theory being mainly concerned with art as a means of accentuating his philosophical theses, and his statements about the unique place of art within the lived world being primarily statements to be accepted at their face value, his theory remains strongly dependent upon perception of art as a paramount example and venue of begetting the consciousness of our place in the world and our embodiment therein. But, again, this is done by hypothesizing the existence of a unified subject—or transcendental ego—which perceives art. While MerleauPonty strongly admonishes the thesis of classical perspective being the most appropriate one,52 he nevertheless puts forth the claim that it is nonetheless possible that Cézanne conceived a form of art which, while occasioned by his nervous condition, is valid for everyone.”53 It remains open what weight this statement carries and in which ways can it be universalized as I suggested above, but it does reveal that Merleau-Ponty had in mind a unified subject as a prototype of the perceiving transcendental ego. Lacanian psychoanalysis thoroughly deconstructs the notion of such a unified subject. Or as Jean Hyppolite has commented in Lacan’s seminar in 1954/55 about the Gestalt when discussing Merleau-Ponty, this is, “basically a phenomenology of the imaginary in the sense in which we employ the term.”54 No wonder, therefore, that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological interpretation of the transcendental ego, in spite of it being conflated with the world in its different guises, suffered the same destiny as the notion of art itself, i.e., being proclaimed to be a remnant of humanist (and basically ideological or “idealist”) way of thinking. Does the fact that Merleau-Ponty never attempted to establish any normative hierarchy within art which would exceed that which is common to existential phenomenology as a whole, represent a deficiency of his philosophy or, 52 Cf. The Merleau-Ponty Reader, 86. 53 “Cezanne’s Doubt,” 61. 54 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire II. Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 100.

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to the contrary, a consciousness of the impossibility or obsoleteness of such an endeavor? Or does his incessant linkage of the perceptual and the artistic (the visually perceived and painting) simply show that art is but a special or privileged aspect of the lived world as such? Does the fact that Lyotard in his 1971 book Discours, figure attempted to continue Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological presentation of art and of the visible, so as to counter Lacan’s privileging of the Symbolic at the expense of the Imaginary, but then gave up such an endeavor, witness to its impossibility? All of these questions require complex answers, all of which are crucial not only for a theory of perception, but especially for any contemporary discussion of art. Authors in other areas have come to the conclusion that some of the traditionally “unscientific” and disregarded notions, similar to those of art, not only deserve but warrant scrutiny. One such notion is that of “love” which Kaja Silverman has recently put forth as a notion worth revisiting from a new perspective, that of idealization. Although art falls within a very different category from love, they both are related to the Imaginary and to idealization. Love has been declared, in various moments of history, to be defunct or to be a transient category. It has furthermore “always seemed to lack respectability as an object of intellectual inquiry—to represent the very quintessence of kitsch.”55 From our contemporary perspective it may be theoretically valid and practically relevant to reexamine the notions of aesthetic and artistic experience and to reevaluate the notion of art, not as an ontological entity but as a part of continued human practice and need. By arguing for such a réintroduction of a rather traditional notion I don’t intend to disclaim distinctions and notions introduced primarily by psychoanalysis (and then applied or transposed into other realms mainly by various theories of ideology), but would like instead to point out that art, and the experience it offers, possess an important place in our lived world. While their continuous emergence may be contingent, this contingency in no way diminishes their relevance, as the aforementioned comparisons of Chinese art and that championed by Merleau-Ponty show. From this perspective (and this is a perspective determined also by the “postmodern” turn toward art which excludes the premodernist as well as modernist belief into a unified subject) the need to reevaluate the Imaginary and reevaluate art as a crucial human activity and value appears increasingly warranted. 55

Silverman, 1–2.

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Aesthetics as Philosophy (1999) 1

Philosophy and Transparency

In many respects philosophy is no different than other fields of knowledge, with perhaps one exception that nonetheless is of paramount importance. I have in mind the critical nature of philosophy or, rather, philosophical activity. No matter how we define philosophy and no matter from which cultural tradition we commence our attempts to determine what philosophy is, we are confronted with the fact that philosophy proper doesn’t exist if it doesn’t possess this self-reflective strain, i.e. of being not only a thought about the extant reality but also a critical thought about thinking as such. After knowledge became thoroughly specialized in the 19th century and after Althusser’s claims in the 1960s that Marx discovered the continent of the science of history, the postmodern turn of the early eighties brought with it not only the end of the belief in the scientificity of philosophical discourse and in its epistemological support but also a thorough reconfiguration of the relationship between the natural and the human sciences, philosophy included. We could view philosophies such as Plato’s, late Heidegger’s, that of late MerleauPonty or the early Lyotard not only as efforts to reduce the difference between reflection and authenticity but—somehow paradoxically—also as philosophical attempts to preclude the loss of this critical edge not by retaining the distance required by critical reflection but instead by collapsing critique and individual or social practice. Philosophy which went the farthest in this direction was that of the young Karl Marx and his “critique of everything existing” with its continuation in the undertakings to materialize theory through historical practice, an effort resulting in a similar failure as attempts of Russian constructivism, Tatlin, and especially productivism to materialize avantgarde art in utilitarian social practice. In both cases the result was the complete loss of the essence of the primary activity. The failure of such efforts reveals not only the impossibility of carrying out such a project and the need to start the philosophical critique of knowledge and itself as its segment every time anew, but that at the same time the need for the consciousness of the irreducibility of differences between various spheres and realms is required. The collapsing of various spheres, the dedifferentiation, the desire to attain the undifferentiated self and the primordial unity, are all parts of the same impossible search for a transparency and a transformation without a residue. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_006

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One of the causes of such a desire is the very nature of theoretical knowledge, philosophy included. Philosophy is an activity springing up from the Greek preoccupation with vision, from the predominance of ocularcentrism,1 to use Martin Jay’s term, a preoccupation inherent to Greek thought and revealed, for example, in its language which abounds in visual metaphors. Both features have given rise to the hypothesis that without such an abundance of visual metaphors and, generally speaking, dependence upon vision, theory itself would not have come into being, for its emergence was essentially dependent upon vision and the inherent privilege this offers to static entities or immovable essences at the expense of the flux of changing phenomena. That philosophy emerged with the ocularcentric universe of ancient Greece signifies, therefore, that the significance assigned to static essences is at the core of philosophical activity, the millennial history of which could also be perceived as a continuous effort to bridge or overcome the gap between such static essences and what was perceived as a dynamic or dialectic flux of antagonisms of history, society, and the human psyche. 2

Postmodernity and Particularity

Although postmodernity and postmodernism have lost much of their previous purport I view these two notions as highly relevant for any contemporary discussion of philosophy and aesthetics. What I have in mind can be illustrated best by quoting two authors, the first being Wolfgang Welsch and the other Zygmunt Bauman. In an influential article published in 1988 entitled “Modernity and Postmodernity,” Welsch claimed that “Postmodernity is traversed by the recognition that totality cannot arrive without establishing as an absolute a certain particularity which is then inevitably tied to a destruction of other particularities … Postmodernity begins where totality ends.”2 Another equally insightful observation was made at approximately the same time by Zygmunt Bauman. In his opinion, “What has happened in recent years could be articulated as the appearance of a vantage point which allows the view of modernity itself as an 1 See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993) and, especially, Martin Jay, “The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism,” Force Fields (New York: Routledge, 1993), 99–113. 2 Wolfgang Welsch, “Modernité et postmodernité,” Les Cahiers de Philosophie (Postmoderne, Les termes d’un usage) 6 (1988): 33.

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enclosed object, an essentially complete project, an episode of history, with an end as much as a beginning.”3 In Bauman’s view, which I find very congenial, modernity is not something that has actually ended with the advent of postmodernity. Postmodernity is instead characterized exactly by the emergence of the consciousness of a possible closure of modernity itself, of the consciousness of the possibility of the end of modernity. Before, modernity was viewed as a project stretching into temporal infinity; now it possesses a beginning as well as a possible ending. Both Welsch and Bauman, as well as a series of other thinkers in the eighties, viewed postmodernity as a positive notion, replete with possibilities offered by the emergence of particularities, the newly attained dignity of which arose from the ashes of the now obsolete notion of totality—a process today visibly on its way and at work already in Foucault’s book The Order of Things from two decades earlier. Therein the notion of totality was already simultaneously deconstructed and replaced with the new order of discontinuities, with these being closely related to particularities that Welsch mentions. It is safe to assume that the humanities in general and philosophy and aesthetics in particular have fared no differently than other fields of knowledge. In all, a trend toward particularization developed in the last two decades. If international congresses of aesthetics can serve as an indication of what those of us who turn our head when somebody calls behind us, “Hey you, aesthetician!” and find ourselves interpellated into such a subject, do we see that aestheticians over the world are mainly concerned with issues of art, culture, and beauty (probably in this order). Two other facts are that with few exceptions the contemporary postmodern world and its communicational and informational plethora have made us depend upon similar references and often work on related issues, and that the previous global division into what Richard Schusterman has called “philosophical empires”4— which could just as easily be called “aesthetic empires”—is increasingly becoming a past phenomenon. Globalization has affected not only products of mass production and consumption such as the globally marketed material commodities, but also symbolic commodities called theories, authors, and visions of the world (the visions du monde about which Lucien Goldmann wrote in the 1960s). In the

3 Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 117. 4 Richard Schusterman, “Aesthetics Beyond Nationalism and Internationalism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51:2 (1993): 161. See also, Aleš Erjavec, “Philosophy: National and International,” Metaphilosophy 28/4 (1997): 329–345, reprinted in this volume.

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words of Wolfgang Welsch again, “Strictly speaking there is no longer anything absolutely foreign.”5 One of the frequent features associated with postmodernity is its purported break with the past. As I sketched above, by using Bauman’s analysis, it would be more proper to claim that postmodernity is the end of the Ausgang from modernity, although not exemplified by dedifferentiation,6 for this is to an excessive measure dependent upon the early fascination with the purportedly epochal break between modernity and postmodernity. This dedifferentiation of the previously autonomous spheres should not be equated with particularization. The first denotes a disintegration of fixed borders between realms, while the second signals the emergence of a situation that doesn’t allow for a totalizing elimination of particularities, for there no longer exists a reductionist and exclusivist common denominator—or if it does, it exists only in the plural form, as well as in a transitory and hence relative one. I find the notion of postmodernity as the present (and perhaps final) phase of modernity of relevance for it allows us to take into consideration what are at the same time global social and historical processes and events and simultaneously those restricted to the much narrower fields of philosophical and aesthetic inquiry. Among the generally accepted features of postmodernity—accepted even by its philosophical critics—are a globalization of culture and the erosion of the distinction between high or elite art and mass culture. What is less frequently noted is that aesthetics and philosophy too have ceased being pure academic endeavors and are increasingly become active ingredients of activities as varied as politics, design, and even forestry. We may well argue that some of these applications of aesthetics may be problematic, but we should nevertheless follow Wittgenstein’s dictum that to know what a word means we should look at how it is used. These instances may lie at the margins of philosophy and aesthetics. Nonetheless, especially in the realm of what Welsch has frequently criticized as the “aestheticization of everyday life” and its transmogrification into an ingredient of “experience,”7 hence changing the world into a “domain of experience,” aesthetics and theories linked to new forms of communication and technological means have helped establish these as radically different from those of the (mostly modernist) past. The so-called “new media” and the euphoria 5 Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality: The Changing Form of Cultures Today,” Filozofski Vestnik 22/2 (2001): 69. 6 See, Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990), esp. 11–15. 7 Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1997), 2.

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associated with such technical and technological advances have opened a new field of research, but at the same time heightened expectations that a completely new realm of the aesthetic and the experienced was in the making. Even if this was not the case, it nonetheless helped broaden—in a certain or specialized field, but within the realm of the social nonetheless—the extant notion of aesthetics. What occurred in aesthetics resembled developments in other realms or areas of knowledge: the notion of aesthetics commenced to encompass theoretical activities of Eastern cultures, the former sociology of culture, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and ecology, among others. Such broadening or extension of the meaning of the word was a positive phenomenon, although it also instigated the current confusion and increased vagueness of the term. At an aesthetics conference one can today find papers on Plato, Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, the aesthetics of the stratosphere, soap operas, Wittgenstein, and dress codes in primitive or contemporary societies. Despite the criticism aimed at interpretation of postmodernity as a period of dedifferentiation, to a certain extent such a diagnosis merits further discussion. It is true that aesthetics, for example, is a typical discipline of philosophy that came into existence as a consequence of the differentiation occurring in modernity and that current broadening of this notion is also a consequence of the changed circumstances in our organization of knowledge. That this is possible is furthermore due to the undisputedly increased permeability of the aforementioned “philosophical empires”: a few decades ago certain works of philosophy or aesthetics would patently appear out of place within a different cultural or philosophical empire: these could have been the case not only with Indian works in a Polish environment, for example, but just as well with French works in a British environment or British in a German one and vice versa. Not that many classical works were not a part of the global culture, but they were there either as a part of the philosophical canon or as a marginal phenomenon. This is no longer so: today authors from various countries and cultures employ similar or the same references and are treating theories not much differently from cuisine or, to give a more elevated example, literature or the fine arts. Another reason for such a situation is that aesthetics is increasingly an activity that strives to be to an essential extent related to on-going human practices. These are not necessarily artistic, but in most cases certainly are cultural ones. The sixties and seventies demolished the barrier between high and low in art. Structuralism and related semiotics possessed special import, effectively relegating to oblivion the notion of art as a paradigm of creativity and its most desired emanation. Art now became a slightly elevated realm within the global

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sphere of culture, with both these terms often being discarded as obsolete totalizing notions, to be replaced with concrete works and the signifying practices these offered and were the results of. This viewpoint was supplemented by another, namely, that it was (neo-)avantgarde art which was acceptable because it avoided capitalist commodification. When in the eighties and especially nineties aesthetics, art and artwork again commenced to gain theoretical interest, what then appeared as the object of aesthetic inquiry became so broad that it carried almost no definable distinctions. The notion of experience started to seep into the theoretical realm of aesthetics, while art became such an oblique entity that it could acquire almost any form, shape and temporal (especially transient) status. In such a situation the institutional theory of art started to be proliferated globally. At the time of its formation in the sixties this theory validly mirrored the New York art scene and aptly described the way in which an artwork therein came into existence and the mechanisms by which it earned appreciation. The institutional theory furthermore signaled the demise of normative aesthetics, a process which was strengthened and gained global dimensions as it spread to other artworlds. As Bauman noticed, “the institutional theory of art (as an institutional theory of any other value domain) sounds the death knell to the philosophers’ dream of control. What has been put in place of the absolute principles that only they had access to and only they were able to operate, is this evasive, unwieldy, unpredictable entity of ‘consensus’ … What is new is not the authority of consensus, but the fact that the kind of consensus which now seems to possess the reputation-bestowing authority is not the consensus of philosophers.”8 The institutional theory of art detected and articulated a change which was in the sphere of art properly engendered mainly by Duchamp and his artistic subversions. It nonetheless, despite its lack of normative foundations, described possible artworlds that formed relatively self-contained spheres, peopled by the required inhabitants who together created the consensus mentioned by Bauman. With the advent of postmodernism a new situation developed: art and culture have become so democratized and so widespread that very often consensus is not even attempted. To the authors and their audiences suffices the act of making and then exhibiting or showing their artifacts. What is occurring is no longer a process, the executors of which desire to have their artifacts integrated into the extant culture and artworld and do this either by assimilating or tearing down the old norms (a process the Czech aesthetician 8 Bauman, 139.

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Jan Mukařovský could in the thirties still describe as the “dominant” in art), but instead an act that requires no special affirmation from the broader society or its segments that are more artistically or aesthetically inclined. Instead, the act of making appears almost identical to the act of consumption. It is no longer important how the audience will respond to a work, i.e. if, and how, it will communicate with it; instead it is the creative experience that authentically represents the purportedly ontological dimension of such a work. We therefore speak of autopoetics which are incommensurable and not subjected to totalizing normative notions and frameworks. It is also for this reason that the border between art and nature is lowered or eradicated. If a work of art can be any human artifact, it can also be any natural artifact, for no spiritual dimension is required for its specific and distinct ontological status. 3

Philosophers as Legislators?

Institutional theory as a theoretical articulation of the then extant art offered an appropriate response to the artistic world of the neo-avantgardes of the sixties and early seventies. As Bauman observed, it also revealed the fact that philosophers, among others, have lost their position as legislators and were transformed into interpreters. I wish to argue that under the present post-­ modern conditions, when frequently this same theory has not only proliferated further but broadened and been applied indiscriminately, it may become again valid to ascribe to philosophers, aestheticians and others the role of legislators, although this legislature can of course no longer be based on transcendent or ideological foundations. I believe it is high time to do this, for the revolt against the fetish of art has for a long time now been a victim of its own success. The current omnipresent freedom suffocates art and causes it to become irrelevant, for it allows for any activity or object that a certain person wishes to designate as such to be called art, effectively denigrating its meaningful significations. As Michel Foucault observed in 1983, one of the great roles of philosophy “could be characterized by saying that the task of philosophy is to describe the nature of the present, and of ‘ourselves in the present.’”9 The same should be demanded of aesthetics if it is to be a philosophical aesthetics. I interpret aesthetics primarily as a philosophy of art. This it can be allowing and supporting at the same time the existence of other interpretations of aesthetics, such as Welsch’s, for example, who argues for an aesthetics which “will do justice to all 9 Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 36.

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usages of the expression.”10 While I fully agree with his Wittgensteinian interpretation of the term and of its multifarious usages, it needs to be added that Welsch at the same time elevates aesthetics to a paramount position within philosophy, ascribing “aesthetic character” (22) to cognition and ascribing to ethics the role of “a subdiscipline of aesthetics” (24). What appears problematic is not his broadening of the notion of the aesthetic onto various realms of human activity and nature, etc., but his designation of aesthetics as a philosophical activity aimed at a similarly broad domain. It is this collapsing of the aesthetic and aesthetics that I find hard to accept. Aesthetics as a philosophy of art (and perhaps culture) continues a long tradition, reaching back at least to Hegel. The artistic is not necessarily the aesthetic, for although the two overlap they are not identical. If we equate aesthetics with the broad domain of the aesthetic we lose a conceptual set of tools that may enable us to analyze and evaluate present-day artistic endeavors in an attempt to regain the critical and hence necessarily the normative edge of aesthetic philosophical reflection. By opting for such an aesthetics directed towards art I am not propagating aesthetic, philosophical or artistic exclusivism and a denigration of everything incompatible with whatever norms are imposed by such aesthetics. I wish instead to re-establish art as a relatively distinct phenomenon requiring its relatively distinct theoretical reflection. This view is a corollary of a position that has also recently been expressed by Arthur Danto. In his opinion, “there is a kind of transhistorical essence in art, everywhere and always the same, but it only discloses itself through history.”11 It would seem that such a criterion proffers a similar relativism as is the one existing in the present “artglobe.” This is not so, for while it is true that the view just described allows for an infinite variety of artistic endeavors, it at the same time does not ascribe to all of them the name and hence the status of art. As stated before, there is no practical or theoretical need to do so, for the current practice in the infinite number of artworlds of the world is such that the “interesting”—of which Henri Lefebvre wrote already in the fifties—has replaced the “artistic.” It is high time to reevaluate certain traditional values and regain and implement their meaning and function, but this time, retaining also the consciousness of their historical settings and the difference between them and those of the present. Hence a similar consciousness as that pertaining in postmodern art could be implemented in aesthetics (and perhaps elsewhere): the 10 Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics, 18. 11 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 28; cf. 95.

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consciousness of contingency but at the same time of the need for certain rules and norms, both of which may be relative and transient, not dependent upon essentialist and transcendent foundations, but upon continuously and incessantly renewed similar or related conditions of possibility. The fear of any normativity imposed from above or behind is unwarranted, for it cannot be promoted and implemented under present conditions. This may, finally, be what Welsch promulgates in his vision of the aesthetic, for his notion too aspires to a certain universality which is probably but a certain anthropological or human condition, based on the view that “fundaments” may themselves be aesthetically or poetically constituted. It now becomes clear why, according to Welsch, aesthetics cannot be limited to art only: if so, it would omit the broader spheres of the aesthetic and would, furthermore, include only those which are artistic but not necessarily aesthetic.12 4

“Aesthetic” and “Aesthetics”

I want to suggest a solution to the dilemma offered by Welsch, i.e. of choosing between aesthetics as a philosophy of art and philosophy of aesthesis. My answer would be that we can have the cake and eat it too. In other words, I opt for an aesthetics understood as a philosophy of art, but at the same time an aesthetics that can legitimately attain to and carry other meanings in multifarious ways connected and related to this concept and term. I wish to offer two interrelated reasons for such a designation of aesthetics. The first concerns the concept of transculturality as suggested by Welsch in the previously quoted essay. The author draws our attention to a curious fact related to the reasons for his introduction of this concept. He writes: The diagnosis of transculturality refers to a transition, or to a phase in a process of transition. It is a temporary diagnosis. It takes the old conception of single cultures as its point of departure, and it argues that this conception—although still seeming self-evident to many people—is 12

It should be noted in passing, though, that the aesthetic—as implied by Walter Benjamin, for example—may be a much more problematic notion than the artistic, for the autonomy and therefore the consciousness of the value of the artistic is related also to the tradition of the Enlightenment, while the notions of nature and the aesthetic as proffered by romanticism or for that matter by Michel Foucault, i.e. as the making of the perfect self, carry with them numerous dilemmas known from history.

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no longer descriptively adequate for most cultures today. Instead, the diagnosis of transculturality views a present and future state of cultures which is no longer monocultural but cross-cultural. The concept seeks to conceptually grasp this transition … The process of transition obviously implies two moments: the ongoing existence of single cultures (or of an old understanding of culture’s form) and the shift to a new, transcultural form of cultures. With respect to this double character of the transition, it is conceptually sound and even necessary to refer to single cultures of the old type as well as to point the way to transculturality.13 Why couldn’t we make a similar claim—with a slight twist, perhaps—­ concerning aesthetics? Aesthetics could then be interpreted as a broad notion encompassing all phenomena to which the adjective “aesthetic” could be assigned and, at the same time, retain or ascribe to aesthetics the meaning of philosophy of art. It would then be the tension between these (and other tentative) interpretations of aesthetics which would—and in fact do—together form aesthetics as such. It would be this difference that would be essential, a difference arising also from the historical situation in which it now comes into being, a situation exemplified by this enormous reconfiguration of traditional taxonomies. Aesthetics also is in a temporal transitional state, allowing for reinterpretation and the investment of new meanings. It is currently an empty signifier akin to Fredric Jameson’s “vanishing mediator,” offering an opening in an otherwise firm and homogeneous membrane of discursive and symbolic reality. It currently denotes what it has been in the past and what it could denote in the future—if we decide to influence the course of events. My second argument for such a line of reasoning is related to contemporary events and processes in art and culture. I claimed before that the present situation in art and culture is one of normative vacuity. I cannot offer here extensive arguments for such a statement, but suffice it to say that in my view the purportedly “central” artistic events—ranging from the Documenta exhibitions in Kassel, through some of the Venice biennials of this decade, to the 1997 “U3” exhibition in Ljubljana curated by Peter Weibel—as well as certain philosophical critiques of such events, such as that of Paul Crowther,14 for example, all reveal the present intermediary nature of our global art and culture, akin to the notion of postmodernism and postmodernity as previously analyzed by Welsch and Bauman. Could we not claim that the present normative vacuity is 13 14

Welsch, “Transculturality,” 74. Paul Crowther, The Language of Twentieth-Century Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

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in fact created by the transitional nature of this very art, where old forms are acquiring new contents and where in a new reality we are in search of new concepts? Could we not claim that the present apparent artistic uniformity, arising from the freedom to assign the title or label of art to any phenomenon whatsoever, offering the impression of a spent nature of the art events just mentioned, arises from the old modernist scheme or interpretation of avantgarde art that was aimed—according to Adorno and the Habermasian tradition that was then appropriated by the artistic, curatorial and theoretic elite of the last two and a half decades—at defending and promulgating avantgarde art because of its authenticity within the inauthentic capitalist world? Could it not be argued that the current cultural and artistic situation/situations in the world arise, on the one hand, from their propensity to multiply infinitely (hence requiring and acquiring local character and “local” evaluations) and, on the other hand, from their continuous global and hence general or even uniform presence and existence? In short, from their transitory nature, the accrual of which exceeds that of the modernist past? Not only the aforementioned demise of concepts such as alienation and reification attests that this is so, but also requests for new cognitive mappings within which art would again acquire its place. Within such a context it would of course be erroneous to require, as Welsch puts it, aesthetics to restrict and “link the concept of the aesthetic exclusively to the province of art and [to] want to fence it off completely from daily life and the living world partout, practicing [thus] aesthetic-theoretical provincialism.”15 Aesthetics—or rather, aestheticians—should become involved in art, practicing aesthetics in relation to and in connection with art and culture and not exclusively isolate themselves within the ivory towers of academia, a practice often seen in the past16 and implied in the statement just quoted from Welsch. Aesthetics as philosophy of art and also of culture should develop as a relatively distinct theoretical activity, although still remaining a part of aesthetics, the whole of this forming the same big family, usually possessing the necessary family resemblances. Such a permeability of concepts has been occurring in the humanities for a few decades at least, ranging from history to art history to philosophy.

15 16

Wolfgang Welsch, “Aestheticization Processes: Phenomena, Distinctions and Prospects,” Theory, Culture and Society 13/1 (1996): 11. Symptomatic for such a situation within aesthetics was the fact that only in the late 1980s did aestheticians at the international congress of the International Association for ­Aesthetics find the concept of postmodernism, for example, at all relevant for their ­discussions.

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Which reasons should prompt aesthetics and aestheticians to acquire such an activist role within the realms of art and culture? First among these, since it is the most obvious, is the present obsoleteness of strict divisions among various social practices. Staying aloof in aesthetics or philosophy is today possible only if we completely and consciously retreat from our everyday life, which is globalized as never before and influenced by global and local events and information to an equal if not greater extent. The second reason is the evaluative vacuity of the contemporary art scene and the preponderance of watered-down, simplified and nicely packaged philosophical and aesthetic theories by theorists who drop names, pick up artists and discard criteria, all in the name of combat against the obsolete dangers of the fetishization and autonomizing of art. A reason for such a course of events was also the self-critical stance of philosophy, its decomposition into various theoretical currents, and the general adversity towards normativity. The third reason is that art cannot be anything and everything. If it wants to be something, be this something contingent as other phenomena, as we ourselves are, some semblance of criteria must be articulated. An attempt in this direction was that of the “reenchantment of art”17 or Richard Schusterman in his Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992), for example, while others with which I am familiar are mostly continuations of the aforementioned combat against the presumed danger of artistic fetishization and autonomization. The strength of such arguments rests on the weakness and absence of any aesthetic theory attempting to argumentatively offer different or opposed views—or even strengthen the one that I here criticize. A possible argument against this third reason could be that art requires no criteria and can actually be anything and everything. Such an argument is not hard to dispute: every term, applied too broadly, loses its significance. Even in anarchist aesthetics, the concept opposed was not that of art, but of institutionalized art, art locked up in museums and galleries, art as an object in contrast to art as an event. It is the current “anything goes” slogan that contributes to the current anaestheticization and that causes numerous contemporary works to remain expressive devices only, with no actual aesthetic or artistic value, both of which depend directly upon the social response of the audience, be it small or large. The resulting void, besides being filled by mass culture, is also being compensated by traditional or classical art as an object of increased public interest. The fourth and final reason, or even causa finalis perhaps, is that art matters, or can matter. If we are to retain the notion of art for a specific and special 17

See, Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1991).

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realm of human activity that enables us to establish a specific form of human intersubjectivity and, at the same time, enhances our self-awareness, be it in a conscious or corporally intuitive way, art can retain its tentative role in human society and in individuals. This role can also be played by other social acts and activities, but not equally well. It is or could be up to aesthetics to develop these notions, concepts and normative frameworks, not as something to be imposed upon art—this is not only undesirable but impossible—but as something to be worked on together with art. It now becomes clear that any relevant aesthetics today must be linked to and involved with art. In the present transient period, characterized by a transculturality, a plethora of reconceptualizations, with the search for new notions and mappings with which to grasp our present—with profound philosophical questions and challenges—a renewed place should be found for aesthetics too. I opt for an aesthetics strongly linked to philosophy, on the one hand, and to art, on the other. Other options are viable, valuable and to be granted their worth. If, however, we ascribe to art an existential role exceeding that of quotidian aestheticization and of randomly feeding the Imaginary, aesthetics has to accept art as its relevant, if not necessary exclusively privileged object. Should we decide to ascribe to art such a place, we should then also accept as one of the essential interpretations of aesthetics that of being a philosophy of art and culture.

Chapter 6

Aesthetics: Philosophy of Art or Philosophy of Culture? (2001) Throughout its multifarious history aesthetics in its various historical, cultural, and theoretical frameworks has been concerned with issues of cognition, beauty, nature and art, and with their mutual relations and relationships. Hence, aesthetics, as established by Baumgarten, was intended to establish the science of cognition as carried out by the senses (although not in opposition to scientific rationality); in Kant the notions of the beautiful and the sublime simultaneously related to nature and to art, both in relation to the preconditions of human cognition and understanding; while in Hegel aesthetics firmly becomes philosophy of art, although it still retains the umbilical cord with the sensuous, for, by being the “sensuous appearance of the Idea,” by its very definition, art cannot exist without it. Although in Hegel art is an essential step in the development of the self-awareness of the Absolute Spirit, its specific sensuous features prevent it from attaining the ultimate position of the pure concept. This is reserved for philosophy, which deals, in Hegel’s view, with concepts only. Hegel’s identification of aesthetics with philosophy of art and the turn away from nature to art as the fundamental object of aesthetic reflection represents a crucial historical moment, for it not only establishes aesthetics as philosophy of art but, consequently, also signals the demise of its relevance by eliminating the further historic importance of its subject, i.e. art. As Peter Bürger notes in his Theory of the Avantgarde, in Hegel can be found a sketch of a concept of postromantic art: Using Dutch genre painting as his example, he writes that here the interest in the object turns into interest in the skill of presentation. “What should enchant us is not the subject of the painting and its lifelikeness, but the pure appearance (interesseloses Scheinen) which is wholly without the sort of interest that the subject has. The one thing certain about beauty is, as it were, appearance (semblance: Scheinen) for its own sake, and art is mastery in the portrayal of all the secrets of this ever profounder pure appearance of external realities.” What Hegel alludes to here is nothing other than what we called the developing autonomy of the aesthetic. He says expressly “that the artist’s subjective skill and his application of the © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_007

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means of artistic procedure are raised to the status of an objective matter in works of art.” This announces the shift of the form-content dialectic in favor of form, a development that characterizes the further course of art.1 Bürger draws from this passage the conclusion that Hegel himself foresaw the separation of the content and the form, or what he calls “the antithesis between art and the praxis of life.”2 There exists another interpretation of the Hegelian thesis of the intermediate position of art in relation to philosophy, which can be found in Henri Lefebvre and more recently in Luc Ferry and which relates to contemporary dilemmas intrinsic to aesthetics. According to this second interpretation of Hegel (the similarities of which to that of Bürger and hence indirectly of Adorno as well, Ferry disputes) contemporary art has lost its power of negation. It follows from Ferry’s theses that, because it turned into philosophy, art became sublated and by this act or process it was transformed into its opposite, although at the same time retaining its name as an empty shell. In the words of Ferry, “if art is simply an incarnation of a conceptual truth in a sensible material, art is dead.”3 The art that is referred to here is conceptual art in its broadest sense, and it is this art that increasingly appears as the art after modernism par excellence. It is also this art that is one of the causes for the present re-examination of the relation between art and culture and, therefore, of the relation between aesthetics as philosophy of art and aesthetics interpreted as philosophy of culture. A dilemma that confronts us today is as follows: can we treat all contemporary art as a single entity, whether it is conceptual or other, or do we have to distinguish between 1) conceptual art, 2) traditional (classical) art, and 3) predominantly commercial, commodified, and for the most part visual art that is closely related to what used to be called mass and consumer culture? A step necessary for answering this dilemma may be in historically defining the initial object of our inquiry. How can we define art historically? First, we may define it as a shifting function that gives a semblance of ontological stability simply because we don’t view it from a long term historical perspective. From this viewpoint artworks are transient entities with ontological, cognitive, aesthetic, ideological, and other functions, and artists and writers are appreciated and valued for a brief 1 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avantgarde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of ­Minnesota Press, 1984), 93. 2 Bürger, 93–94. 3 Luc Ferry, Le Sens du Beau (Paris: Cercle d’Art, 1998), 200.

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historical moment and then slip into oblivion to be, perhaps, resurrected years, decades, or even centuries later. They may, in the meantime, become part of the Canon, but even in this case it cannot be said that they are appreciated with the same intensity through history. The Czech structuralist Jan Mukařovský furthermore suggested that each new artistic movement or trend—an avant-gardist, for example—first opposes and subverts the past artistic norms, but subsequently becomes itself a part of the tradition and hence itself a norm. In this first historical definition, art is something that attains the function of art. Its essential feature could be defined in Nelson Goodman’s manner: the question is not what is art, but when is it art? Mukařovský follows here in the footsteps of the Russian formalists, who had already claimed that artworks— they were concerned almost exclusively with poetry and prose and not with works of visual arts—attained, lost and perhaps even regained their artistic status through history. Or, quoting Danto from eight decades later, “We might define their historical moment as any time in which they could have been works of art.”4 According to the second historical definition which is also a historicist one, art follows a historically preexistent norm. In Hegel’s case (and also, but to a lesser extent, in that of Heidegger) this is of course the Greek model. As Peter Szondi observes, “While in Hegel everything starts to move and everything has its specific place value in historical development … the concept of art can hardly develop, for it bears the unique stamp of Greek art.”5 Romantic art does not fulfill those criteria and their ideal; to return to Bürger again, For Hegel, romantic art is the product of the dissolution of the interpenetration of spirit and sensuousness (external appearance) characteristic of classical art. But beyond that, he conceives of a further stage where romantic art also dissolves. This is brought about by the radicalization of the opposites of inwardness and external reality that define romantic art. Art disintegrates into “the subjective imitation of the given” (realism in detail) and “subjective humor.” Hegel’s aesthetic theory thus leads logically to the idea of the end of art where art is understood to be what Hegel means by classicism, the perfect interpenetration of form and content.6 But does it necessarily follow that post-romantic art has lost the historic role it purportedly possessed in the past? While a positive answer is obligatory if one 4 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 196. 5 Quoted in Bürger, 92. 6 Bürger, 93.

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follows Hegel’s designation of the development of the Absolute Spirit and may even be necessary if we follow Ferry’s arguments, it is also true—as Adorno claims and, later, Bürger—that after romanticism, art, especially in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, attained or retained a very privileged social and existential position. Art’s preeminence was left practically undisputed at least until the sixties, when the emergence of structuralism and later poststructuralism started to radically question and attack the previously sacrosanct notions of the artwork, the artist and artistic creativity—a process that coincided with the change from the modernist into the postmodernist paradigm. Within such a changed culturescape the contemporary alternative to the two historical definitions previously described would be that of Arthur Danto: “The picture then is this: there is a kind of transhistorical essence in art, everywhere and always the same, but it only discloses itself through history … Once brought to the level of self-consciousness, this truth reveals itself as present in all the art that ever mattered.”7 This essence or truth cannot be identified with a particular style of art, continues Danto. What is then disclosed through history is the historicized essence of art. And Danto continues much like Bürger and especially Ferry: “[T]he end of art consists in the coming to awareness of the true philosophical nature of art.”8 The passage of art into philosophy, the emergence of intellectual reflection upon art, purportedly signals the final death knell to art proper, but while in Ferry or Lefebvre art has not only lost its historic role but has lost its role altogether, Danto sees in this change the emergence of a post-historical art which, although no longer historic, legitimately continues the tradition of its predecessor and is therefore a continuation of art as such. A correlate of the previous belief in the importance and the essential truth-revealing function of art are the nineteenth- and twentieth-century beliefs in creativity of which art was the paramount instance. The view that the role of art may have been diminishing for centuries at least, is obvious also from Heidegger’s question: “[I]s art still an essential and necessary way in which truth that is decisive for our historical existence happens, or is art no longer of this character”?9 This same issue was picked up in 1997 in The Work of Art by the French aesthetician Gérard Genette, who noted that Adorno and Heidegger “systematically overvalued art”10 thereby echoing Danto’s views on posthistorical art. 7 8 9 10

Danto, 28. Danto, 30. Heidegger, quoted in Danto, 32. Gérard Genette, L’Oeuvre de l’Art: La Relation Esthétique (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 11.

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Truly, may we not say that art is but yet another master narrative of modernity and that modernism was its last and perhaps paramount historical instance? In other words, that the dominant contemporary art has lost its privileged social, political, cognitive, even ethical role and that it has been transformed into its opposite, this opposite being the visual arts and, especially, their commodified postmodern version? The essential difference appears to occur with the demise of the modernist paradigm in art. This description is, I think, generally accepted, for there seem today to be no contemporary defenders either of modernity as an incomplete project or of interpretations of postmodernism as yet another facet or instance of high modernism, as was frequently argued in the eighties. If, then, postmodernism appeared as a relatively homogeneous phenomenon, which with its firm and distinct features could persuasively stand up to modernism, the latter being exemplified by its distinct, exclusive and easily recognizable properties, then in the nineties and thereafter we seem no longer capable of affirming such distinct properties in postmodernism. In other words, the current postmodernism increasingly appears as a series of localized artistic and cultural phenomena, existing as a set of local and transient events with no particular claims to universality and historic importance. Hence Heidegger’s observation about the possible reduced importance of art and Genette’s comment about the overevaluation of art in Adorno and Heidegger correctly announce or diagnose the current status of art. Nonetheless, such diagnoses are possible on the background of a specific and outstanding historical situation of the previous century, i.e. that of modernism. As Fredric Jameson notes, echoing Adorno from his Aesthetic Theory, “Whatever the validity of Hegel’s feelings about romanticism, those currents which led on into what has come to be called modernism are thereby surely to be identified with one of the most remarkable flourishings of the arts in all of human history.”11 It is hence probably also from the vantage point of modernism that the current diminishment of the importance and relevance of art appears to be stark enough to cause a series of authors—some of whom I have mentioned— to question the current status of art altogether. Moreover, since the avantgarde project of art has been separated from the general project of life and society as an art project, as two instances of the same utopian process (the consequences of which were well described in the case of the Russian avantgarde by Boris Groys in his Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin book from 1988), what we are confronted with are the consequences of what Achille Bonito Oliva, Charles Jencks, and

11

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings of the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (­London: Verso, 1998), 80–81.

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Jameson have at an early stage, i.e. in 1972, 1975, and 1984 respectively, diagnosed as trans-avantgarde, post-avantgarde, and postmodernism. If, then, Duchamp’s ready-mades appear today as an ever-recurrent issue of aesthetic and philosophical debates, this does not mean that this was the case also in the first half of the twentieth century when Duchamp was interpreted variously as a dadaist, a surrealist, and a conceptualist. It was only when art created according to or resembling that made by him almost a century ago started to become the exclusive recognizable dominant trend of recent art that his work became an object of intense attention and was revealed as an early and paradigmatic instance of contemporary art. Marcel Duchamp has been instinctively resurrected as the proto-postmodernist, for postmodernism consists, to quote an insightful observation by Slavoj Žižek, “in displaying the object directly, allowing it to make visible its own indifferent and arbitrary character. The same object can function successively as a disgusting reject and as a sublime, charismatic apparition: the difference, strictly structural, does not pertain to the ‘effective properties’ of the object, but only to its place in the symbolic order.”12 Doesn’t this observation perfectly fit the history of the early ready-mades? Of the “Fountain,” for example, which turned, but in this instance from a less than memorable object, restricted mostly to public toilets, into one of the most discussed works of art of the second half of the previous century, with the issue of how many holes the original had becoming one of the highlights of the discussions and disputes of art historians and critics? Isn’t it also true that Duchamp, since he was a predecessor of postmodernism at least in this respect, fitted only with difficulty into the designations assigned to him by twentieth-century art theory? In a recent article in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Péter György argued that “the end of art history [which György posits around 1984] also signified the logical collapse of the border between high and not-high art, and is accompanied by the rendering senseless of the distancing of art from not-art.”13 Furthermore— Inasmuch as the reality of essentialism and institutionalism can be ordered into periods, we can state that the dominance of essentialism and functionalism was appropriate for the history of art, for the centuries of the great narrative. That era lasted from Vasari to Gombrich, or Danto, 12 13

Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991), 143. Péter György, “Between and After Essentialism and Institutionalism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57/4 (1999): 431.

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we might say from the Renaissance to abstract expressionism. What happened afterwards and what is happening now is none other than the preparation for the dethronement of high culture.14 Doesn’t this periodization coincide with the passage from modernism into postmodernism, namely, with the advent of the visible demise of modernism, and with the theories of Lyotard, Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of the changed roles of legislators and interpreters, as well as Jameson’s seminal essay from 1984—implicitly supported also by theses by Lyotard and Baudrillard—on postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism? It is unnecessary to mention a series of publications diagnosing the visual turn in culture published since the late eighties, and it is this same visual culture, or rather the general and all-pervading ocularcentrism, that exemplifies much, if not all, of contemporary culture, or is, at least, its dominant feature. What we are predominatly experiencing then are basically two related but relatively distinct forms of contemporary art: the first is the conceptual one, the paradigmatic case of which is Duchamp, and the second consists of the visual arts with their continuation in a predominantly visual culture. 1

The Problem of (Visual) Culture

It was, I think, at this point that the issue of culture and hence of the philosophy of culture had, after three decades, reentered contemporary discussion about art. Members of the Frankfurt School had experienced and persuasively expressed profound cultural shock from their encounter with American mass culture such as jazz or Hollywood films, both in Europe in the 1930s as well as later, during the exile of some of them in the U.S., which evidently only confirmed their previous denigrating views. For a long time, the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass and consumer culture effectively blocked—until the proliferation of the so-called postmodern theories—any totalizing philosophical attempts at its analysis from a positive point of view. When these critical ideas were transposed back into Europe in the sixties and seventies, they helped cause culture to become an object of sociological research, but only occasionally of philosophical investigation, except in their more ideological and political forms, where culture was treated (and often still is) as a set of ideological emanations 14 Ibid.

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of various class, gender or racial issues and conflicts. At the same time, i.e. in modernism and high modernism, culture also signified a social realm devoid of normative designations so frequent in relation to art, wherein much of the institutionalization of art took place via the inclusion of non-art into the realm of art, very much in accordance with Mukařovský’s notion of the artistic norm. It was the visual turn of the eighties, the rise of postmodern culture and its globalization as depicted and analyzed by numerous authors in the eighties and, earlier, in the seventies, also by Jean Baudrillard in his analyses of the sign and its economy, that offered first a critical and then a resigned analysis and assessment of postmodern culture, on the one hand, and a euphorical one on the other, with culture as such now being approached in an increasingly neutral manner.15 In his book on Adorno, Martin Jay writes: To speak of culture means immediately to be confronted by the basic tension between its anthropological and elitist meanings. For the former, which in Germany can be traced back at least to Herder, culture signifies a whole of way of life: practices, rituals, institutions and material artifacts, as well as texts, ideas and images. For the latter, which developed in German as an adjunct of a personal inwardness contrasted with the superficiality of courtly manners, culture is identified with art, philosophy, literature, scholarship, theater, etc., the allegedly “humanizing pursuits” of the “cultivated” man. As a surrogate for religion, whose importance was steadily eroding, it emerged in the nineteenth century as a repository of man’s most noble accomplishments and highest values, often in tension with either “popular” or “folk” culture, as well as with the more material achievements of “civilization.” Because of its undeniably hierarchical and elitist connotations, culture in this more restricted sense has often aroused hostility from populist or radical critics, who allege its natural complicity with social stratification.16 In most other European countries (one would want to say “cultures”), culture carries a similar meaning, with a more distant one being the French, wherein 15

16

An outstanding example of symbolic commodification carried out by postmodernism is first the work and then the views of Jean Baudrillard, which started as an all-pervading critique of postmodern culture and in a single decade ended by being one of its main theoretical supports with him become one of its proponents. Martin Jay, Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984), 112.

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the notion is probably less frequently used than elsewhere. Hence, according to Larousse, the term “culture” relates to 1) the action of culturing: “the culture of flowers,” for example; 2) the unity or the whole “of acquired knowledge”; 3) the unity or the whole social, religious and other structures characterizing a certain society; 4) “mass culture”; 5) “physical culture”; and 6) a culture in a biological sense, such as that of microbes. Another usage, similarly distant from the usual sense of culture, but with a difference arising from an even more different historical background, is a Russian interpretation of culture, wherein culture is, as the Russian philosopher Mikhail Epstein stated some years ago, designed “to liberate a person from the very society in which he is doomed to live. Culture is not a product of society, but a challenge and alternative to society.”17 Culture is a parallel world, in which art is “more true,” in the words of the contemporary Russian painter Erik Bulatov, than real life. Culture thus offers a spiritual shelter from the mindless pursuits of everyday life and its chaos. These different meanings of the term culture offer various inroads into the issue of a possible philosophy of culture. It is mostly the tradition of the Frankfurt School, combined with contemporary discussion of new technologies, alternative culture, postmodernism, postmodernity and, especially, contemporary visual culture, which are among the second group of reasons for present attempts to bring together philosophical aesthetics and the notion of culture. There is a certain antinomy in such an attempt, for culture was in the past either a normatively neutral term or, in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, often a negative one, for it was conceived as an opposite to uncommodified avantgarde art. The views and theories of Walter Benjamin were in this regard exceptions which gained authority only when the tenets of Adorno or Marcuse became increasingly obsolete in relation to the recent developments in art and culture. The notion of culture appears to respond well to its recent neutral or at least non-normative notion, to the “dethronement of high culture,” to use Péter György’s phrasing, and to the implementation of the institutional or, to use Stephen Davies terminology, the “procedural” definition and theory of art18 as theoretically and practically the ruling definition, offering a philosophical framework in aesthetic discourse on art. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that no other definitions and understandings—for example, following Davies again, the “functional definition of art”—exist any longer. The difficulty with the institutional or procedural definitions (and interpretations) of art today is that they disregard the historical changes that have occurred with the 17 18

Mikhail Epstein, After the Future (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 6. See Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

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passage from modernism into postmodernism and treat art as if it were still functioning as it had in the time when modernism was vibrant and exclusive, while, in fact, they mostly use as their examples conceptual art which often functions like Wittgenstein’s language games. If, on the other hand, the social and existential functions of art have apparently substantially diminished due to a series of reasons (these being analyzed in the last few decades by Lefebvre, Lyotard, Huyssen, Harvey, Bauman, and Vattimo among others), then we may possess a good reason to ask whether in the present time the very object of such theories and of the ensuing definition is not flawed at the very outset and does not—and cannot—authentically represent their pertinent reference point and the subject of its definition. Moreover, even if such attempts remain legitimate, meaning that art still basically functions as it did in the past (although perhaps not to the same extent, or with the same intensity, or equally frequently) the problem still remains how to establish the relation of such art to culture in the sense of mass and consumer culture—which today applies predominantly to the visual culture and its hybrid forms, these ranging from dress codes, design, and the aestheticization of everyday life to the ensuing anaestheticization and its retroactive consequences. Contemporary art in most cases obviously no longer strives to be partisan, subversive, and radical. Even if authors such as Terry Eagleton (in his Ideology of the Aesthetic, 1990) claim that postmodern art is both radical and conservative, most frequently its radical features are immediately commodified or carry, and especially, retain little weight if measured by their social consequences. Commodification is one of the essential common features of contemporary and past culture and of contemporary art. It is the third cause for the question of how to relate the philosophy of art to a philosophy of culture so as to avoid separating these two realms of inquiry whose subject increasingly appears to be merging or are revealing numerous similarities—for hasn’t art, by losing or diminishing its truth-disclosing function, landed in the broad and normatively neutral realm of culture? Modernist art tended to distance itself from culture: culture was ethnic, local, traditional or mass and consumer culture, while art was predominantly elitist (and a part of “high” culture), be it in the traditional modernist sense or the avantgarde one. One of its distinguishing characteristics was its subversive nature, be it in relation to previous art or to society, as well as its truth-­disclosing role, defended by philosophers from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, and Althusser. It furthermore required an effort on the part of the audience to achieve aesthetic and artistic appreciation. Such modernist art is today often assimilated and integrated into

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the repository of cultural heritage and is modern in Lyotard’s sense (as is the theory that supported it). One of the features of postmodern art and culture, related of course to their commodified nature, is their accessibility, their “userfriendly” nature which, on the one hand, allows both to be global and, on the other, to raise the question whether this is still art and not simply culture in its traditional commodified form. Such works are hence often hybrids between modernist art (from which they retain the notion of art) and culture under modernism (from which they have gained their accessibility and, therefore, what was then perceived as its commodified features). A paramount example of such art or culture is contemporary architecture, which is simultaneously artistic, aestheticized, market-oriented, and representative of a public space. It is therefore not surprising that the issue of postmodernism was first raised in architecture, in which the demarcation line between art and culture is often extremely difficult to draw. In modern exhibition spaces the architectural environment often carries equal or similar importance to the works exhibited in it. The reason why an attempt to designate aesthetics as philosophy of culture seems at first sight doomed to failure is that aesthetics, not only in its functionalist form, but also in its proceduralist or institutionalist variants, in spite of the innumerable attempts to disrupt the institution of the realm of art, nonetheless contain an intrinsic normative feature. While contemporary art may be losing its real or imagined existential or truth-disclosing function and value which it presumably possessed under modernism, the designation of “art” nonetheless at least potentially retains artifacts and other phenomena existing under such a designation within the unavoidably, i.e. by definition, normative realm of “art.” To be an artist today often designates primarily one’s self-designation and only secondarily that of the audience. I may be an artist in my own eyes and for this I don’t require confirmation from others—a feature that radically distinguishes a contemporary artist from a modernist one, who required at least the appreciation of a narrow circle of similarly inclined individuals. But, on the other hand, such a designation does not eliminate, negate or replace its normative implications. 2

Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Culture

So, how would aesthetics, in spite of the aforementioned possible reservation, be possible as a philosophy of culture? I shall conclude by discussing two such attempts. The first is that of Heinz Paetzold who has developed his views in a series of articles and books published since 1990. I am thinking particularly of his Ästhetik der neueren Moderne from 1990 and The Symbolic Language of Culture, Fine

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Arts and Architecture from 1997. The essential arguments from these two books have been presented and updated in an article entitled “Aesthetics and/as Philosophy of Culture” and published in the 1999 volume of the IAA Yearbook. I shall thus limit my discussion of Paetzold’s views to this essay. Paetzold’s intention is to develop a critical philosophy of culture. In his words, “This undertaking finds a historical backing in the stance of the earlier critical theory, on the one hand, and in the project of the philosophy of symbolic forms, on the other. I am arguing in favor of a synthesis between these two strands which moved historically along separate routes.”19 What makes Paetzold’s project of a philosophy of culture interesting is the requirement for such a philosophy to be critical, for without this critical element it is difficult if not outright impossible to propose a persuasive philosophical project. What Paetzold then appropriates from Cassirer is his understanding of culture as “a process of man’s progressive self-liberation.” But for this to be possible, in culture two sides must be recognized. “All this leads me to the conclusion,” writes Paetzold, “that philosophy of human culture becomes a critical endeavor only to the extent that we grasp culture’s two sides: its hope-giving promises and its thorough failures.”20 Secondly, argues Paetzold, “the philosophy of human culture has to deal with the plurality of symbolic forms in a non-­hierarchical, pluralistic way … Dethroning scientific and technological rationality from being the foundational paradigm of culture does not mean to enthrone the arts and poetry in place of science as romanticism wanted to do.”21 Thirdly, the philosophy of human culture contains an answer to the question of what makes a cultured subjectivity. This includes bodily and somatic components which cannot be sublated into pure rationality.22 Among the early philosophers of culture Paetzold finds not only Herder and Georg Simmel, but also Vico, Rousseau, Croce and Collingwood, and places aesthetics within a critical philosophy of culture as a component of it,23 wherein works of art exist as “symbolically significant expressions of culture.”24 He ends his essay by explicitly embracing a functional understanding of symbolic forms, art included. While Paetzold’s project of a critical philosophy of culture, a segment of which is also aesthetics as a philosophy of art, appears very promising, it lacks an analysis of the negative side, i.e. culture’s failures. Without explaining this 19 Heinz Paetzold, “Aesthetics and/as Philosophy of Culture,” IAA Yearbook 3 (1999): 1. 20 Ibid., 2. 21 Ibid., 3. 22 Ibid., 3–4. 23 Ibid., 8. 24 Ibid., 9.

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side, his project seems to fall under a similar category as the neopragmatist theories of Schusterman and Rorty whom Paetzold criticizes for highlighting only the aesthetic dimension of contemporary culture, i.e. only one of its sides. Hence the project of a critical philosophy of culture remains for the time incomplete. Another, much better known recent project of a philosophy of culture, is that of Fredric Jameson, many of whose writings after the essay on postmodernism published in the New Left Review in 1984 were devoted to various aspects of not only postmodernism as the cultural dominant of the current late capitalism, i.e. its multinational form, but also to broader cultural issues, these being devoted to and supported by a variety of works ranging from films by David Lynch, contemporary poetry and postmodern architecture, to painting by Andy Warhol and Heidegger’s analysis of a painting by van Gogh. In certain respects Jameson’s analysis and critique of contemporary culture is similar to that discussed in Paetzold’s project, although it rests not only upon the tradition of the Frankfurt School but also on Georg Lukács and partly on Lyotard and Baudrillard. In fact, most of Jameson’s theory is surprisingly traditionalist, finding, with its totalizing tendencies, its proper historical place perhaps more in the first half or middle of the previous century than at the outset of postmodernism. By stating this I in no way wish to diminish its importance and influence or insightfulness. On the contrary, I instead want to point out that such a totalizing stance obviously reveals, firstly, the contemporary need for such a viewpoint and the privileges it offers and, secondly, it avoids the shortcomings of regarding postmodernism as a complete break with the past which then prevents a serious historical comparative analysis. On the other hand, Jameson’s frequent, almost interchangeable use of the terms art and culture and his treatment of the former as an implicit extension and perhaps a relatively special case of the latter, avoids some of the pitfalls of the desire to establish a clear division between the two, implying a desire to collapse them into a single entity. The reason that Jameson’s approach appears successful, be it in relation to realist, modernist or postmodernist art and culture, is in his implicit interpretation of art and culture as a vehicle for creating meaning, for creating a representation and self-representation of ourselves as social beings. Hence his request addressed to authentic art and culture are requests for political and partisan views and articulations, for subversion of established norms and views—an interpretation that is highly successful when aimed at politically oriented works or an Adorno-type interpretation of art and its place in society, but which falls short when applied to acclaimed works of art which nonetheless show no covert or overt political intentions. This question is frequently

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raised by Jameson himself, as in the case of Warhol’s works: “The question [is] why Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell’s soup cans—so obviously representations of commodity or consumer fetishism—do not seem to function as critical or political statements.”25 It is exactly this question that sets the limits to Jameson’s endeavor to determine the function or functions of art in a uniform way. Yet, an apparent way out of this impasse is offered by the notion of “cognitive mapping,” which is in fact, as Jameson himself admits, a paraphrase of Lukács’s class consciousness. Put differently, the basic purpose or function of art—any art of any epoch—is to offer a cognitive mapping of oneself and of the society in which we belong, to disclose the truth of oneself within one’s place and to offer coordinates which help us establish our here and now within a given social, historical and mental space. In 1984 and also in 1991 (when the “Postmodernism” essay was published in a book bearing the same title), he expressed his view that postmodernism had not developed sufficiently yet to allow for a cognitive mapping which would be not only the opposite of itself—schizophrenia, chaos, temporal displacement, etc. To our surprise this topic is later dropped, which makes us wonder whether this happened because it was irrelevant or because in no instance an answer for it has yet been found. In other words, postmodernist art and culture seem to offer no clue as to how to establish a cognitive mapping similar to that offered in modernism by modernist works as described and explained by Lukács, Adorno and others. It thus appears as if Jameson accepts Lyotard’s views from The Postmodern Condition, where, in his introduction to the English translation, Jameson offers no way out of what for him should be a failure, but which is, for Lyotard, exactly the central feature of postmodern art.26 The notion of cognitive mapping somewhat corresponds to ideas promoted by Paetzold, for cognitive mapping doesn’t necessarily mean only a rational endeavor, but is, judging also from Jameson’s Hegelian background, equally sensuous, representing in this way a case of symbolic forms. If this is true, a link between these various attempts to forge a philosophy of culture may be established, but we seem to be still a long way from a relatively consistent and theoretically persuasive philosophy of culture, although something of the kind appears, after half a century, to be again a necessity that will help us productively relate art and culture, but in a contemporary historical setting. 25 26

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 158. See Fredric Jameson, “Introduction,” to Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxiii–xxv.

Chapter 7

Art Beyond Aesthetics, or, the Consequences of Promiscuity (2001) 1

Philosophy’s Relation to Visual Art

It may be safe to claim that an aesthetician finds himself or herself today in a situation where he or she feels overwhelmed by the ongoing events in philosophy, art and culture. Moreover, if only a few decades ago an aesthetician or a philosopher could well live within and refer almost exclusively to his own cultural and linguistic environment, this is no longer the case. Let me mention an example of this latter change: Almost thirty years ago, in 1972, a British reviewer of Jean-François Lyotard’s book Discours, figure from 1971 noted in the British Journal of Aesthetics that, “very little of the general position [of the author] is clear enough to be argued with.”1 At that time the borders between the cultural empires—and hence the philosophical ones—were obviously sufficiently firm to prevent any influence of the said work in the Anglo-American cultural empire. What was true about views on such works or of Hegelian philosophy in the U.K., was true of analytical philosophy on the Continent. Less than two decades after this review the very same work of Lyotard received an unprecedented response among Anglo-American authors: Geoffrey Bennington, Peter Dews, Bill Readings, Scott Lash, Andrew Benjamin and Rodolphe Gasché, among others, have highly praised the ideas in this work, some even emulating its discourse. This all goes to show how much the previous high and perhaps rigid borders between different philosophical traditions have diminished in recent years. (Or, some may say, goes to show how criteria have been swept away.) It is such a plethora of thus far foreign ideas that adds to the apparent confusion concerning what is and what is not philosophy or aesthetics—as well as concerning what is relevant to them and what is not. A number of authors—W. J. T. Mitchell, Richard Rorty and Martin Jay, to mention but a few—have shown not only how averse contemporary philosophy is to the “visual turn,” but how the “linguistic tum” in philosophy may have arisen exactly as a consequence of the predominance of ocularcentrism. It is understandable that among philosophers and aestheticians much of what is 1 Veronica Forrest-Thomson, “Review of Discours, figure,” British Journal of Aesthetics 12:1 (1972): 95. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_008

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usually designated as mass and popular culture is treated as consumer culture and hence disregarded as a proper object for a theoretical discussion. Most twentieth-century philosophers not only sided with extravagant and avantgarde art, but, moreover, made explicit value judgments and offered reasons for them. Today it is instead fairly common to avoid issues of value judgments in art and to limit oneself to descriptive terms, explicitly or implicitly accepting as a fact the value judgments offered by those whom Arthur Danto aptly calls “experts.” Today only very few authors evaluate or even proclaim some or much of the so-called contemporary visual arts “non-art,” this reproach being mostly directed towards most or some of contemporary conceptual and neo-conceptual art. One of the reasons why this is so difficult to do I have already mentioned: it lies also in the fact that for two centuries philosophers tended to side with new ideas and modes of thinking and creating, as well as with unrecognised, oppositional, non-traditionalist, bohemian, and anti­market oriented art. Contemporary (mostly European) conceptual art seems to fall under the same category of anti-establishment art for it appears not to be a part of affirmative or consumer culture and is, furthermore, seen as a direct descendant of avantgarde and neo-avantgarde art supported by figures as different as Theodor Adorno, Clement Greenberg, and Lyotard and exemplified by artists as different as Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. Some authors such as Stefan Morawski and Paul Crowther have criticized the contemporary version of such art, the latter attempting to draw a dividing line within the conceptual art itself, distinguishing between what he calls “at best a set of exercises in applied aesthetics,”2 and genuine art which Crowther finds “aesthetically interesting.”3 In this latter less frequent case it appears as if aesthetics or philosophy seems to influence the artistic domain and to create some semblance of hierarchical and hence normative order and distinction where apparently very little of it exists any longer. Such critical authors are not numerous, they come from different traditions and possess very few other shared characteristics. But a critical position is hardly possible without criticism. The French aesthetician Gérard Genette thus defends the view that aesthetics should be a philosophy of criticism,4 while Hal Foster, no doubt a very different author, asks himself,

2 Paul Crowther, The Language of Twentieth-Century Art: A Conceptual History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 186. 3 Ibid., 183. 4 Gérard Genette, La Relation Esthétique (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 10.

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What is the place of criticism in a visual culture that is ever more administered from an art world dominated by promotional players with scant need for criticism, to a media world of communication-and-­ entertainment corporations with no interest whatsoever? [ … ] Of course this very situation makes the old services of criticism ever more urgent. He concludes by stating his doubt “if any artist, critic, theorist, or historian can ever escape value judgments.”5 Nonetheless, such views are uncommon. What hinders such interventions are historical reasons that I mentioned earlier. Today only the most conservative critic will dare criticize an exhibition or a book, play or author for moral or ideological reasons, aesthetic reasons being popular no more—the only reasons generally accepted as a proper cause for reproof being denigration of religion and race. Maybe a further cause for this situation is. the burden of repression in the previous century which is apparently so heavy that a strong disapproval or rejection on any other basis but the two mentioned is almost unthinkable. Or, equally if not more true, maybe works appear and exist in so many different frameworks that it appears almost impossible to apply common criteria to them. Thirdly, art today may simply be different from that of the past or may play a lesser role. And—a general observation—it may be that the described situation is mainly limited to Europe. If in modernism and prior to it, art was divided into art and non-art, with the former being then divided into mediocre and superb, today “all art is equally and indifferently art” (Danto); or, in the words of Genette, “An artwork requests a (positive) appreciation and it is this request which defines it as such, and not appreciation as ‘aesthetically correct’ which it obtains or not.”6 An early warning concerning such a shift in our appreciation of art was expressed in 1962 when Henri Lefebvre in his Introduction to Modernity noted that art is less and less frequently being viewed as “beautiful” but is characterized instead by the normatively neutral adjective “interesting.” A recent critical note related mainly to contemporary conceptual art, was put forth by Crowther: “Once the Duchamp readymade is allowed as art, literally, everything else can be allowed as art.”7 In Crowther’s view the consequences of this opening of the gates of art to conceptual art are enormous: once “in principle, any object can be counted

5 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), xv and 226. 6 Genette, 272. 7 Crowther, 177.

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as art, then the possibility of large-scale innovation—the development of new paradigms—is heavily restricted.”8 Is what is true of visual or fine arts also true of literature, music, architecture and so on? Étienne Souriau quoted Victor Hugo saying “Le vent c’est tous les vents,”9 “The wind is all the winds,” implying with this metaphor that various art forms form a whole. Nonetheless, at least some of the issues of the visual arts appear limited to them only: hence no great and divisive contemporary dilemmas similar to those associated with conceptual art have arisen in poetry or in theater; architecture had no Marcel Duchamp whose influence would continue for almost a century. Also, other art forms weren’t subjected to such an influence of technical innovations, commercialization and instantaneous globalization, all of which have caused the visual arts to be often indissociably linked to global popular culture, on the one hand, and to merge with a series of other forms of artistic expression, on the other. Finally the very term “visual arts” bears witness to the dilemmas associated with this artistic and cultural realm. 2

The Intertwining of Art and Philosophy

In the past, conceptualising about art was not only deeply influenced by art, contemporary art included, but was also able to intervene in the forming of art. There is no doubt about the truth of this statement when referring to past art: not only in antiquity, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, but also in classicism, romanticism and realism, ideas in philosophy, philosophy of art included, had direct consequences for art and, equally often, vice versa. Similarly, philosophical, social and historical ideas behind the October Revolution had a direct impact on the Russian avantgarde. Russian formalists such as Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum or Roman Jakobson influenced Russian futurists such as Victor Khlebnikov and offered theoretical arguments for their poetic inventions. The theory of Einfühlung or empathy as developed by Theodor Lipps and later by Wilhelm Worringer directly influenced expressionism, especially Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky.10 Theodor Adorno was a friend of Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg and wrote about atonal music, comparing it to modernist painting. His Philosophy of Modern Music is one of the rare works by a philosopher devoted to music, and many musicologists have a high regard 8 9 10

Ibid., 215. Étienne Souriau, La Correspondence des arts (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), 7. Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 9.

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for it; in many parts of Europe it is seen as one of the few relevant classical philosophical books on modem music. French existentialist philosophers not only influenced fiction writers and playwrights but were themselves sometimes—as in the case of Jean-Paul Sartre—appreciated and highly regarded as writers and playwrights. The same is true of Maurice Merleau-Ponty who influenced artists as different as Alberto Giacometti and Richard Serra. Even later, in the late sixties and early seventies, French writers around the review Tel Quel not only promoted Isidore Ducasse—the Compte de Lautréamont—and similar authors, but also their own circle of modestly successful writers, such as Philippe Sollers or Marcelin Pleynet. Similar cases exist in architecture, with the most recent global example being deconstruction. In the late eighties it led to cooperation between the art of building and the love of wisdom, as in the architectural project of Parc de La Villette in Paris which brought together the architect Bernard Tschumi and the philosopher Jacques Derrida. In the case of philosophy the situation was similar to that of sciences and scientific discoveries and ideas that were transposed into art. Nonetheless, it still remains an interesting question as to what extent and in which ways artists understood, transformed and applied scientific and philosophical ideas and vice versa. Numerous other cases of the recent intertwining of philosophy or philosophy of art and artistic practice could be offered which don’t seem to support the statement about the meagre influence of philosophy on artistic practice. Or, more to the point, this statement is hardly true of continental philosophy. What we may find problematic is thus not so much a lack of cases of mutual influence and interdependency but two other issues which, in my view, are responsible for the impression that aesthetics and philosophy no longer influence art and which may also throw a different light on some of the statements I have made thus far concerning value judgments and their relevance in relation to contemporary art. They both appertain not so much to aesthetics or philosophy but primarily to contemporary art proper. The first issue is related to the impression that today we no longer find much of the so-called “great art” being created. While we may all agree that Sophocles, Bosch, Tintoretto, Shakespeare, Mozart or Gaudí have created great art, many seem to think that nothing of that stature is created today. The second issue is related to the impression that the designation “art” is being used too indiscriminately. Combined with the frequency of such designations it makes us question the import of the notion of art altogether. It is like using the word “food” for everything from a hamburger and steak to grass, acorn and tree-bark. Although calling all these items “food” is not incorrect, it doesn’t really tell us much about their culinary or nutritional value.

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May we compare food and other trivial activities and artifacts to art? If we are concerned with aesthetics as philosophy of art we cannot be but sceptical about such a comparison. Nonetheless, the consequences of views held or suggested by some contemporary philosophers and aestheticians are sometimes not dissimilar to such an interpretation of the notion of art. This was highlighted by Wolfgang Welsch in his lengthy paper, presented in Ljubljana during the XIVth International Congress for Aesthetics in 1998, where he seriously compared art to sport. In his view sport “fulfils the function of art for a broader audience no longer reached by art.”11 A related observation is implied by Genette when he notes in passing that Heidegger and Adorno have both overvalued the role of art.12 Viewed from our present perspective the status the former assigned to poetry really may appear unusual, as may the wager of the latter on avantgarde art which alone counters the complete dominance of society by market forces. Isn’t this—and, equally or more importantly, wasn’t this in their own time—more a kind of wishful thinking far removed from any cultural reality than a statement of fact? The answer is negative, for although avantgarde art didn’t fulfil the historic role it aspired to according to its artists, theorists, philosophers and ideologues, it nonetheless had tangible effects in artistic practice and in the social and aesthetic eval­uation of such art. A good example of the social failure of the avantgarde’s ideas is modernist functionalist architecture which was intended for workers but ended being inhabited, as Tom Wolfe pointed out years ago, by the rich bourgeois who alone could afford its price. In spite of its failure to carry out a genuine social mission, in the eyes of its beholders, visitors, and inhabitants, it remains great art. It could even be claimed that the failure to carry out its social mission may have substantially added to its artistic value for this allowed it to avoid compromises and sliding into ideology and remain on the level of a semantically open idea. What also caused Heidegger and Adorno to assign such an outstanding place to art within their philosophy was a totalizing philosophical view. If we want to grant art (or some other human activity) a privileged position, this has to be carried out from within a broader philosophical framework. A common denominator of all recent philosophies which assigned to art a special place (and, as previously mentioned, directly or indirectly influenced artists, critics and other members of various artworlds), was the belief that art was something very special. One of the basic but now often forgotten tenets of 11 12

Wolfgang Welsch, “Sport-Viewed Aesthetically, and Even as Art?” Filozofski vestnik (XIV ICA -Proceedings, Part]), ed. Aleš Erjavec, 20/2 (1999): 235. Genette, 11.

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anthropological Marxism as well as of existential phenomenology was the idea that to be creative is the highest form of self-fulfillment. We find this idea in Marx’s early writings, in Heidegger’s praise of Hölderlin, or in Merleau-Ponty for whom painting plays the role equal to that of poetry in Heidegger. Instead of looking for the age of authenticity in pre-Socratic Greece, Merleau-Ponty finds it in one’s own childhood instead, in the last two centuries a recurrent metaphor for the creative approach of an artist: to look at the world with the eyes of a child. It is mainly within such a framework that philosophy and aesthetics have attained an influential position in relation to art. What united the two was an understanding that an artwork is a creation of the human being who himself or herself is striving to make his or her life or its segments similar to a work of art by turning living into an art of living. It is the idea of Bildung as developed by Schiller and recently by Michel Foucault that brings the two together. As Souriau wrote in 1947: “Don’t believe that you yourself could exist without art—without making from yourself an artwork.”13 Not only the anthropological, but also the political consequences of such a statement are obvious. The issue of the intervention of aesthetics in the forming of art thus boils down to the observation that at least in the recent past intervention occurred not within the realm of aesthetics proper, but in totalising philosophies or, the second case, in realms adjacent or partly intertwined with aesthetics and philosophy, such as different “artists’ theories” as discussed by Heinz Paetzold, or, as Arthur Danto claims, manifestos which brought philosophy into art,14 as well as what we may call, for lack of a better term, “theories of art”: deconstruction, for example. Pure academic aesthetics—be it that of Nicolai Hartmann or even Souriau, for instance—never had a visible influence on artists or critics. It was too dry, too systematic and too orderly. It was the poetic and unsystematic theories and philosophers like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Bergson and Walter Benjamin who were often directly influential instead. It appears that the mutual enrichment of theory and art or between individual disciplines of the humanities usually occurs via misunderstanding and via what Jean Baudrillard called “seduction”: interesting things happen not when people understand each other, but when they are seduced.

13 14

Soriau, 299. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 30.

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Criticism and Authority

Much of today’s continental philosophy usually avoids the issue of totalization, preferring instead partial views usually designated by the term “critical theory” or deconstruction as conceptualized by Derrida on the basis of Heidegger’s notion of “Destruktion.” Paul Valéry designated aesthetics as a “wing in the palace inhabited by philosophy,” and even today aesthetics essentially shares the destiny of philosophy. In his influential Critique of Cynical Reason from 1983 Peter Sloterdijk began the preface with the following words: Since a century ago philosophy is dying and cannot achieve its demise for it hasn’t fulfilled its aim. Its farewell is therefore sadly prolonged … Sensing its end to be near, it would like to become honest and reveal its last secret. And it confesses: its grand themes were lame excuses, half-truths. Its vain and beautiful big words—God, Universe, Theory, Practice, Subject, Body, Mind, Meaning, Nothingness—this wasn’t it. These are nouns for young people, marginals, clerks, sociologists … There is no longer a knowledge of which one could be a friend (philos).15 A related and more far-reaching conclusion was drawn by Lyotard: there can be no general theory of small narratives because there is no master narrative on which it could base its authority.16 The philosophical discourse of Heidegger or Adorno still appertains to the era of master narratives, an instance of which may be art. So long as art was a representation (the signified, the signifier and the referent were linked together to form a sign), it was possible to retain the master narratives. One of the first demands of the theory which began to emerge in the late sixties (and became known in the Anglo-­American world as “poststructuralism”) was to eliminate the designation of literature— or, as it was then called, “writing”—as representation: “In its productive functioning writing is not representation,”17 wrote the Tel Quel group in October 1968 in a volume which brought together authors such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. In the view of one of the contributors to the volume, Philippe Sollers, who supported his theory with that of Derrida, the need for a “transcendental signified had to exist so that the difference between the signified and the signifier would be absolute and

15 16 17

Peter Sloterdijk, Critique de la raison cynique (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1987), 7. David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (London: Routledge, 1989), 158. Tel Quel, Théorie d’ensemble (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 9.

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insurmountable.”18 This line of reasoning brings us into the vicinity of Fredric Jameson’s historical division of art based on the relation between the referent, the signifier and the signified, and there is probably a good reason to see in poststructuralism of the late sixties the theoretical birthplace of features of what was later to be called postmodern culture. Another facet of this changed role for philosophy was expressed a few years after Sloterdijk by Zygmunt Bauman: philosophers and intellectuals in general have ceased being legislators and have become interpreters; they don’t implement norms and evaluate, they only analyse, explain and disseminate knowledge. As a prime example of such interpretative practice Bauman mentioned the institutional theory of art. In his words, the institutional theory of art (as an institutional theory of any other value domain) sounds the death knell to the philosopher’s dream of control. What has been put in the place of the absolute principles that only they had access to and only they were able to operate, is this evasive, unwieldy, unpredictable entity of “consensus.”19 It is Danto’s writings and his use of the notion of the artworld and the subsequent introduction of the institutional theory of art which is increasingly often the central reference point in contemporary discussions of visual arts. As Joseph Margolis notes in What, After All, Is a Work of Art?, “Danto is the most important philosophical theorist of the history of the arts (of painting in particular) practicing at the moment.”20 What makes Danto’s writings so influential? This is certainly partly due to the fact that he is an art critic. Also, his interpretation of the institutional theory ascribed to George Dickie and to him has been influential, although the former explicitly dissociates himself from Danto’s notion of the Institutional Theory of Art, “according to which what makes something art and something else not is something the Artworld—i.e. the ‘experts’—prescribes.”21 Although Danto has formulated his stance on the same issue in different ways, and more importantly, has written on other issues related to contemporary art, it is this basic idea which underlies most of his more recent views and positions. There is no doubt that this theory aptly 18 19 20 21

Philippe Sollers, “Le Reflexe de reduction,” in Tel Quel, Théorie d’ensemble, 397. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 139. Joseph Margolis, What, After All, Is a Work of Art? (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 18. I am referring to the essay by George Dickie, “A Tale of Two Artworlds,” Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 73–78. The quote is on p. 73.

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describes the current situation in the visual arts. As I will show, many of Danto’s views resemble those of Luc Ferry, only that Danto reaches much more positive conclusions than the latter. Today the experts are no longer critics: what they explicitly do is describe, not evaluate. The beginnings of this—highlighted also by Bauman—are aptly described by Michael Fried who in 1998 writes about his critical writings from the sixties and seventies: I remember feeling as early as the late 1960s, and with increasing force during the 1970s and after, that what might be called evaluative art criticism no longer mattered as it previously had. No longer was it read with the same interest, no longer could the critic imagine that his or her words might intervene in the contemporary situation in the way in which, perhaps delusively, I had sometimes imagined my words intervening in it, no longer were there critical reputations to be made by distinguishing the best art of one’s time from the rest or analysing that art with respect to its treatment of issues that were, in a strong sense of the word, “inescapable.”22 In the past the critics were the experts. Today it is mostly the curators who have at their disposal government- or privately-owned galleries that are the experts. It is they who implicitly and explicitly prescribe and do this by selecting someone’s work for exhibition and ignoring someone else’s, without having to rely on more than intuition built upon acquired practice. If in the past the gallery owner and the artist decided where to hang which painting, it is today frequently the curators who suggest (or even prescribe) the artists what to make or, even more frequently and especially in the case of large galleries, select different artists in such a way that the final result is just as much their creation as that of the artists. Such projects are easier to carry out with works which have either severed or severely weakened the link between their referent, the signified and the signifier, in other words, works in which no intent to function as a representation is perceptible. It is such works which have caused aestheticians to repeatedly raise the issue “but is it art?” How do we know whether an object or some phenomenon is a naturally or simply spontaneously occurring entity or whether there was some human (if not outright subjective) intent invested in it?

22

Michael Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 15.

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Most often it is the intention which is viewed as crucial. Thus Margolis speaks of artworks as possessing “intentional properties,”23 as does Genette who raises the question of when something is received as an artwork. His answer is in part: “When an aesthetic intention is attributed to it.”24 But isn’t such a definition deficient or, at least, fails to note an essential issue which is that today its purpose may not be primarily to distinguish an artwork from something created by nature, but an art work from an ordinary object with no aesthetic intentions? Such a definition furthermore also demonstrates an ignorance of the nowadays often discarded notion of creativity: “We make things,” notes René Passeron, “for the pleasure of constructing and not only to communicate.”25 This shows that the importance of the notion of intention that we find in Margolis or Genette probably arises from the current unavoidable omnipresence of conceptual works. If this is the case such a definition misses two important points which both relate mainly to traditional art. The first is that art works communicate and hence allow for what Crowther calls “reciprocity.”26 The second is that often works that are subsequently recognized as works of art may easily be made without prior intention of the kind Margolis and Genette speak—except, of course, if we consider any play to be an intentional activity. This relates to Kant’s notion of genius. It may furthermore be worth noting that today, with conceptual art, traditional art finds itself in an ambiguous situation similar to that in which, in the past, nature existed in relation to art, for again theirs is a need to distinguish between two related but ostensibly different phenomena. And the last observation: conceptual works are not so much works as concepts, ideas and intentions. As Foster aptly put it, Duchamp’s Fountain “is a declaration, a performative.”27 A conceptual work—at least the kind which functioned as an antipode to traditional art—in a museum is almost a contradiction in terms, for its adequate existence would be in its original and unrepeatable setting. Such works nonetheless became the artistic dominant in the Jamesonian sense; devoid of their original setting, semantically recontextualized, they have become the opposite of their former selves. It is a different case with the Brillo boxes, for they make use (or exploit) the achievements of Duchamp and, although provocative, function very much like much of avantgarde art. 23 24 25 26 27

Margolis, 34. Genette, 266. René Passeron, “Poïétique et pathologie,” Psychologie Médicale 122/10 (1980): 2210. Crowther, 4, 14. Foster, 20.

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Artists’ Intentions and Theories

A work of art is no longer distinguished by being a representation: in contradistinction to the classical definition of an image, the artistic one included, an image is no longer, as John of Damascus put it already in the eighth century, “of like character in every way with its prototype, but with a certain difference. It is not like the archetype in every way.”28 It is not so much the infinitesimal difference between the original and the copy which makes the copy a representation which in the past offered the pleasure of recognition and hence potentially elevated it into a work of art but, instead, the “intentional properties” in Margolis’s terminology and the “aesthetic intention” in Genette’s. But if it is the intention which is the distinguishing characteristic of an artwork, this tells us something only about its ontic and nothing about its ontological status. In Danto’s words, “there really is no art more true than any other, and there is no one way art has to be: all art is equally and indifferently art.”29 A comprehensive explanation why this happened is offered by Heinz Paetzold: Since classical modernity, which one would locate in the period between 1850 and 1930, the time has passed when the arts could mirror themselves in philosophy’s idealistic systems. They have developed their own forms and forums for discussing their practices … Systematic philosophy developed aesthetic practices independently of, and often in contradiction to, the poetic reflections of writers and fine artists; the integration of aesthetics into the body of systematic philosophy was the price it paid for the distance it took from the theories of practicing artists. Romanticists such as Philip Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich were still able to consider their self-reflections in relation to philosophy. Later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, aside from the work of Wagner and Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche’s implicit influence upon the arts, the alliance between art and philosophy came to an end.

28 29

John of Damascus, “Three Apologies against Those Who Attack the Divine Images,” quoted in Mosche Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 193. Danto, 35.

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Since classical modernism, however, “artists’ theories” (Künstlertheorien) have emerged, in which artists reflect upon the conditions and aims of their own practices.30 Paetzold offers as examples of such writings those by van Gogh, Cezanne, the Surrealists, the Futurists, Joseph Kosuth, Donald Judd, Jenny Holzer, etc. From such writings “art conceptions” could be developed and it is these that are a prerequisite for art to be recognized as such: “If we want to understand contemporary art, we need to have ‘conceptual knowledge’ concerning the particular genesis of each work.”31 But why is such understanding necessary? Because it offers us an “entry” into the work and its artistic potentials. Paetzold furthermore quotes Cassirer saying that art “is not imitation but a discovery of reality,”32 echoing numerous authors of the twentieth century—Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, even Althusser—who all stressed the revelatory, originary and authentic truth-offering feature or even essence of art. Paetzold’s accentuation of the need for conceptual knowledge is strongly related to Genette’s notion of aesthetic intention. But Genette also requires some­thing else to make a work a work of art: it has to possess “the character of an artifact.”33 Stressing both properties and repeating after Nelson Goodman as the relevant question not “What is art?” but “When is it art?”34 Genette counters Danto who, in the view of the former, takes into consideration only the artifactual character of a work. Genette hence suggests a different answer to the notorious question of the artistic status of Brillo boxes: according to Genette, “an artwork doesn’t reside in any of the objects but in the provocatory act,”35 implying again that it was the intention which made the difference between a work and a work of art. In Genette’s view the evaluation of such a work—or any work made with an aesthetic intention and possessing the character of an artifact (be it an object or an action)—is dependent upon what he calls “articité,” its artistic nature or value. It is conceptual art, beginning with Duchamp, which incessantly appears as the turning point in the history of contemporary art. Warhol and his Brillo boxes are, in contradistinction, but 30

Heinz Paetzold, The Symbolic Language of Culture, Fine Arts and Architecture: Consequences of Cassirer and Goodman. Three Trondheim Lectures (Trondheim: FF Edition, 1997), 21; also Heinz Paetzold, Ästhetik der neueren Moderne (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990), 66. 31 Paetzold, Symbolic Language, 24. 32 Ibid., 9. 33 Genette, 252. 34 Ibid., 265. 35 Ibid., 254.

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a pop artistic diluted extension of Duchamp’s readymades. In fact, they function very much like traditional art, i.e. they offer the ostranienie effect, that of “­making strange” as suggested by Viktor Shklovsky in 1914. Let me turn to another author, for it is exactly this point that is developed by Luc Ferry in his recent book Le Sens du beau, The Meaning of Beauty, from 1998, which is a revised version of his well-known book from 1990, Homo aestheticus. Ferry paints a very dismal picture of contemporary art. In his view, “the break with tradition has itself become a tradition.”36 Since 1913 and Duchamp no new arguments for or against the avantgarde have appeared and the avantgarde itself has lost its power of negation.37 In Ferry’s view—which strongly echoes that of Lefebvre—what we are witnessing is what Hegel has already foreseen: “So, if art is only an incarnation of a conceptual truth in a sensible material, art is dead. And I think, “continues Ferry, “that one of the great dangers encountered by contemporary avantgardes was just what the anti-avantgardists have always called … intellectualism.’’38 The introduction of the intellect, of the concept, of what was, in Hegel, reserved for philosophy, signals the death of art, which thereafter remains only an empty shell, devoid of historical substance. Since art follows its own rules and criteria, it becomes a part of secularized society and, within the capitalist society, loses its subversive powers. Ferry supports his analyses by referring to an earlier French critical thinker, Cornelius Castoriadis, in whose view contemporary capitalist society possesses no values, no transcendence. In such conditions characteristic forms of great art—be it popular or not—disappears: it is the essential relation of the artwork to the public which is blurred, at the same time in which emerges, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the distinction between the life of a philistine and the life of an artist with its inevitable correlate: the “avantgarde” ­public.39

36

Luc Ferry, Homo aestheticus: L’Invention du goût a l’age democratique (Paris: Grasset, 1990), 260. 37 Luc Ferry, Le Sens du beau (Paris: Editions Cercle d’Art, 1998), 198. 38 Ibid., 200. A similar critique was elaborated already by Henry Lefebvre, starting in 1948, who then wrote that after Baudelaire and Flaubert contemporary art became “hyperintellectual”; see: Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne (Paris: L’Arche, 1958), 121. Similar views are elaborated also in his Introduction to Modernity, wherein Lefebvre claims that after Hegel modern art ceased being art; see: Introduction à la Modernité (Paris: Minuit, 1962), 348. 39 Ferry, Homo aestheticus, 322.

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Within such an environment culture dies out. And Ferry poses the ultimate question: could it be said that “after the end of great utopias and the master narratives we shall be assisting in that of great artworks?”40—raising, in a different way, the question also implied by Genette’s observation that Adorno and Heidegger have overvalued art and, in a milder form, by Danto’s notion of “posthistorical art.”41 If the importance of art has been overrated in the first half of the previous century, it may have been because at that time art meant something of paramount importance, while today it has drifted on the margins because there exist only margins and no center. There is no master narrative any longer that could offer authority which would support the special role of art. That is also why, in Danto’s words, there exists today “an absence of direction” in art.42 Much of what Ferry writes relates to the discussions about modernism and postmodernism which in aesthetics never really took off, or if they did, this happened very late and under very sceptical conditions. I therefore don’t wish to broach this territory, nor shall I talk about the role of surrealism which formerly was often a pure negativity in the philosophical views on the history of twentieth-century art, as witnessed by critical and derogatory statements by Adorno, Habermas, and Greenberg and which recently were resuscitated and reevaluated outside the French cultural empire by writers such as Rosalind Krauss, among others, in an attempt to reevaluate the position of modernism and its normative frameworks. The special place recently assigned to surrealism resembles that of conceptual art which raises questions of their similarities. 5

Affirming Art

To summarize: for various contemporary authors, be they philosophers, aestheticians or art critics, values still remain an important issue, although the institutional theory of art and the omnipresence of conceptual art have apparently diminished the role contemporary art plays today in society. Since the previous century art has been losing its paramount role in human existence which was still assigned to it in the twentieth century by existential phenomenology, the authors of the Frankfurt School and anthropological Marxism. The ensuing demands for the denigration of the privileged role of art, its deconstruction, and the accentuation of the non-representational nature of art, replaced the 40 Ibid., 319. 41 Danto, 12. 42 Ibid., 13.

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previous classical and modernist indissoluble link between the signified and the signifier, or between the artwork and the outer and, in modernism, the inner truth. In the forties Souriau had already claimed that it is wrong to substitute natural laws of the world “O” with the laws of the subjective world “S,” for this only causes art to replace the imitation of outer nature with the mirroring of the copy of the subjective world.43 In his view, the only world that counts in art “is the world ‘A,’ this world instaurated by the art work.”44 From a historical distance Souriau’s statement is surprisingly similar to that of Sollers two decades later. They both wanted to establish art as a new reality which would replace the previous two renditions and depictions of reality. At least in France conceptual art never carried much weight. That Genette finds it necessary to devote so much attention to Danto’s theories and to the examples he uses, shows the extent to which postmodern commodification and posthistorical or postromanticist tendencies, stressing culture at the expense of art, have appropriated and replaced the previous modernist artistic paradigm. It is therefore not unusual that some authors are attempting to carry out research in the direction of culture and symbolic forms or to return aesthetics towards its original meaning as developed by Baumgarten, hence broadening its borders which in modernism used to confine it to the realm of art and artistics. What is typical of art—and an essential agreement on this can be found in a surprisingly large number of otherwise very disparate authors, ranging from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to Lyotard and Althusser, to name but a few—is its feature of offering us not the original “truth,” but a view, an opening, and an imaginary experience of the world and its intricate parts and phenomena as if seen for the first time, in their authenticity and immediacy. It is here that the line between culture and art may be drawn, for while art evokes this sense of authenticity, culture, especially mass culture, acts only upon our Imaginary, be it sports or television series. It is this feature of art which warrants its promotion and defense, the opposite tendency in aesthetics, the acceptance of everything designated as art, leading to the irrelevance of art and aesthetics. Some years ago our elder colleague Stefan Morawski painted a very bleak picture of contemporary philosophy, aesthetics and art,45 describing nothing but an all-pervading cultural and artistic decline. I think, instead, that art, like nature in the form of dinosaur eggs in the movie Jurassic Park, always “finds a way.” But we should not avoid the contemporary recurrence of seemingly obsolete ­questions related to human existence, to which art and related human 43 Soriau, 283. 44 Ibid., 285. 45 Stefan Morawski, Troubles with Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1996).

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activities have responded in the past. What there is may not be great works or generally acceptable or globally known works, but often their aesthetic and artistic role and impact is no lesser than in the past, only it is not universally known or accepted. In this respect aesthetics as philosophy of art and art share the same terrain. It is unnecessary to accept as art everything that “experts” designate as such. The first step in such a direction is to reject an indiscriminate designation of art. Philosophers and aestheticians have been turned into passive recipients of views and implicit norms disseminated by the culture and communication industry, instead of partaking in their creation and articulation, whether these aspire to local or universal status. Why is it that art is probably the only realm of human activity where completely random semantic designation is not only allowed, but very much universally accepted? By partaking in this practice aesthetics and philosophy are inadvertently accomplices to the present rule of the “experts.” The situation that aestheticians often criticize is hence to a large extent a consequence of their own doing. We either have to accept this view or proclaim the notion of art to be a term applicable to anything appearing within a space designated as exhibition space. In this case it is hence the exhibition space—along with the experts who put it there--that determines what is art. It is the law of theory, preceding the work at the expense of the previous law of aesthetics experience, which followed the work and was accompanied by criticism. Such a view was recently put forth by Peter Weibel, one of the promoters of conceptual art: “All ontology of art is the last triumph of conservative action against … the emergence of theory at the expense of experience.”46 Or we have to accept the view that art, or at least visual art, and its importance are over and are things of the past. 46

Peter Weibel, “Machine Experienced Space,” Lier en Boog 14 (1999): 162.

Chapter 8

The End of Art (c. 2003) 1

The Idea of the “Death of Art” in the 1980s

In recent decades the topic of the “end” or even the “death” of art has been a frequent subject of debates in aesthetics and art criticism. Although it proliferated in its present form mainly in the United States, it of course has its historical roots in Hegel’s notion of the end of art as he developed it in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It was in the eighties of the previous century that the idea of the “death of art” became popular: in 1984 appeared a book entitled The Death of Art in which the central contribution was the essay “The End of Art” by Arthur Danto.1 As Danto himself later noted, to speak of the “death of art” was “an overstatement.”2 At approximately the same time another author, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, discussed the same idea, but with a different agenda: Vattimo’s intent was to reveal the extent in which the proliferation of kitsch and contemporary mass media has caused the “death” and the “decline” of art. Basing his analyses on Hegel and Adorno, Vattimo came to the conclusion that “in a world of manipulated consensus authentic art speaks only by remaining silent.”3 Yet another author was Hans Belting who in his book The End of the History of Art (published in German in 1983 and then in English in 1987)4 argued, in the words of Arthur Danto, “that art did not seem, in the objective sense, any longer to have the possibility of a developmental progressive history. And the question for Belting then was how there could be an art history of the present if this objective condition failed?”5 Nonetheless, while admitting the “death of art” was an exaggeration, in Danto’s view, “the idea must have been in the air in the mid-eighties.”6 1 The Death of Art, ed. Berel Lang (New York, New York: Haven Publishers, 1984). 2 Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia U ­ niversity Press, 1986), 81. 3 Gianni Vattimo, La fin de la modernité (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 60. (Original title La fine della modernità, 1985.) 4 Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1983); The End of the History of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 5 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 62. 6 Danto, After the End of Art, 17. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_009

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Even before the eighties the issue of the end of art concerned not only scholarly debates that would be exclusively limited to a discourse intrinsic to the study of Hegel and, perhaps, his commentators, or to Vattimo’s thesis that the end of art was essentially tied with that of the end of metaphysics. Instead, the thesis was often essentially related to, and made explicit by, the events in Western art itself, for at least some Western art after Hegel behaved as if it wanted to prove his views on the future of art. Hence, according to Danto, he and Belting came to the conclusion of the end of art on the basis “of the internal state of art itself, considered more or less in isolation from wider historical and cultural determinants.”7 As Danto explained already in 1986, he furthermore wrote the essay “The End of Art” precisely as “a response to the dismal state of the artworld, for which I sought—and continue to seek—an explanation.”8 2

Art’s Diminished Relevance

While discussing the explicit or implicit philosophical source of various “end of art” theories, i.e. Hegel’s philosophy, I cannot avoid discussing an artist who is considered to be the historical place of origin of the art that emerged after the “end of art.” This artist (who in fact never called his works “art”) is Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), whose readymades, presented at the very beginning of the twentieth century and then followed by their similes as found in various forms of conceptual and neo-conceptual art, have in the view of many proven that Hegel’s dictum about the end of art foretold the course of events in art of the twentieth century. It would thus appear that Hegel not only justly claimed that romantic poetry (this one, according to Hegel, stretching from the Middle Ages to his own time) represented the highest form of the Absolute Spirit as it appears in art, but that, furthermore, he also foretold the emergence of conceptual art, that is, of an art that no longer deals with the sensuous, but with ideas only—the concepts. This, then, meant that romantic art no longer carried an intrinsic spiritual value but has been transmogrified into a product or even an “idea” (concept) only, thereby losing its former prerogatives and relevance. Why should art carry such a significance? It should be remembered that from the time of Plato the highest ideas were those of the Truth, the Good, and the Beautiful. From the Greek antiquity until modernity in the West these three ideas were not only the highest ones but were also the main features of 7 Danto, After the End of Art, 18. 8 Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 81.

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the Christian God. With the advent of the French Revolution and, especially, with the emergence of romanticism, the role of God slowly diminished and his place in the new human world was appropriated by the artist: it was now the poet who “created” a “new” world from his mind and spirit. Artistic creativity began to serve as the paradigmatic example of human creativity. The same idea was also strongly present in the views of Karl Marx and in his interpretation of the role of work in society: in his view, in class society work is but labor and toil, while in a classless society work is to become equal to art, for it is to depend upon the creative potentials of each individual. This same understanding of the artist as a special human being and of art as the paramount form of creativity continued in the twentieth century. Hence modernism of the twentieth century appears in practice and in theory as an “overevaluation of art”9 and hence as a direct descendant of the nineteenth-century romanticism.10 Other features arising from such a notion of the artist are the perceptions of the latter as someone exemplified by inspiration and by the “genius” that he has to follow, and who is exempt from the usual bourgeois customs and norms and whose behavior may therefore be that of a bohemian. Another metaphor for the artist and his approach to the world and its perception is that of a “child.” A child in this sense is someone who is capable of seeing and discerning the world in ways that are closed to the ordinary members of the bourgeois society who have in their practical and worldly pursuits instrumentalized the world, its resources as well as human relationships and life itself. A precondition for art to be regarded as something very special—with this then being equally true of its creator, the artist—is to be a creation of the free play of human faculties. Within this mental horizon which stretches almost to the present and even today still persists as the predominat perception of art among many western people, art is not only something very special, but also essentially linked to a particular human universe and community. An ensuing consequence is that the same notions carry different relevance and significations in different contexts. Hence the notion of the “end of art” may possess a different relevance in different cultures.

9 10

Gérard Genette, L’oeuvre de l’art: la relation esthétique (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 10. For a continuous critique of the notion of art and the artist and an attempt at their replacements by the notions of the producer and production, see the Paris-based revue Tel Quel from the sixties and early seventies, wherein authors such as Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Baudry, etc. collaborated, equating the artistic notion of creativity in bourgeois society with the divine one, all in an attempt to show the ideological nature of artistic production. It was from this source that arose the notion of the “signifying practice.”

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The same is true if we compare the notion of art within three “philosophical empires,”11 that is, the German, the French and the Anglo-American. Their number is of course not limited to these three, for one could readily find others, such as the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, etc. Half a century ago these “empires” existed side by side and had a very limited influence upon each other. Although in recent decades this gap has often been bridged due to an increased communication, it still holds true that some of the differences in the interpretation and understanding of what philosophy and art are have not completely melted away, although they may have fused to a certain extent and hence formed new and much less distinct entities, a process that is simultaneously due to the cultural interchange and processes occurring within art proper. Thus the German notion of Kunst includes all the arts, while the French notion of l’art as well as the similar English word “art” not only in much of the previous century but also today still refer mainly to the visual arts and some other artistic forms, with the visible exception of literature. The reason for a partial change in our understanding of what art or philosophy (or aesthetics, for that matter) mean in various cultural frameworks does not arise only because of an increased cultural permeability, but also because today an increasing amount of artistic creations falls under the category of visual creations or products, with these being furthermore strongly (and sometime essentially) related to (visual) culture, with this one encompassing an enormous variety of works and activities which in the recent past would be excluded form the notion of art altogether. Due to the ensuing conceptual fluidity it usually also escapes our attention that when referring to poetry and fiction the idea of the “end of art” never caught on in the same way as it did in visual art (to which both Danto and Vattimo refer). While it may be viable to claim that the other art forms too no longer possess that historical relevance which they may have had in the past, they nonetheless continue to have a relevant place in culture or, at least, are not a cause for the kind of dismay that Danto speaks of in connection with the visual arts. 3

Hegel and the Death of Art

It is in German idealism wherein the issue of art emerged as a central topic of modern philosophy—especially in Friedrich W.J. Schelling and in Hegel.

11

Richard Schusterman, “Aesthetics Between Nationalism and Internationalism.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51/2, (1993): 161. See also Aleš Erjavec, “Philosophy, National and International.” Metaphilosophy, 28/4, (1997): 329–345.

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Already in The Phenomenology of Mind from 1807 we find the idea about the passing away of art. As Benedetto Croce writes in his Estetica: Like the Greek philosopher who, listening to the order of the reason that was put forth, admonished mimesis and Homeric poetry which he loved so much, in the same way the German philosopher did not want to evade the logical consequence of his system, announcing the death, or rather, the already carried out death of art. “If, on the one hand, we place art so high (says he) then, on the other hand, we should not forget that art is neither in its content nor its form the highest and absolute way in which the spirit becomes conscious of its real interests. For, precisely because of its form, art is limited to a certain defined content. Only a certain delimited circle and level of truth can be shown by the structure of an artwork; for something to become a real content for art, it must already contain in its proper definition the potential to pass into the sensuous and therein is adequate to itself as is the case, for example, in Greek gods. Contrary to this there exists also a deeper grasping of truth wherein it is no longer similar or close to the sensuous which would allow this material to accept and express it adequately. Of such kind is the Christian understanding of truth, and especially the spirit of our contemporary world or, more precisely, the spirit of our religion and of our intellectual education appears as something that stands above the level on which art must carry out the highest kind of cognition of the absolute. The artistic production and its products by themselves do not satisfy our highest needs … The thought and reflection have superseded art.”12 “For this withering away of art in the modern world”—continues Croce— usually different causes are given, especially the predominance of material and political interests, but the real reason is (says Hegel) in that art is on a lower level in relation to the pure thought. “For us art is and according to its highest definitions remains, a part of the past,” and precisely because it is already a spent thing, it is possible to make a finished philosophy. Hegel’s aesthetics is therefore an obituary: in a sequence it passes forms of art which follow one after another, shows temporary stages which they represent in their inner tiredness and puts all of them into a grave with an epigraph on it, written by philosophy.13 12

Benedetto Croce, Estetika (Serbo-Croatian edition), (Zagreb: Globus, 1991), 262. The quotation from Hegel is from Vorlesungen über Ästhetik I, (Leipzig, 1829), 13–16. 13 Ibid.

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“Metaphysical romanticism and idealism”—Croce concludes this discussion of Hegel—“have elevated art so high, have placed it so far into the clouds, that they necessarily had to comprehend that placed so high, it no longer can serve any purpose.”14 We can see that already Croce, a follower of Hegel, recognized an important feature of Hegel’s aesthetics, namely the fact that Hegel elevated art to such heights that he was bound to set historical limits to its importance. It is in The Phenomenology of Mind that Hegel set these limits and posits art within religion. He writes: “Later on, spirit goes beyond art in order to gain its higher manifestation, viz. that of being not merely the substance born and produced out of the self, but of being, in its manifestation as object, this very self; it seeks at that higher level not merely to bring forth itself out of its own notion, but to have its very notion as its shape, so that the notion and the work of art produced may know each other reciprocally as one and the same.”15 In Hegel’s holistic philosophy every art form and period are important because they relate to, and are consubstantial with, other parts of the totalized whole of the development of the Spirit, ie. its history. Art gains importance because of its place in the order of the progression of the Spirit and it is because of this order of the progression that it also loses it—in the form of romantic poetry. As Luc Ferry has aptly phrased it, “poetry is therefore art at the exit of art.”16 Elsewhere, Ferry writes: What does it mean, the death of art in Hegel? Something that is very simple and is not at all absurd: if art is simply a sensuous incarnation of a conceptual truth, then science is superior to it, and philosophy is superior because philosophy and science grasp that truth where it should be grasped, that is to say, in the element of the concept, of the mind. They [philosophy and science] think this truth instead of presenting it in a sensuous material and consequently, since Hegel says, “Art is dead,” art is surpassed by science and by philosophy, it must always be remembered what the intended meaning of this statement is. The argument is a strong one: art has been surpassed by religion because religion presents the same idea as art, that is to say, the idea of a divine truth, but in an element which is better appropriated: the parable of Christ, for example, or the myth, and the myth is superior because it is the word, logos, and

14 Ibid. 15 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York: Harper, 1967), 711. 16 Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus (Paris: Grasset, 1990), 191.

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more adequate to its object. If art is therefore simply an incarnation of a conceptual truth in a sensuous material, then art is dead.17 As Ferry rightly claims, the reason for Hegel’s conclusion that art is dead lies in his view that art is essentially related to truth; since the highest form of truth is the conceptual one, it is necessary that art is surpassed by the more conceptual incarnations of this truth. Or as Hegel phrases it in The Phenomenology of Mind, “The work of art hence requires another element for its existence … This higher element is that of Language—a way of existing which is directly self-conscious existence.”18 The idea that art is related to truth is of course an ancient one and in antiquity probably most thoroughly presented in Aristotle. It then reaches new heights in romanticism and then in realism and modernism. Émile Zola thus argues: “I want … a simple composition, a clear language, something like a glass house that would allow to see the ideas within.”19 The whole modernism is infatuated with truth. Although in modernism “truth” is not directly discerned in a figurative form, it is there, only hidden behind (or perhaps “within”) the abstraction, which no longer offers a truth of the equivalence of “the mind and the thing” but rather of the Heideggerian “unconcealedness.” Consider the works of Malevich, Barnett Newman and especially of Mark Rothko. In realism—to follow Fredric Jameson—the link between the referent, the signifier and the signified is still there, while in modernism the link to the external referent has disappeared. To ascertain the importance of truth in relation to art in the twentieth century it suffices to mention again two thinkers of completely different philosophical and political persuasions, namely Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno. While the first was a proponent of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Trakl, the latter sided with, and promoted, the works of atonal music of Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky, and theater plays by Samuel Beckett. Adorno furthermore extensively and intensely ­criticized Martin Heidegger’s ideas. Nonetheless, from the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, their views in many respects appear surprisingly similar, an important part of these being related to art: both see in art (again for very different reasons) something exceptional. In Heidegger’s view only art retained some of the original immediacy of human existence; otherwise the modern 17 18 19

Luc Ferry, Le Sense du Beau (Paris: Cercle d’Art, 1998), 200. Hegel, 716. Émile Zola, “Les romanciers naturalistes,” quoted in Philippe Hamon, “Un discours contraint,” in Littérature et réalité (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 168.

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age is nothing but an epoch wherein Being has been forgotten to be replaced by what Theodor Adorno would call “instrumental reason”: “Ratio, having been fully instrumentalized, and therefore devoid of self-reflection and of reflection on what it has excluded, must seek that meaning that it has itself extinguished. But in the condition that necessarily gives rise to this question, no answer is possible other than nothingness, which the form of the answer already is. The historical inevitablity of this absurdity allows it to seem ontological; that is, the veil of delusion produced by history itself.”20 Under such circumstances (but analyzed with different terms) Heidegger claimed that as “in the whole of modernity, it may be that the distinctive character of existence, or in Heidegger’s terms the ‘meaning of being’ in our epoch, appears first and most clearly in aesthetic experience.”21 We see that both in Heidegger and in Adorno art is one of the rare venues of truth that is still available in the instrumentalized, commodified, reified and alienated capitalist world of the twentieth century. In its peculiar and unique way art offers truth—and is therefore in this respect not far removed from the role it plays in Hegel’s philosophy. True, neither in Heidegger nor in Adorno (with the exception of the criticism of consumer culture in Adorno) is there an explicit idea that art will disappear, die or end. Nonetheless, Heidegger did ask himself the important question, thereby preceding Gérard Genette: “The judgment that Hegel passes in these statements cannot be evaded by pointing out that since Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics were given for the last time in the winter of 1828–1829 … we have seen many new art works and art movements arise. Hegel did not mean to deny this possibility. The question however remains is art still an essential and necessary way in which truth that is decisive for our historical existence happens, or is art no longer of this character?”22 In the last century and more the issue of the end of art as put forth by Hegel has occupied numerous authors. Let me end this presentation of the ideas of some of them by mentioning Peter Bürger’s views on Hegel’s idea of the end of art. He notes (as many have before him) that “Hegel historicizes art but not the concept of art. Although it has its origins in Greek art, he accords metahistorical validity to it.”23 Bürger also finds in Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics a hint concerning the post-romantic art: “Using Dutch genre painting as his 20 21 22 23

Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 348. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 45. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Artwork,” Philosophies of Art and Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 701–702; quoted in Danto, After the End of Art, 32. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avantgarde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 92.

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example, he writes that here the interest in the object turns into interest in the skill of presentation: ‘What should enchant us is not the subject of the painting and its life-likeness, but the pure appearance … which is wholly ­without the sort of interest that the subject has.’ … He says expressly ‘that the artist’s ­subjective skill and his application of the means of artistic production are raised to the status of an objective matter in works of art.’ This announces the shift of the form-content dialectic in favor of form, a development that characterizes the further course of art.”24 Bürger makes here two important points. The first is a well-known one, namely that notion (or concept) of art arises from, and is limited to, the Greek art. In other words, while in his philosophy art forms are presented as developing further, the essence of art nonetheless remains the same since the ancient Greeks. Nonetheless, Bürger discerns in Hegel a deviation from his aesthetic theory for Hegel, claims Bürger, foresaw the formalist approach of the modernist art of the twentieth century. It may remain questionable whether we can conclude from the quoted passage from Hegel’s lectures in aesthetics that his words therein signal the transformation of Western art from realism to modernism and hence formalism, although such a possibility cannot be discarded. What is perhaps more pertinent is the link that could be established between Hegel’s views and the development of that other form of twentieth-century art, namely that of conceptual art. The argument is a persuasive one: since conceptual art is based on the idea, the concept, it represents a clear-cut case of art transcending its own confines, thereby entering the realm of conceptual truth while simultaneously retaining the prerogatives of the romantic art and of the art of previous epochs. Although this hypothesis is an attractive one, I don’t think it stands up to the facts. Let me explain why. 4

Conceptual Art

Conceptual art has many sources but we can nonetheless say with a fair amount of certainty that its historical place of origin is Marcel Duchamp’s readymade. Although its most notorious emanation, Fountain, from the Armory Show in New York in 1917, was meant as a provocation, readymades nonetheless acquired a life of their own which led to the claim that “[t]he Duchamp invention which made the most original contribution to the development of 24

Bürger, 93.

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contemporary art was the readymade.”25 The readymades still serve as early examples of a whole artistic trend in the previous century which diverges from the usual course taken by modernism. To recognize the difference between the two, a difference that is an essential one, it suffices to note the reaction of the central modernist art critic Clement Greenberg to Duchamp which clearly establishes the boundaries between modernism per se and conceptual art which in my opinion falls outside the confines of modernism and represents its parallel, or in Greenberg’s words, a “mutation.” As Curtis Carter explains, Clement Greenberg took on the Duchampian legend in his essay, “­Counter-Avantgarde.” Greenberg begins his attack by finding in Duchamp the origin of what Greenberg calls avantgardism. “With avantgardism,” he says, “the shocking, scandalizing, startling, the mystifying and confounding, became embraced as ends in themselves and no longer regretted as initial side-effects of the new that would wear off with familiarity.” Such side effects, according to Greenberg, were deliberately built in by the artist to achieve an immediate impact and were based on cultural habits and expectations rather than on aesthetics or taste. Greenberg charged that Duchamp’s demand for liberation from the art of the past and from all formal constraints in creating it did not evoke the heretofore typical response of condemnation or opposition. Rather, in Duchamp’s case, the innovations drew praise and welcome. This, Greenberg argues, was the polar opposite of the public and critical response toward Impressionism and to virtually every prior radical step in the development of modern art. Hence, Greenberg sees Duchamp as, in part, responsible for a radical mutation in the nature of art, a mutation after which art no longer behaves as it had. In Greenberg’s view, Duchamp has led art off-course to the point where it often presents premeditated academic forms of so-called unconventional art as genuine advancements. For instance, Greenberg contends that Duchamp’s readymades were not at all new except in the sense of being presented as fine art, a matter of cultural and social context rather than aesthetic or artistic value. They depend as art on how they are perceived rather than on skillful making and the aesthetic responses they call up. Such art is raw, private and unformalized, capable of feeding on anything. Such art has been freed from the usual expectations, including the giving of satisfaction. In short, Greenberg 25

Juan Antonio Ramírez, Duchamp: Love and Death, Even (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 26.

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finds Duchamp’s art lacking in the fundamental qualities of aesthetics and taste that he sees as required for making significant art. In contrast to Duchamp, Greenberg would argue that superior art always emerges from tradition, which is itself a product of the interplay of expectation and satisfaction. In his view, the superior artist provides new surprises arising out of experiences informed by a rich context of tradition and by readiness to revise expectation.26 Conceptual art, as the term implies, is created on the idea that the concept, the idea, actually forms the artwork. The execution, the craftsmanship, or the technical skill are not essential prerequisites in conceptual art, for its aims are not the representational or expressive features which should offer what Greenberg calls “satisfaction,” Aristotle the pleasure of recognizing the familiar, and Ernst Gombrich the “pleasure of recognition.”27 It is instead the idea, the conceptual argument, that makes a work into a work of art—but into a work of art wherein art carries a very specific meaning, far removed from the traditional one. It is significant how Duchamp explained the readymades: “­[I]t is necessary to obtain things with such indifference that they do not provoke any aesthetic emotional reaction. The choice of the readymades is based on visual indifference, at the same time as a total absence of good or bad taste.”28 The mentioned features of the readymades perfectly denote the kind of works that Marcel Duchamp for the most part made, be they the early readymades or the Large Glass (with the potential exception of his last work, Étant donnés, with its voyeuristic intent). Or to choose two more recent examples from artists who saw themselves as conceptual artists (something that Duchamp did not claim to be): artist Sol LeWitt defined conceptualism in 1967 in the following way: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes art.” Another definition was offered by Joseph Kosuth: “The ‘purest’ definition of conceptual art would be that it is inquiry into the foundations of the concept ‘art,’ as it has come to mean.”29 26

27 28 29

Curtis Carter, “Marcel Duchamp and the Americans,” an unpublished paper presented at the colloquium “Marcel Duchamp. Aesthetics, even,” Ljubljana, October 2001, organized by the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics. For Greenberg’s essay, see “Counter-Avantgarde,” Art International (May 20, 1971): 16–19. Ernst H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), 12. Quoted in Ramirez, 27. Both quotations are from Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), 12–13.

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I mentioned before the hypothesis that since conceptual art is based on concepts, it could consequently represent art transcending its own confines, thereby entering the realm of conceptual truth while retaining the prerogatives of the art discussed by Hegel, that is, as it existed before its purported demise. The reason why such a thesis is problematic can be found in Greenberg: superior art arises from tradition and it is this historical context and consequently the historical passage of styles and forms that determines the relevance of a certain art form or an art work. Without historicity the Hegelian notion of art and its demise lose their significance. Without the passage of time that we call history and without the historical dialectical process which retains the past in the present which then carries it, transformed and on a higher level, into the future, there can be no superior art, for there exist no criteria for such a distinction. What is typical of conceptual art is, contrariwise, precisely its ahistorical nature: conceptual art is no longer concerned with overcoming its or some other past, but simply keeps on repeating the same gesture of exhibiting and presenting itself as art. Even for conceptual art it therefore cannot be claimed that it overcomes limitations set up by Hegel: although it demonstrates the “end of art” it doesn’t demonstrate its own passage into the realm of philosophical conceptual knowledge. Let me return again to the Duchamp readymade as that “place of origin” of conceptual art which emerged with the Bicycle Wheel, i.e. the first readymade, conceived in 1913. We could perhaps say that the cubist collages (which also appeared at almost the same time) already were a step in the same direction, but this would be only partly and certainly not essentially true: the collages, in spite of containing “real” pieces of newspapers etc., as a whole nevertheless still functioned as representations. With readymades this was no longer the case: a bicycle wheel is nothing but a bicycle wheel—and the same is true of Duchamp’s other readymades: the bottle rack, the snow shovel (which at least was retitled In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915)), and so on. By introducing the readymade Duchamp cut the umbilical cord that still tied modernist and avantgarde art to traditional art. Traditional art found its continuation in art with a symbolic content such as Malevich’s or Kandinsky’s for the works of these, in spite of being abstract, nonetheless were supposed to contain a symbolic or a metaphysical content, or possessed a purely aesthetic potential—a process carried to its extremes in the decades after 1908 when Kandinsky had what Herbert Read called an “apocalyptic experience,” i.e. that of “a painting [that] lacked all subject, depicted no identifiable object and was entirely composed of bright colour-patches.”30 30

Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), 190.

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In suprematism, expressionism, surrealism and abstract expressionism the sign nonetheless still existed, in spite of the fact that the link between the referent and the signifier had been severed. In Duchamp’s readymades and in latter works which were consciously designated as conceptual this was no longer the case: they represented but themselves, and were neither signs nor representations. Traditional as well as modernist art was based on, or derived from, the principle of the copy and its representational character. Already in the ninth century John of Damascus developed a doctrine of images which is still valid today. An image, he wrote, “is of like character with its prototype, but with a certain difference. It is not like the archetype in every way.”31 But this doctrine is valid only as long as the images or similar artifacts represent something. What distinguishes the prototype and the image is precisely that infinitesimal difference between the original and the copy: if the copy is but the original, no artistic effect can be achieved. What conceptual art claims is precisely that: that it can function as art even if it is not a copy in any way but is the original only. Let me return to Hegel. It has to be stressed that his judgment about the end of art carries weight only in the light of the developments in art since the end of the first half of the twentieth century; only from that time on did the notion of the “end of art” really become pertinent and it happened for reasons which are perhaps not directly related to the arguments that Hegel posited in his philosophy of art: the end of art occurs not because art has reached its limits and has to be transformed into a conceptual form, but loses its relevance (at least in the extent to which it still possessed it in modernism) because of the reasons offered by Vattimo, and because the social contradictions in the First World as we have known them in the past have diminished, this situation being increasingly mirrored in the art that has been produced. To assess the relevance of such a statement it suffices to observe the role of art in less developed parts of the world, such as Latin America, for example, where art still carries weight: not perhaps in the modernist sense but in the sense of social engagement, be it in the visual arts or theater and music. 5

Duchamp and Warhol

What is so specific of Duchamp’s works? One distinctive feature, i.e. that of not offering the pleasure of recognition, has already been mentioned: a readymade is but what it denotes and thus carries no or very scant excess or surplus 31

John of Damascus, On the Divine Images: Three Apologies against Those Who Attack the Divine Images (Crestwood, New York: SVS Press, 1980), 19.

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signification. Duchamp’s works therefore are not representational. Although they could sometimes be called non-objective, they could hardly be designated abstract or non-figurative: an abstract work may contain a symbolic content or may research the possibilities of the pictorial properties and possibilities offered by a plastic work, offering thus, in a transformed manner, some kind of aesthetic “pleasure” which is, because it arises from what is considered an artwork, also an artistic pleasure. Nonetheless, in most cases the works of Duchamp could not be designated in this way, for their intent was most often patently anti-pictorial and not only countered the previous art but disregarded it altogether. A possible answer to the question of the specific nature of Duchamp’s works may be obtained via a detour, i.e. an observation concerning another seminal artist of the twentieth century, i.e. Andy Warhol. (And it may not be a ­coincidence that in an important segment of his writings Danto in fact was concerned with precisely these two artists.) No doubt, Warhol’s works offer more aesthetic pleasure than Duchamp’s, for although repetitious and serialized, they nonetheless allow for recognition, although this is of a different intensity. Still, compared to a traditional work, such as Vincent van Gogh’s famous A Pair of Boots (thoroughly and paradigmatically analyzed in Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” from 1935) they reveal an important difference: as Fredric Jameson claims, in the case of van Gogh, “the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth, [while] Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of van Gogh’s footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all.”32 In other words, a traditional painting “tells” us of, refers to, or directs us to a broader social, historical and perhaps even existential framework which invests the work with a meaning. In such works this framework is a part of our acquired and shared human existence, something that, according to Jameson, is not true in the case of Warhol’s work. In this latter case we are left with no framework, with little or no potential or basis for an imaginary field of reference—and the same could be said of most of Duchamp’s works. In 1964 Arthur Danto published his essay “The Artworld” with which he helped inaugurate the institutional theory of art. Therein he wrote: “To mistake an artwork for a real object is no great feat when an artwork is the real

32

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 8.

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object one mistakes it for.”33 What Danto was grappling with, was the exhibition of Andy Warhol’s works at the Stable Gallery in New York in which he exhibited the famous Brillo Boxes. The materiality of these objects, in many respects resembling Duchamp’s readymades (although they were not really Duchampian readymades, but their simulacra, for they were made of wood), made Danto analyze the most recent situation in the arts and attempt to explain why such works were for all obvious reasons and practical purposes art. Danto concluded that “[w]hat in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification). Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to see it as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting.”34 Danto hence claimed that it was really the context which elevated a work into a work of art. This context could have been theoretical—Danto calls it “a certain theory of art”—or it could have been historical—such as mastery of “a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting”—but in both cases it was theoretical knowledge on which—to use a term of Étienne Souriau—the instauration of an artwork was based. Again, for the most part, this observation could very well be applied to Duchamp too, except that in his case the artistic nature of a work was construed primarily in the form of a provocation of the extant artworld, but a provocation which at the very same time formed the incessant margins of what art was and is. As Greeenberg observed, Duchamp’s provocations nonetheless provoked a different response than previous artistic gestures. I could venture the hypothesis that perhaps this was due to a different cultural context, for this was now the American one, where avantgarde works and procedures found themselves in a context of mass culture and mass media: they were not viewed primarily as artistic provocations but as a marketing gestures appearing under the guise of avantgarde art. It is thus perhaps the “Armory Show” of 1917 which represents a symbolic divide between the avantgarde tradition of modernism and the mass cultural consumer-oriented context of the United States which, to follow Jameson, are the birthplace of the logic of postmodernism and its thorough commodification.

33 34

Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” in Pop Art: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of ­ alifornia Press, 1997), 272. C Danto, 276.

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Duchamp’s provocations (as perceived in the U.S. or Europe) moreover contained the verbal and anti-ocular features which referred his works and their effects into the active realm thus far reserved for other social practices, such as the sciences. May we not claim that this too shows the very different nature of Duchamp’s works as compared to the traditional (as well as typically modernist) art works? A similar claim is made in the concluding chapter to Herbert Read’s Concise History of Modern Painting, while Caroline Tisdall and William Feaver acutely observe that Duchamp set up the process of “the idea of art as strategy” which continued “in a fairly inevitable way” and seemed “on the face of it to change the nature of art, but from a distance it [could] be seen in spite of itself as an inevitable stage in the development of art history.”35 Another feature of this kind of art was promoted already at the first noticeable public presentation of conceptual art, i.e. at the 1966 exhibition of Mel Bochner: “The viewer became the reader, an active participant as there was no immediately obvious art on show, the readers had to make or deduce the art experience for themselves. There was also some doubt about the authorship: was this all Bochner’s work? The distinction between artist and curator was blurred.”36 It was this feature of conceptual art which also became one of the distinguishing characteristics of contemporary neo-conceptual art. In the already quoted essay “The Artworld”—and on numerous other occasions—Danto argued that an artwork is something that an artworld construes and accepts as such—causing Zygmunt Bauman to observe that philosophers have ceased being legislators and turned into interpreters:37 philosophers (or aestheticians) no longer set the rules and norms, but only interpret them. Thus a theoretician no longer proscribes what art is, but explains why a work functions and is publicly accepted as a work of art, i.e. describes it.38 A further step in this direction was later taken by Danto who discarded the issue of values altogether: In my view, the question of what art really and essentially is—as against what it apparently, or inessentially is—was the wrong form for the philosophical question to take, and the views I advanced in various essays concerning the end of art endeavor to suggest what the real form of the question should be. As I saw it, the form of the question is: what makes 35 36 37 38

Read, 319. Godfrey, 116. See Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). For a critique of this position see Aleš Erjavec, “L’estetica e le filosofie,” Un nuovo corso per l’estetica nel dibattito internazionale, ed. Grazia Marchianò (Torino: Trauben 1998), 73–88.

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the difference between a work of art and something not a work of art when there is no interesting perceptual difference between them? … Until the twentieth century it was tacitly believed that works of art were always identifiable as such. The philosophical problem now is to explain why they are works of art.39 The answer to this question is offered a little earlier: “[T]he true philosophical discovery, I think, is that there really is no art more true than any other, and that there is no one way art has to be: all art is equally and indifferently art.”40 Danto here carries on the logic of conceptual art affirming that “art = art,” and consequently arrives at the logical result of his previous theory: there is no ­longer a distinction between various kinds of what is being designated as art. In the long run such a broad notion of art eliminates the need for art altogether. The process begun by Duchamp in the beginning of the twentieth century has culminated in “art equals art,” for it no longer carries a transcendental, transcendent or existential role. Art apparently ceases being important. As Bruce Nauman in the 1960s remarked: “If you see yourself as an artist and you function in a studio … you sit in a chair or pace around. And then the question goes back to what is art? And art is what an artist does, just sitting around the studio.”41 The strategy commenced and developed by Duchamp was by no means limited to the kind of works he produced and especially conceptual art abounded with it. The composer and musician John Cage in the 1950s raised the issue that was also troubling Danto, i.e. that of normative foundations of the more recent art. His response was: “Why do you waste your time and mine by trying to get value judgments? Don’t you see that when you get a value judgment, that’s all you have? They are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.”42 Paradoxically, this very statement contains a value judgment, for it promotes what I could designate as “semi-existential values,” such as curiosity and awareness, witnessing that the issue of values remains inherent to art. Even if the anti-visual basis of conceptual art caused Joseph Kosuth, the group Art & Language and others to regard art less as “an object for interpretation and more the focus of investigation into the phenomenon of art itself,”43 the 39 Danto, After the End of Art, 35. 40 Danto, After the End of Art, 34. 41 Quoted in Godfrey, 127. 42 Quoted in Godfrey, 63. 43 Robert C. Morgan, Art Into Ideas: Essays on Conceptual Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 34.

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indirect place of “art” within such a context witnesses to the relevance of value judgments, even if only per negationem. Danto’s more recent arguments concerning the status of art are descriptive only: no distinctions are available, the philosopher has not only given up the attempt to normatively determine what art is and then attempt to impose such a normativity, the very reality of the contemporary artworlds has forced him to relinquish any distinction within the oblique formation entitled “art.” In my opinion artworks are created contingently and are for the most part consumed in the same manner, with these being two distinct processes, although they can also be conflated: first is the act or process of creation answers the human need to express oneself (and is, to follow a theory of René Passeron, the domain of poetics and of la poïétique), while the second concerns the act or process of consumption of a work which occurs within the unmediated social field and is a social and, following Passeron again, an aesthetic category.44 The work exists in a dynamic tension between the two realms, both of these existing—viewed from a historical perspective—simultaneously and undividedly as a social and individual fact. While at the outset, as in the case of Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917 or even in the case of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes from 1964 the act of placement could still provoke a response which institutionalized such works and gestures as art, their contemporary inflatory omnipresent continuation produces just the opposite effect. Still, often the role of art remains the same. Take for example a neo-conceptual project such as the Ten Characters series from 1985–1988 by the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov. The series contains typical conceptual elements, contains readymade objects which are but intentionally placed within various environments. It is similar to works by other conceptual artists, but at the same time drastically different, for it is essentially dependent upon the previous knowledge of the story, the Soviet reality, and history. It expresses and explicitly reveals existential phenomena no different from those of the past art—proving, by hindsight, that a contingently produced art is reemerging incessantly simply because the human condition is reemerging incessantly, although, again, contingently. Does such a contingency signify that anything can become art? The answer is of course affirmative. But it would be difficult for an arbitrary aggregate of social phenomena to attain or equal such a role. Art is furthermore an approximate notion, i.e. one stretching from a masterpiece to mass culture and beyond,

44

See René Passeron, “La poïétique,” Recherches poétiques vol.1 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1975).

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meaning that the fixity of the verbal term should not hinder our awareness that in fact it denotes a dynamic phenomenon. 6

Art and the Demands of the Imaginary

Art, like culture, fulfills our needs mostly appertaining to the Imaginary. These may vary through history, may find different phenomenal forms, but are nonetheless a constant which enables us to enjoy and understand the world, other people and ourselves. By making such a claim I am of course not saying that only art as developed throughout history and highlighted in romanticism and modernism can fulfill such a function, for it can be fulfilled also by many other human practices. Nonetheless art is something particular, if not necessarily special—or has become such in the last two centuries and probably also before that, in antiquity and the Renaissance, for example. The issue of the end of art is related to its understanding in the contemporary society. A necessary precondition for art to possess its previous relevance is, basically, to possess an existential function in the sense that it allows for a human transcendence and some form of involvement and hence experience. The artists and theorists who defend the opposite view want to eliminate such an experience which via an artwork connects the creator and the work with its public. It is from this position that arises the view of the Austrian art critic, theorist and curator Peter Weibel who argues that “all ontology of art is the last triumph of conservative action against the division of body and message and against the emergence of theory at the expense of experience.”45 If it is the aim of theory to prevent experience—which is identified with previous and conservative art—the question then is where to draw the line between theory and art, for art then becomes theory itself or, at least, theory precedes art, making it art by the very act of theorizing about a work. In such a case the weight of proving that something is art shifts to theory, meaning that theory has to procure arguments for the dividing line between art and non-art. If art, then, is not persuasive, it is the fault of the theory—although this one is not, by proclaiming itself theory, already philosophy. To conclude: In Hegel the demise of art was linked to his explanation of the path of the Spirit, an essential constitutive element or phase of which was art. Because art was superseded by highest forms of the Spirit, i.e. conceptual thought, art, as a dominant form of this Spirit, became a thing of the past. 45

Peter Weibel, “Experience and Space” (interview), Lier en Boog 14 (1999): 162.

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Although, as Peter Bürger demonstrated, we can still find in Hegel ideas about the further development of art in the direction of formalist modernism, this does not change the observation that in practice the end (or marginalization) of art has occurred in the economically most developed countries of the world, where art has largely become a part of the aestheticized environment, a part of the broader notion of culture, or a rather isolated continuation of the art from its modernist past. It may be true, on the other hand, that the current art may appear to be marginal or even “dead” precisely because art was so successful in the age of modernism. Hegel’s idea of the end of art was also applied to an essentially different form of twentieth-century art, namely conceptualism which has recently often become a predominant art form in many western countries and cultures. It appears to be incorrect to make such a connection because conceptual art actually isn’t conceptual in the sense of philosophy in Hegel. It is based on ideas but the gap between the ideas and concepts in Hegel’s sense remains enormous. The notion of the “end” or the “death” of art, although useful to describe the current diminished role of art, appears to be of limited potential—except, of course, if we understand it in purely Hegelian terms. If we do, then conceptual art cannot take the place of conceptual knowledge in Hegel’s sense, but is to be viewed only as the most visible aspect of the “end of art” situation. It is in similar terms that Arthur Danto interpreted it in 1995: “It was not my view that there would be no more art, which ‘death’ certainly implies, but that whatever art there was to be would be made without benefit of a reasurring sort of narrative in which it was seen as the appropriate next stage in the story. What had come to an end was that narrative but not the subject of the narrative.”46 In other words, once art has lost its historical role and placement in the development of a holistic history, once the “meaning” of history exists no longer (a non-Hegelian equivalent of this would be Jean-François Lyotard’s “master narrative”), once the totality of the history is gone, its constitutive parts are essentially meaningless, when regarded as steps or progressive elements of a totalized whole. Viewed from such a perspective, art shares the fate of totalizing and totalized history. Nonetheless, this also means that such a judgment doesn’t touch upon an existential understanding of art, which is not historically determined in the same holistic sense but should be related to a reevaluation of the Imaginary as was some years ago suggested by Kaja Silverman.47 46 Danto, After the End of Art, 4. 47 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). See also Aleš Erjavec, “Visual Culture,” in Symbolic Imprints, eds. Lars Keil Bertelsen et al (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1999), 31–50.

Chapter 9

Art and: A Toothless Tiger, a Cuddly Panda, or a Snow Leopard? (2009) 1

Art in Decline

The idea of communism arose in the Parisian Faubourg St. Antoine at the end of the 18th century. At that time the French Revolution, after accomplishing some of its aims, was being replaced by Napoleon and his restoration of the previous, pre-revolution society. But as many Hegelians would remark later, his restoration represented a negation of a negation and not a pure and simple return to the previous ancien régime. Around the turn of the new century and after the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) which represented the pinnacle of the Enlightenment philosophy and introduced subjectivity in a novel manner, elevating it into a universality, some other works representing some of the most revolutionary ideas engendered by German idealism appeared. Thus, in 1800 ­Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism was published, explicating—in the words of a recent commentator—”for the first time one of the most influential ideas in modem thinking: the idea that self-consciousness has to develop in stages from a point where it did not exist as such.”1 Five years earlier, in 1795, Schiller’s Letters on The Aesthetic Education of Man had also appeared, thereby offering a way out of what Schiller considered to be an impasse between reason and sensibility. In his view it is art that bridges the gap between what could perhaps also be called the philosophies of the Enlightenment (reason) and romanticism (the sensible). Soon after, in 1807, Hegel came forth with his Phenomenology of Mind. It was then in his “Lectures on Aesthetics,” presented in Jena between 1820 and 1829, that Hegel’s belief arose concerning the end of art. The causes for this are obvious already from Phenomenology of Mind. In it, Hegel argues that in our contemporaneity artworks are “themselves now just what they are for us—beautiful fruit broken off the tree.”2 lt is the tree that is alive and

1 Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: ­Routledge, 1993), 45. 2 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 753. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_010

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essential, not the fruit; the fruit is only something that is pretty, tasty and delightful. But things are really even worse than that: “our action is external; it consists of wiping off some drop of rain or speck of dust from these fruits.”3 Not only is the fruit all that is available to us and our senses, but even this fruit is but a semblance of a real and actual fruit. It is an apple intended only to be observed, to be looked at, as if it were made of plaster and intended for our aesthetic gratification, and not as what it was before it was plucked up—a living tissue and the fruit of a tree which was an integral part of nature as such. The metaphor that Hegel employs here shows that for him art has become devoid of its essential and original organic consubstantiality with other segments of the lived world (as exemplified by the classical Greek culture); art is, in Hegel’s view, no longer an integral part of everyday life but has become aestheticized. Let me note in passing that we find a very similar view also in Martin Heidegger who has for the most part assimilated Hegel’s positions on classical art. The topic of art—as something that has not only lost its essential immediacy but has also become devoid of the import arising from its existential truth—as it still existed in Hegel’s time—opened the door not only to late 20th-century thinkers such as Arthur Danto or Hans Belting with their theories of the end of art, but also to Marxist-oriented authors such as Peter Bürger. In his influential 1974 book Theory of the Avantgarde, Bürger famously claimed that the European artistic avantgardes (dadaism, surrealism, etc.) had exhausted their historic potential and chance to be transformed into life, thereby discarding their status as autonomous works of art. Since, in Bürger’s view, this attempt failed, what we witnessed later with the neo-avantgardes and what he called “post-avantgardiste” art were but forms of autonomous art that exist today within the institutions of art.4 2

Marxism and Art

It is intriguing to note that this line of reasoning, namely the one that stemmed from Hegel and proclaimed the end of art, never really caught on in Marxism. Orthodox Marxism, however, was too integral a part of mass movements to accept this idea of art’s end. Its points of reference were primarily educational 3 Ibid., 754. 4 See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avantgarde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

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art and culture and not what, to the more politically-minded Marxist thinkers, often appeared to be extreme and outrageous avantgarde and Bohemian ideas devoid of social responsibility, running counter to the political actions they desired and strove to materialize historically. Short periods when avantgarde artists actually held political power—mainly the period of the October Revolution in Russia5—ended abruptly and most certainly without having an influence on the immediate generations of artists that followed. Knowingly or not, these artists—Malevich, Tatlin, Eisenstein, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Blok, Meyerhold, as well as the Italian futurists and the Zurich and the Berlin dadaists, etc.—followed the precepts set forth by German idealism and romanticism: to realize art in life, and to turn art into life and life into art. Karl Marx too followed the radical strand of Hegel’s philosophy, famously proclaiming (alluding primarily to Hegel) that until then philosophers have only interpreted the world, while the real issue was to change it: to transform theory into a “material practice.” Even if he was not aware of this, Marx in this respect responded to the romanticist request for joining the sensible and reason. It is also from a romanticist influence that arose his frequent equation of art with creativity—an argument strengthened by the repetitive, fatiguing and anti-­intellectual nature of industrial manual labor. In his criticism of his immediate and broader European environment Marx frequently employed examples, metaphors and allusions from literature and also himself analyzed and criticized literary works and their authors, such as Balzac or Eugene Sue.6 Still, as witnesses the scarcity of his views on art and literature (with these being almost exclusively limited to fiction, poetry and the theater) beyond occasional remarks, these two really were not his priority. Also, Marx himself, while perhaps not someone who would defend utilitarian and propagandistic art, probably would also have no inclination towards the intricacies of the aesthetes from the end of his century, nor a predilection for the avantgarde inventions of the futurists, constructivists or rayonnists. Marx’s own theory (and that arising from his ideas) could be described in brief as a philosophy of history: dialectical social antagonisms, i.e. the class struggle (what Louis Althusser would later call the “engine of history”), drive forth the development of society, which undergoes various stages, the last among these being the classless society which is preceded by the transitional period of socialism. The communist party, as the avantgarde of the proletariat and a 5 This observation partly applies also to the period immediately after World War I when the Political Futurist Party emerged in Italy. 6 A detailed presentation of the scope of these allusions and quotations can be found in ­Siegbert S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

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peculiar collective subjectivity, is purportedly armed with the scientific knowledge of historical processes: it follows the precepts of the scientific dialectical materialism (first used by Plekhanov in 1891) which purportedly follows the laws of natural sciences; these can then be applied also to social history. In an ideal situation—never attained in practice—the collective dialectical materialist, i.e. the communist party, can, by following the laws of history, plan and in a planned manner create the future (with the help of five-year plans, for example), thereby avoiding the “blind history” of which Engels writes in his polemic Anti-Dühring. This collective dialectical materialist comprehends the true laws of history. Since it sees farther into the future than the rest of the people, since its position is a scientific one, this legitimizes its specific role under socialist conditions. The communist party is at once to be the historical and social spearhead of society and at the same time (somehow paradoxically) stand above and apart from that very same social totality. This position, allegedly extrinsic to society and history, allows the party to discern, follow and enunciate the historical truth. Since this truth is based on the totalizing historical schemata that allows only a belief, it is not surprising that recently Alain Badiou was able to propose the figure of Saint Paul, one of the founders of Christianity, to represent a paradigmatic figure of enunciation of the universal truth.7 It is this belief of possessing the universal truth of human history, combined with the dictatorship of the proletariat, that later gave rise to the criticism of Marxism as a totalitarian ideology. While we may oppose such a totalitarian usage of theory and philosophy, the problem arises as soon as we attempt to delineate notions of universal truth from relativism. In other words, relativism is no better that universalism, for it unwittingly allows for the uncritical continuation of capitalism and thereby for the exploitation of large segments of society. But here another problem arises, for how can we ontologically ground the notion of exploitation and thus of the surplus value? The notion of surplus value is obviously an ethical notion, arising from the understanding of a “just” salary being such that it enables one to retain his social position within a society (simple reproduction of labor). Contrariwise, for Marx, there can be no such thing as just profit—a position that re-enacts the pre-modern belief in the unjust nature of any profit. Marxism—the theory and practice codified from Marx’s often contradictory writings—was throughout its actual history incessantly torn between the theoretical freedom and intellectual honesty and principles on the one side, and its utilitarian and ideological usage on the other. Especially, Marxism fell 7 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul et la fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: P.U.F, 1997).

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victim to the contradiction of being simultaneously the “fundamental” and the “operative” ideology. While it usually succeeded in remaining the former, it was continuously in conflict with the latter, which was incessantly making politically or economically opportunistic compromises. Furthermore, in contradistinction to other master narratives of the previous century, Marxism too, oscillated between “orthodox” Marxism in countries where it became the ruling theory and ideology, and between what Perry Anderson has termed “western Marxism”—namely primarily philosophical theory, exemplified by the authors of the Frankfurt School—who never held political positions of power but only those of intellectual authorities. Even among them, with Theodor Adorno in the 1930s, for example, one discerns the enormous impact that the victorious October Revolution had on intellectuals across the globe, who for the first time, knew that a country existed where the radical ideas of freedom, liberty, equality and brotherhood were slogans to be believed in and not simply cynically discarded as childish. Of course, the idea was soon transformed into ideology, but in many instances for some time the outcome of the October Revolution was more than merely a stage and a tool for the struggle for political power. It is in the nature of intellectuals, in their position of “freischwebende lntellektuellen” (the free-floating intellectuals, in Karl Mannheim’s parlance) not to belong to any specific social class, a position that allows them the privilege of seeing society and its history from an intellectual distance. At the same time intellectuals have an inclination to regard the world from a utopian position, a feature that they frequently share with artists whose works, too, are often little utopias of the mind. The Western Marxists, then, by remaining aloof of the social struggles, retained their purity as intellectuals, a position that, if not today then certainly in the recent past, characterized many of them. One sometimes thinks that governments in the Soviet bloc countries, especially in the immediate decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall, willingly played a game with their potential Marxist critics by offering them intellectual venues for voicing their theoretical positions be it at conferences or in revues. The impact of this theoretical ­critique remained limited to the narrow intellectual circles wherein discussions went on about the intricacies of “what Marx really said” about this or that. 3

Artistic Freedom

A crucial theme in this ideological and theoretical universe was art and artistic freedom. Since the emergence of romanticism, freedom was regarded as one

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of the key characteristics of art (which in my usage encompasses also literature). Indeed, freedom was the very metaphor for art itself: an artist resembled a playful child, and the “free play of human faculties” was what Marx saw as exemplary of communist society. Radical attempts of Russian Productivism to transform artistic creation into industrial production remained experiments. Such was the case of Tatlin who in 1918–1919 started to design practical objects necessary to survive in the harsh Russian winter: iron stoves and clothes.8 It was unthinkable that art could be something to be directed by political ideology of the state for its purposes, even if these followed the aims put forth by the party. Of course, certain means and mechanisms were sometimes used by the ruling power, i.e. the state, for the purpose of promoting a certain kind of art, such as governmental financial and institutional support or the lack thereof, or such as access to state galleries (or the lack thereof), to publishing houses etc. As so often, what was at stake was not freedom, but prohibition. Why was this so? As we can see from our own discourse, we immediately defend artistic freedom, for we view it as essential for art as such. Attempts to transform art into political propaganda changes art into non-art; attempts to transform it into commercial propaganda convert it into market commodity. In both cases kitsch is created and in both cases art is lost. The employment or appropriation of art for political means had a long history, for art, in Soviet Union for example, has had a long tradition of criticizing society and its injustices—in the form of critical realism in the 19th century, in the paintings by Ilya Repin, in more theoretical writings of Chernishevsky and Plekhanov, in the plays and novels by Chekhov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky—all of them praising or practicing primarily a realist artistic expression and discourse. Thus content was ascribed priority over form: “Only the content is able to refute the accusation that art is an empty diversion,”9 claimed Nikolai Chernishevsky. In the nineteenth century there was no need to persuade artists to follow the realist, naturalist or critical realist artistic style and dictum; they did so willingly and from conviction. They were not pressured by the state or anyone else to do so. Of course, they may have encountered difficulties, a lack of understanding of their artistic idiom and intent, but this was a destiny that all artists and writers shared and risked. This situation changed in the 20th century, especially after the doctrine of Socialist or Romantic Realism set in in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, erecting realist and figurative art as the two main norms of artistic 8 See for example, Camilla Grey, The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–1922 (New York: Abrams, 1971), 261. 9 Grey, 10.

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expression. Especially after the 1950s this became a cause for concern to a series of theorists and philosophers sympathizing with what they saw as “authentic” (some called it “anthropological” or “young” Marxian) Marxism and socialism, but who were nonetheless either living as mild dissidents within their own socialist countries or, more frequently, were leftist intellectuals who lived in capitalist countries or emigrated to them. Cases of the first were authors such as Stefan Morawski and Adam Schaff in Poland or Karl Kosik in Prague, and of the second the Austrian Ernst Fischer, Christopher Caudwell in Great Britain and French authors such as Henri Lefebvre or Roger Garaudy. Special instances were French surrealist writers such as Louis Aragon or Paul Eluard, who discarded their surrealist style and out of political persuasion started to practice or defend realism. Why is realism such a favorite of the conservative regimes and also of the oppressive ones? Why was it possible for the Soviet Union to initially support, or at least tolerate, the most radical artistic avantgarde gestures to end up, in the 1930s, requiring the artist to become a propagandist and practice only realism? We can understand, as Franz Mehring already observed, that the conservative regimes promote classicism and the revolutionary ones romanticism, and this division definitely can aid us in identifying one or the other in concrete instances. But why should realism be such a darling of those in power? First of all, because when it comes to social power, control is of utmost importance. Control is carried out by vision which is, furthermore, the most persuasive of the senses. By following the precepts set by the photographic camera, of representing the world as if through the photographic lens, we recreate the logic of human vision: “Western artists, beginning with the early Renaissance … construct[ed] a pictorial equivalent to vision. It is this pictorial equivalent to vision which is the source of our unshakable belief in the congruence of picture and world.”10 A similar approach can be applied to the realist writing: compare for example the discourse of Stendhal with that of Franz Kafka. While the former first linguistically depicts (describes) a place, the latter immediately “throws” or immerses the reader into a certain environment of which the reader knows nothing except that it causes in him a complete spatial disorientation. ln Kafka’s novel The Castle, for example, there is no description of the village, or of the castle, etc. which K., a nameless individual present in the novel only by his initial, approaches and attempts to fathom. There is no logic of the moving eye in Kafka that would allow us to create a mental image, but only furtive glances 10

Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” in Picturing Vision, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 234.

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in the dark or in the fog that express and expect fear and disorientation. ln this respect Georg Lukács (in his book On Contemporary Meaning of Critical Realism from 1956) was correct in stating that Kafka revealed the fear and the disorientation of the contemporary individual while Thomas Mann raised a critical position towards the contemporary bourgeois reality. Both were bourgeois writers, but Lukács preferred the more assertive and critical stance of Thomas Mann to Kafka, in whom he saw a prisoner, although an extremely eloquent one, of his own fears and confusions. Basically much of orthodox Marxism asserted and retained until its end a utilitarian stance towards art. Consider the following statement by the aforementioned Austrian Marxist Ernst Fischer concerning Franz Kafka, which he made in Liblice, Czechoslovakia, at the well-known “Kafka Konferenz” which preceded the Prague Spring of 1968 and theoretically prepared the way for it: In our [i.e. Marxist] circles one often hears the question: Why do we need Kafka? What use is he to us? Although such brave utilitarianism—as if the task of literature was to nudge us towards work and rosy-cheeked optimism—should be discarded, I would like to defend the position that we need Kafka. We need him not only because he is a great writer and because the socialist world should not ignore any great author of his stature, but also because he challenges us to a passionate thinking about modern reality.11 Fischer then ended his talk with an exclamation: “I implore the socialist world: Bring Kafka’s work back from his unintentional banishment! Give him a permanent visa!”12 4

Art in Orthodox Marxism

Through the contrast that Fischer draws, his interpretation of Kafka also well-characterizes the predominant position of orthodox Marxism concerning modernist or what were from the nineteen-forties until the seventies often referred to as “avantgarde” work—which comprised anything not realist. In orthodox Marxism art was considered relevant also because of the links between Marxist ideology and its Enlightenment and Romanticist historical 11

Ernst Fischer, “Kafka Konferenz,” in Franz Kafka aus Prager Sicht (Prague: Verlag der Tschechoslowakischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1965), 166. 12 Ibid., 168.

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roots; at the same time art was often expected to play a practical ideological function. We should, of course, not automatically assume that all the artists avoided the ideological usage of their works or that they shunned the request by the state or the party to support their political or ideological aims. In many cases just the opposite was true, and works of art of Socialist Realism, especially in the Soviet Union, were produced in enormous numbers and often with great technical painterly success. In a way what this art was expressing was precisely power.13 Nonetheless, today this form of art—as in contemporary China— while highly valued, mainly represents a document of the lived immediacy of a past epoch. It is contemporary art, no matter how dependent (technically, thematically etc.) on its socialist realist predecessors, that today appears as the “authentic” art of these countries. If art is realist and at the same time critical, its criticism can under the conditions of orthodox Marxism only be directed towards the past, namely bourgeois society. Since the actual situation in the Soviet bloc was considered to be unproblematic, devoid of alienation and class antagonisms etc., any art—or other forms of expression that were critical of the “actually existing socialism”—were considered to be misinterpretations of the current social situation, which was deemed to be without a fault or, at most, in the process of eliminating the few remaining instances of such deficiencies. Art could therefore be realist, but critical only of the past. lt was even better if it was realist and oriented towards the future—which is where romantic aspect of the new realism set in, so that we then got Romantic Realism. From the perspective of contemporary Western philosophy we then got bad propaganda masquerading as art. Under orthodox Marxism art was politically or ideologically problematic not only because of its lack of authentic realism. In the perception of the general public, artists also were thought to lead Bohemian lives, to celebrate them in their writings and art, and, generally speaking, to hold up bad examples both in their lifestyles and their writings or plays or pictures. Their works reached into social and existential territories thus far unexplored by the state and its apparatuses; they represented what the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni expected from futurism: to set up a “new order of disorder.”14 Or, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty exclaimed in his “Eye and Mind” essay from 1961, “Only the painter is entitled to look at everything without being obliged to appraise what 13 14

On this topic see Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008). Giovanni Papini, quoted in Michel Ostenc, lntellectuels italiens et le fascisme, 1915–1929 (Paris: Payot, 1983), 99.

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he sees.”15 Yet such freedom could appear to orthodox Marxists as a reprehensible sort of social irresponsibility. Orthodox Marxism, then, was incessantly caught between the utilitarian drive to use art for short-term gains (to involve it in practical operative ideological struggles) and, on the other hand, to praise it as the highest form of creativity, as the paradigmatic instance of human freedom and as the opposite of the repetitive labor of the industrial age. When the industrial age was replaced by the post-industrial epoch, the age of information technology and that of multinational capital, both traditional Marxism and art as the pinnacle of creativity withered away. 5

Marxism as Toothless Tiger or Cuddly Panda

From what I have said so far it would seem that Marxism is, as Michel Foucault once remarked, a “fish in the water in the 19th century.” Accordingly, however, Foucault also went on to claim that Marxism was dead already in the first half of the 20th century. l would agree with this if the statement were supplemented by another, namely that Marxism remained relevant and alive well into the 20th century in all those countries or parts of the world where society had not yet reached the same developmental level as the economically and socially highly-developed Western parliamentary democracies. Of course, a counter­argument could be that Marxism never really was able to function according to the vision of its founding fathers, be they Marx, Engels or Lenin. The proof of the pudding, as Engels exclaimed, is in the eating of it, and the same should be true especially of Marxism. Of course, various Marxisms sprung up in various periods of recent history and in different environments, and some of them were able to establish a productive relationship with art and culture. What was mostly appreciated in such instances was what could be designated as the existential function of modernist art—for modernism was mostly the art that was around at the time of Marxism’s culmination. This is even more true in the case of authors of Western Marxism, such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, the early Lukács, or even, much later, the early Fredric Jameson. Through the existential function of art, the cognitive and the aesthetic functions could be appreciated. Basically, however, Marxist authors, be they orthodox or Western, regarded the art of their time, as well as that of the past, in a rather traditional bourgeois way 15

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 123.

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and continued to do so. They thus remained—with Walter Benjamin being the main exception to this rule—rather traditional observers of art, even if they defended cubism, expressionism or dadaism. Already when it came to conceptualism there were no Marxist authors that have (or perhaps would) evaluate, analyze and discuss it in any way. Marxism simply had nothing to say about conceptual art or that of the other neo-avantgardes: a fact remarked upon by Benjamin Buchloh, who in his 2000 book Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry deplored the “extreme limitations of European contemporary aesthetic thought,”16 rejecting Bürger’s criticism of the neo-avantgardes, thereby ascribing to American neo-avantgarde artists a much higher place in contemporary art than they would possess had they been analyzed on the basis of Bürger’s theoretical positions. From much of what I have said it would appear that Marxism today is a toothless tiger and that the same goes for any philosophy of art associated with it. As I noted, Marxism as a philosophy of art revealed its scope and capability to become theoretically involved in discussions about art at the times of realism; expressionism; and perhaps cubism and surrealism; but its relevance diminishes significantly beyond these boundaries. Today Marxism possesses much history but apparently little contemporary relevance. What do I mean by relevance?—that a theory is able to conceptually grasp the ongoing events, processes and their discursive articulations. If a certain theory is incapable of doing this, it remains a part of history or is about such history for purely historical reasons. In some of its last authors in Europe— such as Ernst Fischer or Roger Garaudy—realism often was so broadened as to include practically any style. The same went for Marxism as a whole. But there is a more fundamental problem of how we can relate to a theory as Marxist if it has discarded the notion of class struggle or of surplus value? This appeared to be the case with what in the 1980 was sometimes called “postmarxism.”17 Postmarxism was a serious attempt to “update” Marxism. It was preceded by remnants of anthropological Marxism, the aim of which was to present Marxism as a friendly and peaceful (“no class struggle any more!”) theory and social practice, more akin to social work than to revolutionary theory. Of course, the idea of revolution was rejected as an obsolete social aim. Marxism appeared like a cartoon or a zoo panda, harmless and cuddly.

16 17

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 2000), xxvii. See for example works from the eighties by Ernesto Laclau.

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Marxism as a Snow Leopard

Now we come to the third perception of Marxism, namely as a snow leopard. In recent years we witnessed a revival of universalist theories that promote ontology and universal values, without doing this on the basis of religion or traditional metaphysics. They introduced notions such as the “political” (Chantal Mouffe),18 raised to theoretical dignity a notion such as love (Kaja Silverman, Alain Badiou, Julia Kristeva),19 and reappraised the notion of art (Badiou, Jacques Rancière).20 Even if many of these theories are contradictory in themselves or among themselves, they nevertheless reveal a deep contemporary need for a novel theory or theories that would conceptually analyze and pbilosophically grasp the current historical events within the conditions of global capitalism. The only way to do this is of course on the basis of universalism and in opposing relativism. It is thus probably no coincidence that two among these authors who today have the greatest influence in philosophy are former adherents of Louis Althusser from the sixties and seventies—Badiou and Rancière (and partly Slavoj Žižek). It is furthermore obvious that these or similar thinkers are ascribing to art an essential role within their philosophy—something very different from their own treatment of art a few decades ago when they interpreted it primarily as a form of ideology and thus as an unscientific and unphilosophical practice. Today at least Rancière directly links his positions on art and what he calls “regimes of visibility” to the romanticist sources of modern art, thereby following an implicitly leftist and Marxist path. It is also in other areas, such as ethics, that Marxism or its contemporary transformations are gaining ground. This is occurring because today the world is not only economically and culturally a global place, but because also social contradictions are increasing and have become global too. This situation promises to resuscitate social philosophies of the past, Marxism probably being the main among these. It thus remains to be seen whether Marxism or some other perhaps new dynamic and responsive social theory will emerge, for only such a theory has any actual future. As I claimed above, today a revised and detotalized Marxism 18 19 20

See for example: Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005). See Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996); Alain Badiou, Conditions (Pans: Seuil, 1992). See for example: Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004); Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilee, 2004).

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is one of the few viable theoretical paths that are open to theory—whether referring to art, society, ecology or the all-englobing global capitalism. My guess is that any viable reemergence of Marxism as a utopian theory has to be complemented by a similar contemporary artistic and cultural practice. Perhaps the appearance of the latter two are to be one of the first visible signs that such a transformation, transcending the realm of theory, is actually happening.

Chapter 10

Aesthetics and the Aesthetic Today: After Adorno (2010) What is this instant that is ours? —Michel Foucault

∵ 1

Why Aesthetics?

Aesthetics, as the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor W. Adorno often remarked, has lagged behind developments in art. Since its articulation as a field of inquiry, aesthetics has often been unable to accomplish its aim of offering an explanation, evaluation, or identification of its object, which remains predominantly art. Furthermore, it was often the artists who were suspicious of the role of aesthetics, asking, “Why do you waste your time and mine by trying to get value judgments? Don’t you see that when you get a value judgment, that’s all you have?”1 They warned: “The danger to be avoided lies in aesthetic delectation.”2 In brief, for the artists, often the maximum that aesthetics was considered capable of achieving for art was, according to Barnett Newman, what ornithology is for the birds. A similar view is shared by much of philosophy: “The dominant opinion … shows that the glorious sensible presence of art is devoured by a discourse on art which tends to become its own reality.”3 If these views are accurate, why continue to carry out aesthetic analysis except for historical, documentary, and purely intellectual purposes? Adorno himself offered a persuasive answer: “What is essential to art is that which in it is not the case, that which is incommensurable with the empirical measure

1 John Cage, quoted in Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), 63. 2 Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), 13. 3 Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2004), 11. Unless ­otherwise noted, all translations are my own. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_011

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of all things. The compulsion to aesthetics is the need to think this empirical incommensurability.”4 In Adorno, the aesthetic theory—as opposed to aesthetics as an academic discipline or division of philosophy and a segment of a philosophical system— is necessary not only because of the desire to know and to reflect but also to have an effect on artistic practice.5 The philosopher is an authority for practitioners of art and those who contemplate it.6 As Adorno claims in Aesthetic Theory, “Every artwork, if it is to be fully experienced, requires thought and therefore stands in need of philosophy” (AT, 262). In this respect he is unlike the analytic aesthetician—but very much like the Danto-esque theorist of art who appears to have achieved the impossible, namely, a conflation of the analytic and the Hegelian lines of reasoning. Adorno in his turn succeeds in bringing together an insightful analysis of high modernist art without succumbing to the temptations of a Hegelian totalizing mindset. Traditionally, aesthetics targets the gray realm on either side of the borderline of art qua art, aiming at the object at the dividing line between art and notart, be it temporally synchronous or historically diachronous, whether what is at issue is the inclusion of a work or a body of works within the changing realm or “class” called art. “Art is no fixed set of boundaries but rather a momentary and fragile balance” (AT, 300). The identity of art is determined with the aid of borderline cases that are then included within the parameter of art. At stake, therefore, are borderline cases: instances of works that are candidates for aesthetic and/or artistic appreciation but that have not yet attained such status within the current art world. While past art has often met with the designation of not-art or bad art, in contemporary art all such production purportedly falls within the realm of “art.” Even more: once a work is admitted into this parameter of “art,” with the encircled realm being the institution called art, it may lose its artistic or aesthetic worth, but it hardly ever loses its status as a work of art as such. But this is only one side of the coin; on the other side, precisely such borderline cases can be regarded as the only authentic cases of art. Jean François Lyotard introduced the unusual designation of artworks being first “­postmodern” and then “modern”—postmodern when they are still outside 4 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, 1997), 335. (Hereafter cited parenthetically as AT.) 5 “Aesthetics presents philosophy with the bill for the fact that the academic system degraded it to being a mere specialization”; Ibid., 262. 6 Adorno’s continuing influence on and import for music studies is attested, for example, by the fact that in many continental music academies his Introduction to the Sociology of Music remains part of the syllabus.

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the parameter of the institution of art and modern when they enter it and lose their nature as “events.”7 From designations such as Lyotard’s (one of whose historical roots being anarchist aesthetics) arises a conflict and a contradiction between works that are already a part of the institution of art, works that are potential candidates for such an inclusion, and works that, by not yet being members of this institution, function as authentic art. A major factor in the development of art is precisely the disagreement over whether something is art or not.8 On its own terms, this disagreement reveals the conflict between art as a part of the institution of art and art as an event.9 2

The Role of the Avantgarde

In Adorno the “negativity” of art prevents its utopian realization, since this realization would cause its end. In this thought, Adorno distances himself from Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man where the latter claims that if we are to resolve the problem of politics in practice we must approach it through the aesthetic. “It is Schiller’s idea that precisely because it renounces all direct intervention in reality, art is suited to restore man’s wholeness,”10 namely, by bringing together the halves of man represented by sensousness and reason. Schiller’s view was not isolated, or at least not for long; witness Saint-Simon’s 1825 statement about the artists who “will develop the poetic aspect of the new system.”11 The artistic avantgarde is from its historical beginnings linked to its political double, causing—Baudelaire was the first to note12—the artistic avantgarde to accept, in spite of its infinite desire for freedom, the militaristic discipline of the political avantgarde. Adorno sees the characteristic feature of avantgarde art in the concept of the ”new” rather 7

8 9 10 11 12

“Une oeuvre ne peut devenir moderne que si elle est d’abord postmoderne. Le postmodernisme ainsi entendu n’est pas le modernisme à sa fin, mais à l’état naissant, et cet état est constant”; Jean-François Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1988), 28. See Andrew Bowie, “Adorno, Heidegger, and the Meaning of Music,” Thesis Eleven 56 (1999): 4. The more recent theorists of the “event” range from Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze to ­Jean-Luc Nancy and, especially, Alain Badiou. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avantgarde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 46. Quoted in Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avantgarde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987), 103. See Ibid., esp. 110–11.

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than in “the intent of the avantgarde movements to reintegrate art in the praxis of life,”13 which, for him, would suffer precisely the consequences of such a discipline. The notion of the avantgarde is crucial to an understanding and interpretation of modernism in the last two centuries. Adorno also sympathizes with the notion of the avantgarde, but the aspect that would be of interest to him would today more appropriately be called modernist. This aspect is exemplified by the concept of the new and by the dissonance that prevents facile consumption of an authentic artwork in bourgeois society. The radical—politicized—­ avantgardes partly overlap with Adorno’s notion of modern art, but in their central features they represent a very different form of artistic dissonance. Their avantgarde aesthetic intent in the culture of the thirties and forties no longer meets with a supportive or indifferent social environment, which is why they cease to be considered worthy of discussion by Adorno. Around World War I their utopian potential is still present, but even then they are subversive not in the artistic manner propounded by Adorno, but in staking out another path of dissonance: that of aesthetic militancy. Nevertheless, that their aesthetic procedure is not alien to Adorno can be seen in his frequent remarks on Dadaism, as when he states that hermetic poetry (and that of Mallarmé) converges with its political counterpole, dada (AT, 321). In the debates preceding postmodernism, the notion of avantgarde art attains a variety of designations, from those that associate the debates with, or dissociate them from, the political avantgarde organizations to those associated with “classical” avantgardes (Stefan Morawski); Bürger’s almost eponymous “historical” avantgardes; Greenberg’s “avantgarde”; post-, trans-, and retro-avantgardes. Contrary to the notion of autonomous art defended by Adorno, the avantgarde in art was conceived as art that transcends the confines of its autonomy. In Adorno, autonomous art of course cannot be subsumed under the category of Kantian disinterestedness, which, for him, is in fact pleasure masquerading “beyond recognition” (AT, 13), very much resembling the effects of l’art pour l’art. Modern art has eliminated the universal, but the excluded is retained through its negation. It is the specificity of this negation that is “constitutive of the modern” (AT, 351). The other feature of modern art—of any authentic art—is for Adorno its existence as a mediated form between the historical society and the work: the “constitutive immanence of the aesthetic sphere is at the same time the ideology that undermines it” (AT, 349). This mediation is a 13

Bürger, 87.

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theme for philosophical aesthetics. In Adorno’s opinion, the social aspect of art is its opposition to society by way of its immanence and not its political stance: by being partisan, art negates its autonomy and becomes reducible to a particular interpretation. Since society is thoroughly instrumentalized—everything is but a means for something else, having value only in relation to something else and not to itself—autonomous art is one of the few instances of human activity and existence that does not succumb to the demands of the capitalist system. Still, as noted in the case of dada, Adorno’s aversion to partisan art (and the “kitsch of the Soviet bloc”—AT, 349) should not be confused with his implicit support for some aspects of the activities of the classical avantgardes. In accordance with the prevailing dichotomy of the first half of the twentieth century, Adorno perceives authentic art of his epoch as that which achieves the subversion of content by form, offering as examples works by Kafka and Beckett and Picasso’s Guernica. Works of artists such as these allow for the experience of the autonomy of an artwork in its relation to the heteronomy of society. 3

Criticisms of Artistic Autonomy

In the opinion of Wolfgang Welsch, in Adorno “the autonomy of the artistic work criticizes the heteronomy of society.”14 Welsch points to Adorno’s accentuation of what he calls “work-internal heterogeneity,”15 namely, ­Adorno’s opinion that a work contains a heterogeneity of the sensible that is to be understood not as “raw” but as a sensible diversity. In Welsch’s view, a similar interpretation must be applied to the “work-external heterogeneity”: the variety and divergence in artistic paradigms regarding different artworks, as well as a divergence in the sphere of art on the whole, must be acknowledged. Welsch concludes that modern works no longer comply with one general canon, but each develops its own. “Thus two things are self-evident for aesthetic awareness from the modern stance: that one must discover the idiolect in a singular work; and that one must be aware of the fundamental plurality of paradigms in regard to art as a whole.”16 Welsch’s assessment of Adorno is preceded by his critical view of the latter as an adherent of traditional aesthetics. It attests to Welsch’s opinion regarding the recent philosophical and historical situation—that of Unsere postmoderne 14 Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics (London: SAGE Publications, 1997), 69. 15 Ibid., 71. 16 Ibid., 72.

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Moderne, “our postmodern modernity,” as proclaimed by the title of his influential work from 1987. His views could, nonetheless, be regarded from that (and as that) borderline between modernity/modernism and postmodernity/ postmodernism, the latter pair being specified by the emergence of the novel questioning of the possible Ausgang from modernity. Some of the questions implied by Welsch’s observation are: How do we organize our understanding of what art is? How is the history (consciously viewed from the present vantage point) constructed or interpreted, and how does art change through history, especially recent history? In brief, is today’s art essentially the art of Adorno’s modern time, or is it essentially different? The questions raised are of course fundamental questions of aesthetics understood in a plethora of ways. Let me attempt to offer some minor hints as to how they could be answered. In what follows I shall briefly discuss some views concerning these issues, occasionally turning to Adorno and concluding with some observations regarding contemporary art. Let me begin with Bürger. Bürger posited as the telos of the European avantgarde movements an “attack on the status of art in bourgeois society,”17 thereby offering, in the seventies, a novel interpretation of avantgarde art of the previous century. The deep and broad influence of this study continues into the present. While the avantgardes discussed by Bürger actually represented, as he argued, a historic break with previous bourgeois art, early modernism included, it must be noted that Bürger’s empirical and historical data did not fully support his theoretical positions. Thus, for example, the many provocative, revolutionary, and original gestures, procedures, devices, and inventions of the avantgardists often owed more to Georges Sorel than to German romanticism. Dada presents a similar case: Bürger proclaimed it “the most radical movement within the European avantgarde” for no longer criticizing “schools that preceded it, but [criticizing] the art as an institution.”18 In fact, Tristan Tzara (highlighted by Bürger in his study) and the Romanian circle of Tzara’s Zürich friends had been deeply influenced by their native Romanian cultural background—the Jewish tradition; dada-like performances and events; poetry and prose in prewar Bucharest; and the futurism of Marinetti, whose initial Futurist Manifesto appeared in Bucharest a day before it was published in Le Figaro.19 Much of what Bürger called “criticism of art as an institution” may have been in fact a consequence of the transposition of a foreign culture to a West European 17 18 19

Bürger, 49. Bürger, 22. See Tom Sandqvist, Dada East: Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006).

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ambiance. In short, many of the procedures and ideas of Zurich dada may have had more in common with cultural practices and specifics in that distant part of the European East than with a conscious attack on autonomous bourgeois culture. A similar criticism could be raised in regard to Italian futurism (designated by Bürger as yet another historical avantgarde movement), for Marinetti’s pre-futurist artistic practices in Paris and then his early futurist activities in Italy had much in common with anarchist aesthetics,20 with Gustave Kahn’s esthétique de la rue, and with the bourgeois carnivalesque culture of European (and later American) metropolises at the turn of the century and in the period that ended with the end of the First World War.21 What is even more important is that it was within il primo futurismo (1909–1915) that the really radical and subversive ideas arose concerning art as an institution, making the early futurism a much better example of a critical stance toward “art as an institution” than dada. What remains of import in Bürger’s study is that the previously mentioned avantgardes had attempted to breach the border between art and life, although they may have realized this to a lesser degree than we would tend to conclude from Bürger, less consciously than is usually thought, and more due to a “­cunning of reason” than by a conscious adherence to Romanticist suppositions of the historic role of art as regards the realization of humanity. In Bürger, the Hegelian interpretation of the history of art remains a potent factor that, while offering a totalizing view of artistic history, nonetheless distorts the more site-specific artistic, aesthetic, and historically specific events and acts surrounding the war—acts of the kind highlighted by Welsch. The “aesthetic”—in the guise of freedom, “the order of disorder,” the realization of art, the breaking down of the barrier separating “life” and art, and so on—remains an essential feature of the art and broad historical human action (or praxis) of much of the first half of the previous century. In different terms, this characteristic or trend was the cause of a continual introduction of new works into the institution of art, endowing such artifacts with the aura of historical authenticity and consequently aesthetic value.

20

21

“From political theorists Arturo Labriola and Georges Sorel [Marinetti] borrows the Marxist concept of transforming the world; in anarchist thinkers, such as Max Stirner, Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin he emulates especially the protesting stand towards art and cultural institutions of the past”; Noëmi Blumenkranz, “Une poétique de l’héroisme. L’esthétique de Marinetti,” in Présence de F. T. Marinetti (Lausanne: L’age d’homme, 1982), 51. Could we not view Marcel Duchamp’s irreverent gesture of exhibiting Fountain in New York in April 1917 as an act resembling many of the futurists’ activities?

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Bürger’s analysis is valid insofar as it points out that the historical avantgardes were a cultural provocation not with the simple aim of épater le bourgeois, but with the intention to transform the whole artistic and human— perhaps the correct term would be “existential”—domain into a utopian event” a dynamic state of things created according to desires, proclamations, manifestos, and often actual actions of individual avantgarde artists. In their final stages of development, these avantgarde projects and acts mostly resettled into the realm of the institution of art: the historic role of the avantgarde was lost, but the institutional role was recaptured and it blossomed. Bürger’s narrative could thus be regarded as one story among others about the recent history of art. Still, Bürger himself saw his story as objective. He thus claimed that “self-criticism” of art, as carried out by Dadaism, for example, allows for objective understanding: “[O]nly when art enters the stage of self-criticism does the ‘objective understanding’ of past periods of the development of art become possible.”22 Bürger added that this “objective understanding” does not mean that the understanding is “independent of the place in the present of the cognizing individual”; instead, “it merely means insight into the overall process insofar as this process has come to a conclusion in the present of the cognizing individual.”23 If this claim had been true, then Bürger’s attempt to fix the course of the development of avantgarde art within the twentieth century would have originated from a privileged historical position: that at which the process of development of the avantgarde has come to an end. Aside from some previously noted empirical weaknesses, Bürger’s position is made less tenable by a further limitation, namely, the more recent appearance of new avantgarde art, that is, the politicized postmodern art of the transitional period from socialism to postsocialism,24 to which we could easily ascribe features characteristic of avantgarde art.25 This makes Bürger’s rather Hegelian claim about the “conclusion in the present of the cognizing individual” questionable, limited by its modern and culture-specific framework.

22 Bürger, 22. 23 Ibid. 24 See Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art Under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). 25 “Post-avantgarde” art of the former socialist countries visibly displayed all the pertinent features of the neo-avantgardes and many of the historical avantgardes. See Aleš Erjavec, “The Avantgardes: From Modernism to Postmodernism,” Journal of Contemporary Thought 22 (2005): 65–85.

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Historicity of the Work of Art

Aesthetics as a discipline is destined to be incomplete and to promise an impossible outcome, for it attempts to make commensurable what cannot be so. This initial and incessant transgression of its own domain prevents it, argues Adorno, from achieving its aim of grasping theoretically its continually transformed object of reflection. Such reflections are always circumscribed by historical and often also cultural specifications of their vantage points. The plethora of the latter, on the one hand, and their dialectical linkage with the object of their reflection—what Adorno called “the philosophical insight that fact and concept are not polar opposites but mediated reciprocally in one another” (AT, 343)—on the other, is what makes the task of aesthetics an incessant procedure. It could be objected that we should not search for borderline cases but limit ourselves to perspicuous instances of great art, where no doubt exists as to their artistic credentials. Martin Heidegger’s analysis of Van Gogh’s painting A Pair of Boots could serve as an example of such a perspicuous instance. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger proclaims the decline of modern art but praises this painting as a case of “great” art: a contemporary (modern) work is offered as an example of “great art” in spite of all modern art being proclaimed in decline. It is within this philosophical horizon, charted by Heidegger and appertaining to modernism, that the issue of truth is situated. Adorno acknowledges: “Only he understands an artwork who grasps it as a complex nexus of truth” (AT, 262). Like Heidegger, Adorno too accentuates the role of truth in art. In Heidegger’s own words, “Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealedness … In the work, the happening of truth is at work.”26 For both, truth is the basic ontological precondition for art and its exemplary status (and, in Heidegger, position) in modernism and modernity. “Emphatically, art is knowledge, though not the knowledge of objects” (AT, 262). Truth, appearing via a specific form of knowledge—art—is the fundamental category of a modernist philosophy of art. Within this horizon, philosophy offers the self-­ reflection of art that the latter, in spite of all its significance, by definition cannot articulate in a purely abstract way, for in that way it would reach into the realm of philosophical concepts. It is the philosopher who explains, reflects, and judges: “The idea of a value-free aesthetics is nonsense” (AT, 262). And “[a] rtworks, especially those of the highest dignity, await their interpretation … 26

Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1976), 178.

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Grasping truth content postulates critique” (AT, 128). For some time still, aesthetics retains its evaluative faculty; later, with the advent of pop and conceptual art, all that remains to be discussed is the position of such art within the institution of art, for “there really is no art more true than any other, and … there really is no one way art has to be: all art is equally and indifferently art.”27 In juxtaposing Adorno and Heidegger regarding truth, some essential differences must be noted: Heidegger’s position on past and contemporary art changes significantly over decades. Early on, he endorses Hegel’s theory of the end of art and the elevated position ascribed to Greek art as the most authentic, when art purportedly provided guidance as to how to live. Art of the modern epoch “is designed to provide ‘aesthetic experiences.’”28 Such an experience offers no more than repose and relaxation, for it accentuates beauty, not truth. The later Heidegger acquired an affinity for modern artists such as Rilke, Le Corbusier, Stravinsky, Braque, Klee, and Cézanne; it appears that he wanted to write a sequel to “The Origin of the Work of Art” that would refer to Klee and Cézanne.29 In Adorno’s view, great art characteristically overcomes historical limitations: not as an atemporal entity, but as a transient, but therefore no less ­crucial, crystallization of truth: Authentic art of the past that for the time being must remain veiled is not thereby sentenced. Great works wait. While their metaphysical meaning dissolves, something of their truth content, however little it can be pinned down, does not; it is that whereby they remain eloquent. A liberated humanity would be able to inherit its historical legacy free of guilt. What was once true in an artwork and then disclaimed by history is only able to disclose itself again when the conditions have changed on whose account that truth was invalidated. (AT, 40) This could be called Adorno’s interpretation of the historical transformation of a work of art and therefore of art as such: works have their historical moment in which they adequately relate to their broader historical frame and thereby express and present its truth. Since this truth does not lie on the surface of a work, it must be grasped by interpretation and critique. The artistic experience

27

Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 34. 28 Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 9. 29 Ibid.

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meets with resistance that mirrors the resistance of the work to its historical conditions of authenticity. “Great works wait.” They are reborn when historical circumstances reenact the situation in which they achieved their role as exceptional artworks. It is also for this reason that “a univocal construction of the history of art” is impossible (AT, 210). Art is not a dead entity, but a potentiality that in the case of a great work awaits its rebirth. In his correspondence with Walter Benjamin, Adorno agrees that “the auratic element of the work of art is declining.”30 In the same breath he distances his own notion of the autonomy of a work of art from the notion of “auratic” art as suggested by Benjamin. It would thus be incorrect to claim that Adorno envisioned an “end of art.” Nonetheless, in his opinion art is undergoing some kind of a decline: he speaks of Rimbaud anticipating “art’s decline” (AT, 4). To make matters more complicated, Adorno refers also to “the progress of art,” a general judgment that “has to do with a difficulty presented by the structure of [art’s] history.” (AT, 209). The problem with the notion of progress in art arises from the specific nature of art. In art, progress develops through forgetting: past works (“great works”) become alive after a period of waiting and reemerge as “contemporary” in spite of their origin in the past. Progress in art emerges only if past works are forgotten and some theme or artistic device, to use a different terminology, is invented anew or brought forth from oblivion. What exists in art are parallel presents: different historical lines run parallel to each other, interrelate, and are separated. This is why in Adorno’s opinion art’s essence “cannot be deduced from its history” (AT, 2). “The concept of art is located in a historically changing constellation of elements; it refuses definition” (AT, 2). If art were susceptible to a definition, that definition would always arise from a particular work or limit its scope to the present. It would thus exclude future instances of art, for which the main characteristic is that it cannot be deduced from the past to be applied to them. Art’s characteristics change incessantly, and much of the issue of art remains the question of whether a certain work is a work of art at all. It is because of this uncertainty that “[a]rt can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants” (AT, 3). If we were to translate Danto’s claim that “there is a kind of a transhistorical essence in art, everywhere and always the same, but it only discloses itself through history,”31 into Adorno’s conceptual frame, we would have to describe such “essence” as a rule or principle that generates the constellation called art.

30 Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 122. 31 Danto, After the End of Art, 28.

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Art as (Self-)Critique

At the end of his “Draft Introduction” to Aesthetic Theory, Adorno makes this far-reaching Marxist proposition: The principle of method here is that light should be cast on all art from the vantage point of the most recent artworks, rather than the reverse, following the custom of historicism and philology, which, bourgeois at heart, prefers that nothing ever change. If Valéry’s thesis is true that the best in the new corresponds to an old need, then the most authentic works are critiques of past works. Aesthetics become normative by articulating such criticism. (AT, 359) The immediate interpretation of this statement would be, of course, that we should look at past art from our own vantage point—something that cannot be avoided. Adorno furthermore claims that the role of aesthetics is to criticize works of the past since contemporary works are also critiques of past works, thereby privileging such contemporary criticism. But let us interpret the statement somewhat differently and claim that the most recent artworks put all past works into a different light, thereby transforming these same most recent works. Which works of art do we bring forth from oblivion and which do we resuscitate because they “waited” and awaited the repetition of specific circumstances or a condition that is ours? Which are the determining factors that allow us to grasp similarities between historical epochs? And which works of today become petrified and lose their life because they no longer correspond to our vision du monde? The issue is worthy of scrutiny not only for historical reasons, not only for being an essential issue for aesthetics as philosophy of art, but also because of its import for our contemporaneity, for shedding some light on the issue of “what is this instant that is ours”32 as regards art, aesthetics, and the aesthetic. It was of course Hegel who first persuasively presented a response to this question. Hegel grasped the essential issue of art through the pervasive notion of development. He interiorized the question, exposing it for what it remains today: the question of our perception and reception of past art from our proper vantage point for our vantage point. This is also true of the “instant that is ours”: Hegel’s concern and its articulation address our own concerns today. 32

Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. and trans. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 158.

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While he may be concerned with classical art of the past, his depiction of the situation regarding past art relates also to art of our own time and our relation to the art of the past: The statues set up are now corpses in stone whence the animating soul has flown, while the hymns of praise are words from which all belief is gone … They are themselves now just what they are for us—beautiful fruit broken off the tree; a kindly fate has passed on those works to us, as a maiden might offer such fruit off a tree. Their actual life as they exist is no longer there, nor the tree that bore them … Our action, therefore, when we enjoy them is not that of worship, through which our conscious life might attain its complete truth and be satisfied to the full: our action is external; it consists in wiping off some drop of rain or speck of dust from these fruits, and in place of the inner elements composing the reality of the ethical life, a reality that environed, created and inspired these works. We erect in prolix detail the scaffolding of the dead elements of their outward existence—language, historical circumstances, etc. All this we do, not in order to enter into their very life, but only to represent them ideally or pictorially within ourselves.33 The issue raised by Hegel concerns the impossibility of authentically experiencing past artworks. This impossibility also determines our proper possibilities; bearing witness to a change in our sensibility and a change in our vantage point arising from our proper historical circumstances. The past is closed to us in the artistic forms that were open to people of a past epoch. Hegel’s position is similar to Heidegger’s in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” where the perception offered by past art is also changed in contemporaneity. Contemporary art, on the other hand, is also a path not to truth, but to sheer enjoyment. It has become beautiful and has therefore lost its potentials qua art. It no longer allows for immediacy of truth and its unconcealedness; it is an accessory to concealment. The artistic has become the aestheticized; it no longer allows for the aesthetic. A related issue is raised by Marx in the introduction to the Grundrisse where he notes that [t]he difficulty we are confronted with is not, however, that of understanding how Greek art and epic poetry are associated with certain forms 33

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 753–54.

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of social development. The difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable ideal.34 Here Marx echoes Hegel’s views regarding classical art. His thought can be divided into two related statements. First, Greek art and epic poetry are creations of their own time and dependent upon historical and other site-specific circumstances. In many respects—the stage of development of the means of production, the import of mythical thought on the thematics of Greek art, the determining role of pagan religion and its influence on epic poetry—all these features shape and determine the artistic nature and the aesthetic (“pleasurable”) effect of such art. What, then, do Adorno’s words, “[g]reat works wait” (AT, 40), say in relation to or in light of Marx’s observation that these works (epic poetry) “still give us aesthetic pleasure”? Obviously, both Marx and Adorno claim, some works remain alive, actual, and relevant in epochs that transgress their historical circumstances and places of origin. Such works are “great works.” Second, Marx claims, as does Hegel, that Greek art and epic poetry “in some sense” remain for the art of his time—this is the year 1857—the rule and unreachable example. As S. S. Prawer showed in his reconstruction of Marx’s epoch as regards literary knowledge, influence, and tastes,35 in Marx’s time knowledge of Greek art and epic poetry were still very much considered obligatory for educated men. But Prawer’s study also shows that Marx was quite ignorant of art (especially fine art) that was not in the mainstream art of his time. He was thus interested in Eugène Sue and Honoré de Balzac, Balzac being one of the few popular writers among his contemporaries who still remains part of the literary canon today.36 Of course, Marx may not have been an art connoisseur of his time, and his tastes may have been average and rather traditional. Still, it is fair to consider that, as regards Greek art and epic poetry, he shared the tastes and appreciation of his contemporaries. Today, by contrast, hardly anyone will claim that poetry remains a part of the actual cultural canon of the present. It most probably 34 35 36

Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S. W. Razanskaya (Moscow: International Publishers, 1970), 217. S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Fredric Jameson notes that Balzac, although an author of “best sellers,” escapes the designation of being a part of the culture industry, for “no contradiction is yet felt in his time between the production of best sellers and the production of what will later come to be thought of as ‘high’ literature”; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 208.

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wasn’t part of the mainstream literature even in Adorno’s time. Still, once a work has been admitted into the perimeter of “art,” with the encircled realm being the institution called art, it may lose its artistic or aesthetic worth, but it hardly ever loses its status as a work of art. This is what has happened in our time to epic poetry and probably also to much of Greek art—a fact intuitively manifested by Marinetti’s irreverent mockery and disregard for Nike of Samothrace in his 1909 Futurist Manifesto. Something important has occurred between Marx’s lifetime and “this instance that is ours.” The diminution, if not outright disappearance, of contemporary appreciation of epic poetry signals that our own positions regarding our contemporary art have been transformed. Which art has emerged in recent decades? This most certainly was not an art familiar to Marx or his contemporaries. This new art was then in its nascent stage. In a majority of cases it was the art of European modernism. But perhaps even the art of modernism, regarded by Adorno as paradigmatic of the modern epoch and at the same time as an instance of art in its form of critical negativity, was not the art that changed the cultural paradigm of the early twentieth century. If we turn to Georg Lukács as a central defender of critical realism of the first half of the previous century, we recognize his choices as those Marx himself would probably readily have accepted as instances of great art. 6

Modernism, Postmodernism, and Neo-Avantgarde

What represented a central turning point were not the parallel currents of realism and modernism (with the avantgardes representing a radical part thereof) but the advent of postmodernism, arising from European modernism, with Marcel Duchamp’s readymades representing the first instance of postmodern art. If Bürger, when referring to Dadaism, had had Duchamp in mind, his analysis would be much more persuasive. Although Fredric Jameson was correct in claiming that “cultural forms of postmodernism may be said to be the first specifically North American global style,”37 that the logic of postmodern culture—its functioning, dissemination, distribution (as a symbolic and as a financial commodity), and institutionalization within the frame of historical and cultural archives—arose from the United States, the roots of this functioning are to be found in European modernism. In (continental) Europe art retained its special status—arising from 37

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991).

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the tradition of romanticism and the fin-de-siècle—well into the twentieth century, and this status assigned to art the special locus of creativity (as promoted by most European authors, ranging from Marx to Maurice Merleau-Ponty) as opposed to repetition of industrial labor. With the passage into the postindustrial society, the paradigmatic role of art as the highest form of creativity has withered away, a process having as its side effect the diminution of the previous privileged role of art. This change in the role of art is noted by Gérard Genette in his observation that in Heidegger and Adorno a symmetry exists between “two antithetical forms of overvaluation” of art,38 a fact revealed also by the readymade nature of the readymade. A similar gesture—arising from a critique of Bürger, but through him from a critique of Adorno—is to be found in Buchloh’s reevaluation of his own views regarding American neo-avantgarde art. In his opinion, [t]he first of Bürger’s many delusions (and my own as well) was of course to situate neo-avantgarde practices in a perpetual, almost Oedipal relation to the accomplishments of the parental avantgarde of the twenties … The second and equally fatal delusion, shared by Bürger and this author to some extent … was the assumption that the criteria for aesthetic judgment would have to be linked at all times, if not to models of an outright instrumentalized political efficacy, then at least to a compulsory mode of critical negativity.39 By diminishing the import of classical avantgardes and by elevating the neo-avantgardes to a higher status—by discarding the requirement that neo-avantgarde art possess the predicate of negativity—the placement of pop art also changed: the same author persuasively argued (complementing in this Danto’s claim that pop art effectively transgressed the division between high and low in culture) that Andy Warhol successfully transformed himself from a commercial artist into a fine artist, aiding in this way pop art’s replacement of abstract expressionism as the leading American art of the period.40 As Jameson has demonstrated in his comparison of Heidegger’s hermeneutic analysis of Van Gogh’s painting A Pair of Shoes with his own analysis of a Warhol work, the contemporary issue regarding art is no longer that of truth,

38 39

Gérard Genette, L’oeuvre de l’art. La relation esthétique (Paris: Éditions Seuil, 1997), 11. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000), xxix. 40 Ibid., esp. 463–481.

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but meaning. In other words, contemporary art predominantly aspires to create meaning, not to reveal truth. As Boris Groys argues, It turns out that this question [of the value of a product] cannot be answered by reaching back to reality and that the truth of the product cannot be the basis of its value. The question about the value of a product thus remains the question about its relation to tradition and other cultural artifacts … Neither innovative art nor innovative theory can be described or argued in their signifying relationship to reality or, which is the same, in their truth. The question therefore is not are they true but are they culturally precious.41 This means that works of art do not relate to their referents (the truth of which they would establish, reveal, and disclose) but rather form a system of equivalences within which they function according to a grid of mutually dependent meanings. Neither Adorno nor Heidegger see art forming such a system of significations. For both of them, art still reveals the truth of the referent, be it society, an epoch, or an existential artistic expression. For art arising from Duchamp’s readymades and continuing with Warhol, Groys’s description is more valid, for the Duchampian and postmodern art that Groys has in mind does actually function very much according to the principles of the institutional theory of art. This art no longer discloses existential or other truths, it functions exclusively within the institution of art it incessantly recreates. It is within such a framework that the previously mentioned passage from Welsch acquires additional significance: although Welsch was referring to modern art, he was in fact relating to the postmodern, this art being exemplified by the borderline, a borderline determining the essence of the center. Art as an institution has replaced art as part of the aesthetic, and great art of the past has been turned into marketable commodities for the culture industry. Adorno may have sensed this when he expressed his harsh criticism of the cinema. 7

The Waning of Art

The transformation from modernism to postmodernism is global, yet it is the art of modernism—much more than the art of the classical avantgardes— that is still being universally disseminated, acquiring on its way across the 41

Boris Groys, Über das Neue. Versuch einer Kulturökonomie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2004), 18, 19.

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globe local and hybrid forms. These hybrid forms, often considered postmodern products of culture (and not necessarily art) within their place of origin, apparently contradict Adorno’s claims for the universalism of modernism and his value judgments regarding works that represent a negation of the bourgeois frame of reference. If in the recent past there existed a belief that the decline of art, as diagnosed by Danto, Genette, Gianni Vattimo, and so on, did not exist to the same extent in the postcolonial countries as it does in the most developed parts of the world, this hope today seems obsolete. As a Latin American theorist notes, Aesthetic innovation is of declining interest in the museums, in the publishing houses, and in film; it has been shifted instead into electronic technologies, into musical entertainment and fashion. Where there were painters or musicians, there are now designers and disc jockeys.42 The decline of art is universal. What Adorno sensed as the negativity of art of his time, and which found its authentic manifestation in the opposition between content and form, no longer applies. Descriptions and judgments such as this one from Latin America are today enunciated across the globe, from China to Slovenia. While the art markets are booming, the symbolic capital of art is rapidly diminishing. One way of explaining this phenomenon is to suggest that it is a consequence of the global proliferation of art, of its increased production, of the merging of the high and the low (as in the previously mentioned case of pop art), and of the general acceptance of the idea that all art is equally art. The art of high modernism, appreciated by Adorno, has become a historical style; contemporary art in its various forms relates not so much to modernism as to the art of the historical avantgardes with their mixing of genres, techniques, procedures, and different realms of life, these ranging from science to politics. “Walter Benjamin claimed that the creation of mechanically reproduced images tends to diminish the ‘aura’ of the original. In fact the opposite is true. The existence of the reproduction, in all its manifold copies, actually heightens a sense of the uniqueness of the original.”43 This statement says something about the auratic potentials of the extant original works vis-à-vis those that 42 43

Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxxix. Paul Crowther, The Transhistorical Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 138.

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are devoid of Benjamin’s aura, but, as Adorno had already pointed out in his correspondence with Benjamin, the issue of auratic art does not really touch upon the issue of the autonomy of art as conceived by Adorno himself. It says something relevant, though, about the changed mode of art. The theory of the avantgarde developed by Bürger and discussed at the beginning of this essay has been one of the important analyses of the development and broader framework of art and the aesthetic. Bürger’s theory can be regarded within the framework of modernism and as a theory that has, as Bürger claims, become possible when the development of the avantgarde reached its end. The fact that Bürger has not envisioned other “parallel” modernities does not refute the argument of this 1974 book. To this same modern framework Heidegger and Adorno also belong. Their position toward truth is essential, for they both view it refracted through or existing in art. This “overvaluation of art” is also typical for both—as it is for Bürger, who links his historical avantgardes to the historic, albeit unsuccessful, attempt to overcome the division between art and life and between the sensible and the rational. Benjamin offered a different narrative concerning art and its meaning within the recent historical framework, especially in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility.” Disputed by Adorno and generating very little interest for decades, the essay (like its author) became influential with the advent of postmodernism. Benjamin claims that, with the technological developments represented mainly by photography and the cinema, a new artistic and aesthetic sensibility has arisen. During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.44 Regarded in conjunction with Adorno’s observation about the necessity of viewing past works from the position of recent art, Benjamin’s statement attains additional relevance, for it foreshadows from a historical distance of several decades a drastic change in, and an essential modification of, the human and social import of art beginning in the sixties. Contemporary art no longer offers a path to truth and is not historically, socially, or existentially relevant to the extent it still was in Adorno’s time. Modernist art, just as epic 44

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 222.

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poetry, has today increasingly turned from a truth-revealing document of its time into its monument. Benjamin believed that this change has to do with collective experience. He claimed that “[p]ainting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today.”45 He noted that collective experience is dialectically linked to our mode of sense perception. Not only is the creation of certain art forms no longer possible but these forms are also perceived differently or, as the epic poem attests, not at all. This process had already begun in Marx’s time, with the advent of technical advancements in representation and the emergent “plurality of paradigms in regard to art” that Welsch speaks of. From our contemporary position, in “this instant that is ours,” past art has been more quickly and radically than ever incorporated into the present or more recent art, and is being viewed accordingly—following Hegel’s description from the Phenomenology of Spirit as the paramount work of the modern philosophy of art. Within the framework of more recent art, art of the past has become aestheticized to provide, in Heidegger’s words, “aesthetic experiences” and has ceased to be “emphatically knowledge,” that is, truth, as Adorno claimed. Instead of truth, contemporary art offers meaning. Art has become but another commodity. Attempts to subvert the extant art system are few and far between. There is no longer the possibility of conflict between content and form and hardly the possibility of conflict between an individual and the society or politics. In the highly developed part of the world, art no longer serves as an expressive means for social, national, and religious minorities—or if it does, it is practiced for some time (before it joins the institution of today’s popular culture) in subcultural forms such as rap and ethnic music, grafitti, fashion, and lifestyle.46 It is in such ways that the aesthetic today has been retained: to a small extent, on a limited scale, and without the hope of bringing together the divided halves through art. In Rancière’s view, to which no persuasive alternative has yet been offered, “[t]he postmodern reversal had as its theoretical foundation Lyotard’s analysis of the Kantian sublime, which was reinterpreted

45 Ibid., 234–235. 46 See Aleš Erjavec, “Die neuen Vorzeichen der Kunst. Eine Fallstudie zu Mittel- und Osteuropa,” in Zurück aus der Zukunft. Osteuropäische Kulturen im Zeitalter des Postkommunismus, ed. Boris Groys, Anne von der Heiden, and Peter Weibel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 508–35.

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as the scene of a founding distance separating the idea from any sensible presentation.”47 Bürger’s statement from his Theory of the Avantgarde had a premonitional value. There he said that what was at stake in early avantgardes was the notion of art, namely, an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men … The demand is not raised at the level of the contents of individual works. Rather, it directs itself to the way art functions in society, a process that does as much to determine the effect that works have as does the particular content.48 In postmodernity, total commercialization and thus commodification has permeated all segments of society, including Adorno’s autonomous art. The proof of this permeation lies in the fact that not only are we no longer able to experience epic poetry, but that autonomous art that Adorno had in mind is becoming aesthetically opaque and is equally intensively being replaced by mass and popular culture. It is within this popular culture and within the new forms of emergent art that a dedifferentiation seems to be occurring, bringing together previously isolated domains of knowledge and creativity—bio-art and technology-based art as well as other new forms of experimental art—that art may be “finding a way” to continue its life in the aesthetic domain (the utopian, the avantgarde) and not so much in that of aesthetics, within which a work is viewed only as an aesthetic resource. What currently exists in much art of the past may thus be more akin to what Slavoj Žižek has called, in regard to politics, the complete “commodification of politics.”49 Art has undergone a similar commodification that is linked to another development in art, diagnosed as early as 1984 by Arthur Danto: The age of pluralism is upon us. It does not matter any longer what you do, which is what pluralism means. When one direction is as good as another direction, there is no concept of direction any longer to apply. Decoration, self-expression, entertainment, are, of course, abiding 47 48 49

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 29. Bürger, 49. Slavoj Žižek, “A Leninist Gesture Today,” in Lenin Reloaded, ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007), 85.

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human needs. There will always be a service for art to perform, if artists are content with that. A subservient art has always been with us. The institutions of the art world—galleries, collectors, exhibitions, journalism—which are predicated upon history and hence marking what is new, will bit by bit wither away. How happy happiness will make us is difficult to foretell, but just think of the difference the rage for gourmet cooking has made in common American life. On the other hand, it has been an immense privilege to have lived in history.50 Somewhat paradoxically, contemporary art, then, very much resembles contemporary politics: both are commodified, in their contemporary forms most probably devoid of a future, and both remain in need of the political and the aesthetic. Perhaps the resuscitation of this pair today requires an effort no less demanding than that suggested two centuries ago by Schiller, and a task as relevant—for aesthetics as philosophy of art, and for art—as that carried out by Adorno half a century ago. For today too, “[e]very artwork, if it is to be fully experienced, requires thought and therefore stands in need of philosophy.” 50

Arthur C. Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Death of Art, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Haven Publications, 1984), 35.

Chapter 11

Artification and the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2012) 1 Introduction This article is divided into three parts. I first discuss “artification” and some issues arising from and around this term, and then present Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “aesthetic regime of art” and some related themes. Finally, I bring together artification and the aesthetic regime of art in order to ascertain whether we can find some common conceptual and theoretical terrain, or at least some compatibility, between them or only dissimilarity and incompatibility. In this closing part, I also discuss whether the two notions, despite what appear to be insurmountable differences, are, or could be, of significance to each other and to the theoretical framework supporting each of them, or that they arise from completely different theoretical and even practical positions, suppositions, and dispositions, and therefore do not have anything in common. Before I dwell on these issues, let me explain that my frame of reference will be both modernist and contemporary art, the main feature of which appears to be indeterminacy of its expressive, creative, institutional, and aesthetic attributes. At the same time, this is also art that, in its post-colonial instances, is a formation and creation entangled with 19th-century European culture and its emerging social and cultural institutions. The two pivotal but opposed philosophical authors articulating this strand of thought on art and its philosophical reflection are, of course, Kant and Hegel. Contemporary art furthermore encompasses non-European art. An unlikely aesthetic source, André Malraux, observed in 1957 that around 1900 Europeans ceased to regard “primitive” artifacts as ethnographic curiosities and began to look at them as “art”: The metamorphosis of the past was first a metamorphosis of seeing. Without an aesthetic revolution, the sculpture of ancient epochs, mosaics, and stained glass windows would never have joined the painting of the Renaissance and the great monarchies; no matter how vast they might have become, ethnographic collections would never have surmounted the barrier that separated them from art museums.1

1 André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux (Paris: NRF, La Galerie de la Pléiade, 1957), 27. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_012

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This signifies that since at least a century ago, Western art, together with its indigenous and non-Western kindred art, has been preparing the stage for the current situation, where all forms and instances of art coexist within a globally-extended myriad of art worlds. These art worlds themselves exist and coexist in a temporal and cultural flux in which only the general term “art” retains its permanence. Today, once a work is designated as art, it hardly ever loses this designation. This then means that an enormous, universally acclaimed although perhaps also ignored archive of past art exists in various art and culture institutions. At the same time, contemporary and recent art exists in our perception as “art,” but is devoid of the same artistic permanence that traditional (representational) art has enjoyed. In contemporary art, it is increasingly the “process,” or the “event” of the artistic act, including its contextual placement, that makes a work into a work of art. In contemporary art, modern and contemporary aesthetic and artistic criteria apply. Therefore, the perception today is that we may no longer speak of the aesthetic experience of art but of an overlapping aesthetic and artistic experience, with the “artistic” being essentially linked to “political, moral, and ethical judgments [that] have come to fill the vacuum of aesthetic judgment in a way that was unthinkable forty years ago.”2 2

Artification

Let me turn to artification. The term “artification” covers the broad terrain of artifacts, events, and processes that are initially not regarded as art but may acquire such designation, to a greater or smaller degree, at a later time by appropriating or acquiring some art-like features. This, I hope, at least partly sums up Ossi Naukkarinen’s and Yuriko Saito’s description of the term: “The neologism refers to situations and processes in which something that is not regarded as art in the traditional sense of the word is changed into something art-like or into something that takes influences from artistic ways of thinking and practicing.”3 This programmatic description raises three interrelated issues. The first concerns “art in the traditional sense.” In my view, this is essentially or primarily art that can be recognized as such, that is, representational art. This may mean that the term does not include art that is non-representational, and most 2 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 77. 3 Ossi Naukkarinen and Yuriko Saito, “Introduction,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 4, 2012.

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certainly not art that is art only in its “becoming,” in the sense that it is attempting to broaden the existing agreement and understanding of what counts as art. Here I am referring to art that is still attempting to be recognized as art in the institutional sense. It seems that the phrase “art in the traditional sense” intends to limit art primarily to institutional art so as to avoid situations where just about anything could be regarded as art. My dissenting opinion would be that what is interesting in art is precisely the “excess” of art in its becoming art, in contrast with art that is already art and has been assimilated into the institution called “art.” This idea is also the dominant position of any avantgarde art, be it that of the classical avantgardes or neo-avantgardes, with the theory of the avantgarde of Peter Bürger in his Theorie der Avantgarde (1974), along with that of Jean-François Lyotard. These represent perhaps the most obvious instances of philosophical theory highlighting the nature of such “becoming” and the transformation of non-art into art. This tradition, or project, emerged first with anarchism and then continued in the avantgarde activities of the twentieth century. Accordingly, a “theorist of anarchism understands art as an experience … He struggles for a spontaneous ‘art en situation’ that depends on the moment and place (Proudhon).”4 An important strand of the philosophy of art during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thus interprets art as authentically art only as long as it is still striving to attain the status of art, thus paradoxically losing its nature of authentic art once it is relegated into the cultural archive called the museum and art history. Or in anarchist and later avantgarde terms, “The artistic act is more important than the work itself.”5 Second, contemporary art is most frequently not concerned with the intentions of the artist. A work, just like any commodity, acquires its own life and intent, which is why the import of a work is on the side of consumption and not creation/production. If some of the crucial questions of art fifty years ago were, “What does the work mean?” and “What did the artist/author with his/ her work intend to say?,” then after the death of the artist or author and the deconstruction of his or her status as a Cartesian subject, such issues seem to have become redundant, also due to numerous other poststructuralist and postmodern claims. It is now as if the work itself speaks. If this was not the predominant case today, then the issue of artification would be best qualified as an issue about creation/production as approached and (re)solved by various theories of creativity linked to anthropological Marxism, on the one hand, and

4 André Reszler, L’esthétique anarchiste (Paris: P.U.F., 1973), 6. 5 Ibid.

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to the tradition of la poïétique as developed half a century ago by the French theorist and artist René Passeron, on the other. We find ourselves now in the middle of the second issue that emerges from the description of artification as related to the “influences from artistic ways of thinking and practicing.” In the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, creation was essentially represented by art and thus was opposed to repetitive and non-creative manual work associated with the industrial epoch. Today we no longer regard art as an exclusive or paramount form of creativity; with the development of the post-industrial society and its individualized forms of work, the issue of creativity has, at least for the time being, lost much of its relevance. This, of course, does not relate to “art in the traditional sense of the word,” which retains its nature and, it has to be underlined, import for society. I want to note here the important but often insufficiently known successful efforts and practices in Finland to integrate art into education and art education into a general project of human well-being. The presupposition emerging from the programmatic description of artification described above is that “artistic ways of thinking and practicing” are somehow different from the non-artistic ones. Such a statement would be true if we did not proceed from a general notion of creativity, wherein artistic creativity would be but a specific form of creativity, which also encompasses everyday activities and all those that can, with some measure of evidence, be called creative. Probably the greatest commodification of creative practices emerged in the United Kingdom in the 1980s with “creative industries.” If we were to use the notion of creativity and creativeness as something typical of art and of describing “artistic ways of thinking and practicing,” then this would facilitate the integration of art into a general theory or philosophy of creativity. We would then be able to regard art as the paramount instance of creativity, with its other forms being seen as its lesser instances. Of course, such a viewpoint primarily concerns an artwork regarded from the position of its author. But does it really? Is this not a case of “art in a traditional sense of the word,” for it requires the link between the artist, the artwork, and the audience (the public)? This viewpoint depends on the supposition that “creative” art is art that is appreciated by the public. It is a position that, at first sight, is very distant from contemporary art and its art worlds, although also presupposed by them, and accords with the positions and practices of modern art during the first half of the twentieth century when it was the dominant artistic form. Third, there is also the reverse side of the issue of artification: “Something that is not regarded as art in the traditional sense of the word [and] is changed into something art-like” can also appear under other kinds of conditions and circumstances. Consider the tradition of British “Arts and Crafts” started by

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workshops initiated by William Morris in the middle of nineteenth century and which advocated reverting back to medieval craftsmanship. Think, too, of the later Jugendstil (Art Nouveau, Liberty Style), which followed a similar utilitarian aesthetic tradition, or of the introduction in Germany, at the turn of the century, of innumerable workshops that followed in the steps of that tradition in Great Britain. British success was so astounding that in 1896 “the Prussian government sent the ‘cultural spy’ Hermann Muthesius to England on a sixyear mission to study the secrets of British success. Upon his recommendation, workshops were introduced at all Prussian handicraft schools and modern artists appointed as teachers.”6 The aim of such activities was the “cooperation of art, industry, and crafts in the ennoblement of commercial activity.”7 It was also from this tradition that the Bauhaus arose. Related cases of art willingly accepting a utilitarian function are those of Russian constructivism8 and, to some extent and in a different way, of Italian futurism. 3

Rancière’s “Aesthetic Regime of Art”

Jacques Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic regime of art is of interest here. The dominant schema, explained in his numerous works, is that a new “regime” of art, namely the “aesthetic” one, emerged with romanticism and Schiller, although sometimes he mentions authors who predate romanticism, like Vico or Winckelmann. Rancière argues that this regime of art is still continuing, thereby supplanting the periodizing notions of both modernism and postmodernism, since both are purportedly theoretically insufficient. In his view, modernism is problematic, first, because it lumps together such disparate authors and works as Adorno and futurism, and second, because it “wants to hold onto art’s autonomy but refuses to accept the heteronomy that is its other name.”9 He finds postmodernism problematic because it purportedly only reverses the logic of modernism, offering (through Lyotard, one of the main adversaries

6 Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus 1919–1933 (London: Taschen, 2006), 10. 7 Quoted in Bauhaus 1919–1933, 12. 8 See, for example, Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions. The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005); Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer. Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (Autumn 1984): 82–119. 9 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 68.

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of Rancière) the sublime and the unpresentable as the two main features of postmodernism.10 Instead of notions of modernism and postmodernism, Rancière introduces the notion of an “aesthetic regime of art.” Its purpose is to replace both modernism and postmodernism, which Rancière considers obsolete and erroneous terms. In his opinion, “The aesthetic regime of the arts, it can be said, is the true name for what is designated by the incoherent label ‘modernity.’”11 In the aesthetic regime, the criterion of art is no longer technical perfection, as in the representative regime, “but is ascribed to a specific form of sensory apprehension.”12 Furthermore, the aesthetic regime of art resembles Fredric Jameson’s “cultural dominant,” for although it is purportedly the dominant regime in the last two centuries, it is admittedly not the only one to exist in this epoch, for it is supplemented and often in conflict with the previous two regimes, the “ethical regime of images,” and especially the “representative regime of art” which immediately precedes the aesthetic regime. What is also typical of the aesthetic regime of art is that it is “the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the art, subject-matter and genres.”13 As we can see, Rancière’s agenda is to offer his “regimes” as a novel taxonomy that is intended to supersede the present dominant one of the tandem modernism and postmodernism, something that is without doubt an ambitious project. Rancière’s open-endedness of the aesthetic regime primarily implies the obsolescence of the “end of art” theories. In this it somewhat resembles Friedrich von Schlegel’s revolutionary attempt to bring into competitive proximity two art formations of his own time, namely classicism and romanticism, with the latter seen as a continuing process. Romantic art was to strive towards ever higher accomplishments, a view at odds with the recent and dominant viewpoints on the decline or even end of art, such as those of Hegel, Heidegger, and especially Arthur Danto. Rancière’s non-Hegelian view allows for no temporal closures of various regimes and for no totalizations. One of Rancière’s points of departure is Aristotle, with his claim that man is “political because he possesses speech, a capacity to place the just and the unjust in common, whereas all the animal has is a voice to signal pleasure 10

See, for example, Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (­London: Continuum, 2004), 28–29 et passim. Rancière frequently uses “modernism” and “modernity” synonymously. 11 Ibid., 24. 12 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 29. 13 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 23.

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and pain. But the whole question, then, is to know who possesses speech and who merely possesses voice.”14 This is the point where politics is brought into Rancière’s philosophy. Democracy is the possibility and the practice of making oneself heard. By making ourselves heard we become political beings: “Politics consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible which defines the common of a community, to introduce into it new subjects and objects, to render visible what had not been, and to make heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals.”15 The distribution and redistribution of the sensible are also accomplished by art. In the realm of art similar mechanisms as those used in politics are at work, for they are “two forms of distribution of the sensible, both of which are dependent on a specific regime of identification. There are not always occurrences of politics, although there always exist forms of power. Similarly, there are not always occurrences of art, although there are always forms of poetry, painting, sculpture, music, theater and dance.”16 Throughout Rancière’s oeuvre, Friedrich Schiller is singled out as one of the pivotal references for his political philosophy and aesthetics. It is the concept of “play” or play drive (Spieltrieb) that is especially important here, for it brings together “art of the beautiful” and “art of living.” In Schiller’s view, which developed also as a critique of the French Revolution, play is of special importance. As he explains toward the end of the fifteenth letter in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing.”17 According to Rancière, play “is any activity that has no end other than itself, that does not intend to gain any effective power over things or persons.”18 “Play” is a new form of distribution of the sensible, an activity with no purpose except itself and with no intent to exert power over others. An artwork is “given in a specific experience, which suspends the ordinary connections, not only between appearance and reality, but also between form and matter, activity and passivity, understanding and sensibility.”19 It is not my intention to discuss Rancière’s philosophy and its various themes in detail. I have touched on only a few issues that could be relevant to our topic. Let me end this part by observing that, in Rancière’s view, artistic autonomy 14 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 24. 15 Ibid., 25. 16 Ibid., 26. 17 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2004), 80. 18 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 30. 19 Ibid.

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and heteronomy are always intertwined, with the aesthetic experience being autonomous and the creation of art heteronomous. In a way, Rancière’s theory, like that of some of the Romantics, echoes the ancient Greek conflation of art and community, that is, the organic consubstantionality of art and the life of the polis. 4

“Art Become Life”

In an exhibition in the spring of 2011 in the entrance hall of the Research ­Center in Ljubljana, one of the works consisted of a canvas over which the statement “Public Art is for the Birds” was written in big letters. The sentence, of course, brings to mind the artist Barnett Newman who, in a statement made famous, exclaimed that “Aesthetics is to the artist as ornithology is to the birds.” Since its enunciation around 1952, this claim has been reiterated on innumerable occasions. Its original addressee was Susan Langer, and its intent was to denigrate attempts to introduce semiotics and linguistics into art criticism and aesthetics. It was also often interpreted as criticism of the beautiful on the part of Newman and his embracing of the sublime, although its most frequent interpretation was that of a criticism of aesthetics as such. Be that as it may, for Newman aesthetics obviously was not relevant for art and did not aid in establishing its significance. This, of course, drastically changed in the decades that followed, for today authentic art appears essentially dependent on theory. But in the 1950s this was not the case, nor is “public” art usually considered “authentic art” today. Instead, in the eyes of some or perhaps many, public art is nowadays often regarded as a type of art, if not “semi-art.” Proper or authentic contemporary art is assumed to be that which is radical, in the sense of subversive and critical of society or of previous art. In both instances, it is the modern and modernist tradition that questions public art and continues to do so, in spite of many well-known instances of modern and postmodern public art, such as that of Henry Moore, Richard Serra, and Anish Kapoor. If our vantage point is radical art, then, in our opinion, public art today may well be left to the birds and their multifarious activities on pieces of public art. In the eyes of the creator of the work exhibited in Ljubljana, public art is “for the birds” because it is not an authentic form of art that would be of genuine artistic concern. From this perspective, public art today may thus very well be seen as a form of artification, that is, an integration of mostly site-specific works into natural or urban ambiances. This was always a feature of public art, but today it is also such art that appears rather inauthentic. And this is the essential problem with artification, that people may regard it as inauthentic,

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especially if it is interpreted as something merely “art-like.” In the Western tradition, kitsch is something that pretends to artistic status; it aspires to be artlike, but that is as far as it gets. It is fake art. As soon as it crosses the border into the realm of authentic art, leaving faux-art and kitsch behind, art re/­distributes the sensible. It offers something new: it “speaks” instead of being mute and without a voice. By gaining a voice and starting to speak and express oneself, an authentic artist effects a redistribution of the sensible and broadens the borders of what is perceived and sensed. It is a new “voice” to be heard or seen, in short, experienced, which is another way of designating the mechanism whereby a person becomes an artist and the work an artwork. Of course, art that is happy with its subordination to another purpose or agency cannot attain its proper purpose, which is one of the reasons why artification encounters difficulties when grappling with art’s assimilation. Only by “playing,” by having a purpose without a purpose, is a human being “wholly human.” We may assume that such “play” and its creations are appreciated by the artist as well as by the public, although the relationship is by no means a stable and a predetermined one. There are numerous cases when a work causes great satisfaction, in the sense of “play,” to the artist but offers very little to the public. Amateur works are frequently of such nature. There is also the opposite situation, such as when an acclaimed artist makes a simple sketch, which for him is mere amusement, while for the public at large it represents a little masterpiece. Which is it? On the other hand, in modern art there are innumerable cases of art that was art for the artist as well as for the public. This is even more the case in representational art. There, the “quality” and artistic value are relatively easily defined. As we see, art is given various kinds of reception, and especially today our “imaginary museum” is filled with very disparate objects and phenomena. Nonetheless, a salient feature of modern art is not only its variety but its semantic openness and its faith that it is the public that should accommodate the work of art and not the other way around. Why is it necessary for art to be accommodated by the public? Because (and in this we can follow Adorno) authentic art and culture require effort to overcome the resistance made to it. “Culture, in the true sense, did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but it always simultaneously raised protest against the petrified relations under which they lived, thereby honoring them … Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through.”20 Interestingly, 20

Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. by Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 232.

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in instances where art attempts to imitate creations made according to the demands of the public, such fake art remains authentic art, just the opposite of kitsch. Take, for example, the project of Komar & Melamid’s “Most Wanted,” where the two artists created a series of paintings based on a survey of public preferences of the motifs, formats, and colors of individual paintings.21 In spite of formally following the procedures of the market, the works actually functioned as any other authentic works of art. This illustrates that while artification as a transformation of art into non-art, or of non-art into “something art-like,” may well work as an abstraction, it depends, in fact, on a variety of other factors. Still, it appears that there are times when non-art may turn into art and the other way around, without endangering the artistic and aesthetic status of art, but the contrary. I refer to examples of what Rancière calls the project of “art become life.”22 The project is consubstantial with the aesthetic regime of art. It already inspired, in their dreams of artisanal and communitarian Middle Ages, the artists of the Arts and Crafts movement. It was taken up again by the artisans of the Art Deco movement, hailed in their time as producers of “social art,” as it was by the engineers and architects of the Werkbund and the Bauhaus, before again flowering into the utopian projects of situationist urbanists and Joseph Beuys’ “social plastic.”23 Although artification is said to concern “art in the traditional sense,” it would appear that while some of the movements mentioned above produced works of craftsmanship and thus probably belong to that gray area between the realms of utilitarian production and its aesthetic features, there is no obvious contradiction between the two. In these instances, utilitarian and aesthetic functions and features are conflated seamlessly, even opposing and thus relativizing the old aesthetic belief that a utilitarian object must lose its practical function if it is to attain an aesthetic one. Art Deco or Bauhaus chairs, lamps, architecture, and cutlery are practical and aesthetic; they are non-art (having a practical function) merging with art (having an aesthetic function). Instances of such utilitarian aesthetic works can also be found in Russian constructivism and productivism; in Italian futurism, with objects ranging from the “anti-neutral clothes” of Giacomo Balla to the architectural sketches of Antonio Sant’Elia; in the “picture architecture” of Lajos Kassák and the more recent “architecture of 21 See Painting by Numbers. Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art, ed. by JoAnn ­Wypijewski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 22 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 38. Of course, the project of “art become life” carries another meaning, namely the unity, or mutual support, of artistic revolutionary and social (political) revolutionary projects. 23 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 38.

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nothing” by Gábor Bachman; and in the coffee cups, passports, and armbands of the Slovenian artist collective Neue Slowenische Kunst. In brief, the conflation of art and non-art, or the passage of non-art into utilitarian aesthetic and artistic objects, occurs all the time and, as the cases just mentioned illustrate, it is definitely not limited to art in the traditional sense but is as often created by avantgarde artists. In such a context, the issue of subordination of art doesn’t arise; form usually follows function. It is this terrain that could also be relevant to artification: Before the advent of the aesthetic regime of art, that is, the period of artistic modernity and postmodernity, mimesis separated out what was art from what was not. Conversely, all the new, aesthetic definitions of art that affirm its autonomy in one way or another say the same thing, affirm the same paradox: that art is henceforth recognizable by its lack of any distinguishing characteristics—by its indistinction … In short, the specificity of art, finally nameable as such, is its identity with non-art.24 It is this problematic statement that serves as the conclusion of this essay because it reveals the limits of Rancière’s otherwise useful and important enterprise. Theories of modernism and postmodernism point out certain essential characteristics of the art of the last two centuries, a task as yet not accomplished by the “aesthetic regime of art” that lumps together art of impressionism with abstract art and Duchamp’s projects. Put differently, the art it highlights and comprises is even more disparate than Adorno and futurism. My reservations are directed also towards some of the other tenets of Rancière’s theory, for the aesthetic regime of art is an interrelated notion within his philosophical framework. Nonetheless, I think that this criticism does not weaken the argument that the project of “art become life” remains valid, both in Rancière and elsewhere, when referring to artification and utilitarian creations of certain traditions and endeavors, in addition to aesthetic avantgarde movements and their related radical projects. 24 Ibid., 66.

Chapter 12

Art and Aesthetics: From Modernism to Contemporary (2013) 1

Aesthetics and Art

In a statement made famous, Barnett Newman exclaimed that “aesthetics is to the artist as ornithology is to the birds.” Since its enunciation around 1952 this claim has been reiterated on innumerable occasions. Yet such a situation was more typical of the United States or the United Kingdom and their “philosophical empire” (Richard Shusterman) than of continental philosophy, aesthetics included. In recent decades even the Anglo-American “empire” has undergone a change not yet discernible in Newman’s statement: today “political, moral, and ethical judgments have come to fill the vacuum of aesthetic judgment in a way that was unthinkable forty years ago.”1 What occurred in forty years? May we claim that artists no longer see aesthetics as something irrelevant, as Newman probably did? The answer is affirmative. Arthur C. Danto recalls that after 1964 philosophical books of the austere and technical order began “to be preempted by the artworld and made its own, it was as though some deep transformation in artistic consciousness had taken place. A wholly different relationship between philosophy and art … now seemed to exist. It was, almost, as if philosophy were somehow now part of the artworld … whereas in 1964 philosophy stood outside that world and addressed it from across an alienating distance.”2 Despite aesthetics and related theories having more recently found a response and appreciation in art, however, this relationship remains uncertain: in the last two decades, i.e. since the cultural explosion of the late 1970s and early 80s when postmodern artistic practices and theories reigned, most aesthetic theories have once again left the path on which they had walked together with art. In the last two decades philosophy of art has apparently gone its own way, leaving contemporary artistic practices to rely on sporadic instances of art criticism or on rare philosophical theories that attempted to selectively grasp contemporary artistic phenomena. This had much to do with 1 Clare Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (2004): 77. 2 Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), x. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_013

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the current situation in art, bringing to mind the aforementioned observation that “political, moral, and ethical judgments have come to fill the vacuum of aesthetic judgment,” for hasn’t the predominant recent and contemporary art really become politically, morally, and ethically involved, frequently focusing on topics related to social, ethnic, political, and other issues which make it appear to be political and politicized—not in the sense of the twentieth-­ century master narratives but in the direction of Michel Foucault’s “microphysics of power”? In other words, is it not true that art of today still strives, very much in the tradition of modernism, romanticism, and the avantgardes, to be provocative, critical, partisan, subversive, and “involved”? It apparently continues to retain its objectives from modernity, even if most often without equivalent theoretical support. To ascertain how the story—one of the possible stories—of some artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical positions unfolded in the last two decades, I shall sketch some of the common preliminary circumstances and then some theories that detected and articulated them. I thus intend to revisit three theories which have influenced—and are still influencing—not only global views and opinions about contemporary aesthetics, but equally or more intensely views about art and culture—realizing this not in the sense of determining what is good or bad art, but what is to be considered art as such. In the past four decades the big shifts from modernism and modernity to the present contemporaneity occurred. Today a term missing on this path from modernity to contemporaneity seems to be postmodernism. Nonetheless, despite frequent criticism, it should not be forgotten that postmodernism emerged as the great liberator from the suffocating modern totalizations and high modernism. In the words of Wolfgang Welsch from 1988, “Postmodernity is traversed by the knowledge that totality cannot come without establishing as the absolute a certain particularity, which is then related to the destruction of other particularities.”3 Postmodernism in Europe emerged as a theoretical and practical novelty in the seventies. After a few years it was replaced by cautious and reluctant admissions of the factual emergence of the postmodern newcomer, complemented by celebratory praise for postmodernism as a new and liberating cultural paradigm. A critical attitude towards it nonetheless remained strong. The main claim against it was the incompleteness and therefore the still actual relevance of the project of modernity. This attitude was also witnessed by alternative 3 Wolfgang Welsch, “Modernité et postmodernité,” Les Cahiers de Philosophie (Postmoderne, Les termes d’un usage) 6 (1988): 25.

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or complementary reflective articulations—some still being with us—such as “parallel modernities,” ‘second modernity,” or, as in the case of China, that of a distinctive Chinese mode of “modernization.” Such theoretical cultural issues have been connected to political issues in the sense that they were related to the end of ideologies, the clash of civilizations, the end of Marxism as the main master narrative of the previous century, the related fall of revolutionary socialism and its industrialist ideological supports, the surprise at discovering limits to the neoliberal political and economic agenda, as well as the lack of viable political projects and ideas capable of replacing it or at least offering a sustainable alternative to it. Is this to be a revival of the relevance of Marxism, communism, and of the class struggle as recently argued by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, or spontaneous outbursts of social revolts of the multitude as conceptualized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and discussed by Paolo Virno, or something as yet unthought? And where does art stand in this? How can we determine the cultural delineations of the last four decades and especially those related to aesthetics? A starting point can be the rise of postmodern ideas and postmodernism. The fascination with postmodernism and its incessant attempts at establishing its identity by demarcating itself from modernity perhaps revealed as much about modernity as about postmodernism. From the contemporary perspective it would appear that postmodernism was essentially a transient phenomenon, but at the same time one that represented a cultural marker of a deeper historical shift: from industrial society and national cultures and economies to the postindustrial and information society and, of course, to multinational capital and globalism. In the early eighties one of the central theoretical issues was the question of the existence and nature of postmodernism as the most recent cultural dominant. The as-yet undecided response to this query has almost prohibited a similar questioning in our current historical situation. In order to establish what some of the possible answers to this question may be, I will briefly discuss three theories that have captured the attention of audiences that may be broader or different from one of aestheticians. I will thus be discussing “­relational aesthetics” as developed by Nicolas Bourriaud in the nineties, Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics from the past decade, and Terry Smith’s theory of contemporary art developed mainly in the last few years. Two of these authors, Bourriaud and Rancière, explicitly regard their theories as aesthetic ones. That of the former is an endeavor undertaken by a curator, editor, and art critic, while Jacques Rancière is a philosopher. The third author, Terry Smith, is a historian of art and architecture (and known in

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the past especially for his 1993 book Making the Modern, 1993). While hardly even mentioning aesthetics specifically by name, he nonetheless explicitly or implicitly discusses issues of essential relevance to contemporary philosophy and theory of art. It is worth noting that Smith employs an abundance of artistic examples to establish and persuasively support his views. In all three cases the theories offered are mainly devoted to visual art, taking such kind of art as a privileged artistic domain. Only Rancière is to some extent an exception, for he also uses literature as an important point of reference. All three authors take into consideration contemporary or recent art, thereby offering their theories as theories that are to influence the philosophical and the theoretical communities as well as various art worlds. The authors of the three theories also discuss contemporary global art. For them there no longer exists a recognizable border between the art of the First, the Second, and the Third Worlds; instead they see contemporary artists and art as progressively becoming inextricably linked and combined, making the demarcation between various parts of the globe impossible or irrelevant. 2

The Emergence of Postmodernism

If we say that a historical period which marks a transformation in relation to the past and to the future is a time of profound change, then the period in art and culture from around 1980 was such a time. Its cultural dominant, postmodernism, was the last cultural paradigm that was essentially created and almost exclusively theorized within the European and American context. As a concept and empirical fact, postmodernism emerged in the realm of architecture, by this very fact witnessing to a cultural stance irreverent as regards the previous dominant literary artistic and cultural paradigm. In 1977 British architect and critic Charles Jencks published a book entitled The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. The term “postmodern” immediately became a cultural catchword, for it conceptually crystallized in a single word a multitude of similar although unrelated cultural and social phenomena. As Jencks explained in a later edition of this book, “When I first wrote this book in 1975 and 1976 the word and concept of Post-Modernism had only been used, with any frequency, in literary criticism. Most perturbing, as I later realised, it had been used to mean ‘Ultra-Modern,’ referring to the extremist novels of William Burroughs and a philosophy of nihilism and anti-convention. While I was aware of these writings, of Ihab Hassan and others, I used the term to mean the opposite of all this: the end of avantgarde extremism, the partial return to

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tradition and the central role of communicating with the public—and architecture is the public art.”4 The role of architecture as the birthplace of postmodernism was highlighted also in philosophy and cultural theory. Thus Jürgen Habermas begins his programmatic lecture/essay on “Modernity—An Incomplete Project” from 1980 by stating: “In 1980, architects were admitted to the Biennial in Venice, following painters and filmmakers. The note sounded at this first Architecture Biennial was one of disappointment. I would describe it by saying that those that exhibited in Venice formed an avantgarde of reversed fronts … A critic advanced a thesis whose significance reaches beyond this particular event; it is a diagnosis of our times: ‘Postmodernity definitely presents itself as Antimodernity,’”5 Yet another analysis of postmodern architecture was offered by Fredric Jameson, who claimed that “architecture … remains the privileged aesthetic language.”6 Jameson also spoke of a “postmodern space,” relating it to the notion of the sublime in the sense that it defies cognitive mapping. In many ways architecture—often in the sense of “corporate postmodernism”—was the initial paradigm of postmodernism. It was, as Jencks acutely noticed, the public art, meaning that it was focused on the public and the users (and therefore the market); it was averse to avantgarde experimentation, it allowed or even cherished ornaments and embellishments. It furthermore demolished the barrier between the inside and the outside, and promoted the aestheticization of our lived environment, which went hand in hand with the embellishment of the objects of our quotidian life and the aestheticization of the human body. In this sense, postmodernism represented much of what was considered negative when viewed from within the tradition of critical theory and avantgardes. While this view could be correct when regarded from a Western European or American viewpoint, it became questionable when observed from Second or Third World perspectives: in Cuba, for example, the term postmodernism was avoided because of its associations with the U.S. In China it was understood in the sense of “modern,” while in the former European socialist countries its irreverent treatment of ruling ideas (cultural or political), its fondness for eclecticism and its “anything goes” approach made it a liberating 4 Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1987), 6. 5 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal ­Foster (London: Bay Press, 1983), 3. 6 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 37.

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social and cultural theory. Postmodernism was furthermore welcomed in small countries, which have in the modernist past often practiced a cultural policy of appropriation and eclecticism. Suddenly their former cultural practice, which had until then been interpreted as a symptom of a lack of originality, of copying larger dominant cultures, and of being latecomers, was suddenly transformed into a marker of being active participants in the most recent cultural invention and trend. In the eighties Zygmunt Bauman hypothesized that the essential characteristic of postmodernism was that it represented a point in history in which the question of the end of modernity could be posited and thought for the first time—and that it was this possibility which represented the actual essence of postmodernism. In classical modernity, argued Bauman, nothing conceivable existed beyond it.7 Regarded from a contemporary perspective, such observation appears very true: postmodernism, postmodernity, and their theories—be it those of ­Bauman, Jameson, Welsch, Lyotard, or others—appear to exist today primarily as interrelated critiques of modernity and modernism and not as positing of alternative theoretical edifices that would or could subvert materializations of the enormous inventions of modern development. It also appears that while much of postmodern art is eclectic and offers meaning instead of the modernist truth, it today at the same time reveals something about its transcendental conditions and its historical and existential contexts. Somehow it reveals truth where it seemed there was none to be searched for, only a pure or opaque surface, thereby also revealing a specific kind of truth. Often such truth is related to the postmodern acknowledging instances of otherness related to differences in subjectivity. Postmodernism today resembles modernism and modernity. Even Fredric Jameson, probably the most globally influential postmodern author, is seen today as a modernist figure and theorist. Is not his recurring tripartite scheme a typical Hegelian triadic construction, with the postmodern cultural dominant possessing all the modernist prerogatives and postmodernism revealing the historical necessity of its ontological blindness as concerns its inner artistic nature and its obligatory nature of “not seeing” (in the sense of not mapping its place in its here and now)? Does not his theory, just as postmodernism itself, increasingly resemble a modified and critically transformed discourse of modernity?

7 Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity, 1987).

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Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics

“Relational aesthetics” was a notion presented for the first time in 1996 and developed in Nicolas Bourriaud’s book of the same title published in French in 1998 and in English in 2002. Bourriaud, a French art critic, curator, and editor, has also authored other books (the more recent Postproduction, for example). A concept related to Bourriaud’s, but one that never gained similar international attention, was “Context Kunst,” coined by the Austrian art critic and curator Peter Weibel and publicly presented at an exhibition by the same name in Graz, Austria, in 1993. I should note that in my discussion of Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” I will be relying almost exclusively on the book by this title, for over time Bourriaud’s views change and sometimes contradict each other. Referring thus to a single work of his will facilitate our discussion of his basic tenets. Bourriaud’s book is consciously a work whose intention is to reflect theoretically, perhaps even philosophically, upon the art of its time, ie. the 1990s. In his view the art of his time is characterized by a pronounced establishment of relations and communication between the artist and the public. As the author states in the foreword to the book, the misunderstandings concerning the art of the nineties arose out of the lack of theoretical discourse. In his view, the majority of critics and philosophers were averse to tackling contemporary artistic practices, which thus mostly remained illegible. Bourriaud intended to compensate for this deficiency and develop a theory which would to some extent philosophically grasp and plausibly explain what he saw to be not only a temporary phenomenon—i.e. the art of the nineties, with “relational art” being the specificity that emerged in that decade—but an art that in his opinion possessed a more substantial historical significance. He claimed that today history “seems to have taken a new turn. After the area of relations between Humanity and deity, and then between Humankind and the object, artistic practice is now focused upon the sphere of inter-human relations, as illustrated by artistic activities that have been in progress since the early 1990s.”8 Bourriaud thus proclaimed the art of the nineties to be the essential instance and materialization of relational art and thus also the privileged object of relational aesthetics, in this respect somehow repeating Hegel’s thesis about the development of the self-consciousness of the mind but—similarly to Rancière’s notion of the “aesthetic regime of art”—not positing a historical closure to its 8 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002), 28.

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development. Bourriaud claimed that relationality was a universal feature of art, one that was opened up in art by the Italian renaissance, only that in that case art was not yet creating intersubjective relationships but those between art and the objects it depicted. By his tripartite historical scheme Bourriaud followed in the footsteps of other recent French theorists, such as Régis Debray (Vie et mort de l’image, 1991), and Jacques Rancière, who divided history into similarly conceived regimes, even if in Rancière the historical divisions between them were blurred. Rancière thus referred to the “ethical regime of images,” the “representative regime of art,” and the “aesthetic regime of art” that did not necessarily follow each other but could temporally overlap. Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” and his notion of “relational art” have been subjected to innumerable reviews and criticisms, and also served as the basis for other critical discourses. In spite of many obvious fallacies and contradictions inherent to his book, the latter not only generated interest among theorists, but was also well received by artists, curators, critics, and the so-called “art world” in general. It was the 2002 English publication of Relational Aesthetics that put the book on the global art map and turned it into an important point of reference for those with an interest not only in the most recent fine arts and new technologies (which were Bourriaud’s main points of reference), but also those involved with performance art and even theater. The success of Bourriaud’s book also confirmed his observation about the lack of theoretical discourse on the art of the nineties—a period when creative art was emerging not only from Western Europe and the United States, but also from the former Soviet bloc countries, with the latter being subjected to more developed theoretical reflection. The lack of critical theoretical response to the art of the nineties perhaps had something to do also with the still vibrant postmodern ideas and the thesis that the art of that time was only a chain of meaningless signifiers, not allowing for a cognitive mapping that could equal that of the class consciousness as theorized by Lukács, artistically making itself visible in its co-temporal modernist manifestations. On the one hand, western artists were confronted with the politicized art coming from the former or present socialist countries, and on the other with the critical art of the neo-avantgarde tradition and its forms of resistance. Curators, furthermore, became the crucial artistic figures of the nineties, turning themselves into roles previously reserved for film or theater directors and setting up their almost private exhibitions, establishing in this way the pronounced dominance of the curator who replaced the previous persona of the modernist art critic. Since the curator became the pivotal figure of the art world, it was not unexpected that she also attempted to articulate the theoretical positions which were to create, reflect upon, and support the principles of her curatorial practices. Nicolas Bourriaud did just

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that, and this fact became one of the sources of the impact his book made and continues to make in the world, be it the world of art or of academia. In his book The Century (2005) Alain Badiou points out that the predominant part of the modernist art of the twentieth century did not appear in the form of a material work but in the form of an act, as some kind of performance. Boris Groys similarly claims—but in relation to contemporary art—that installation art and performance art are the authentic and the dominant art forms of our contemporaneity.9 In this respect Bourriaud conforms to this view and confirms such observation. Bourriaud has advocated performativity, social contexts, transitivity, and dialogue over the limitations of traditional modernist values such as individualism and objecthood. Bourriaud finds empirical support for relational aesthetics in the art of the nineties, and theoretical support especially in Félix Guattari’s philosophy. According to Guattari’s philosophy, it is illusory to aim at a step-by-step transformation of society. The only realistic options are microscopic attempts, of the community and neighborhood committee type, such as the organization of day-nurseries in the faculty and the like, which play in his opinion an absolutely critical role. With Bourriaud, we thus find ourselves in the inverted cosmos of Michel Foucault’s microphysics of power, a cosmos in which—to use examples from Bourriaud—the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija prepares a meal and invites visitors to share it with them, or “when Gabriel Orozco puts an orange on the stalls of a deserted Brazilian market … or slings a hammock in the MOMA garden in New York.”10 According to Bourriaud, with such gestures the artist acts in the small space of everyday gestures that are determined by the superstructure, with this one consisting of and being determined by the “large” exchanges. In other words, what Bourriaud is promoting is an art that does not strive to be a part of modern utopias or that would want to resist current social antinomies (and therefore continue the avantgarde tradition of modernism), but one that is content to create “microtopias.” In Rancière’s words, in Bourriaud “art no longer tries to respond to an excess of commodities and signs but rather to a lack of bonds. As [Bourriaud] puts it: ‘Through little services rendered, the artists fill in the cracks in the social bond,’”11 A related criticism is aimed at Bourriaud by Claire Bishop. In Bishop’s view—which is less political than Rancière and among the most relevant and 9 10 11

Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008). Bourriaud, 17. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: ­Polity Press, 2009), 57.

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pertinent—the main problem with Bourriaud’s theory and the artistic examples he chooses is that he promotes art that requires “a unified subject as a prerequisite for community-as-togetherness,” instead of basing relationality on (or also on) the art of the same period that provides experiences “more adequate to the divided and incomplete subject of today.”12 Bourriaud’s work shows that despite being frequently contradictory—as when he embraces modernity and the criticality of various modes of modernist art, while at the same time opting for cosy and intimate non-conflictual community-building and sharing experiences as art—personal choice, even if one-sided, has enormous effects in society and in art. In spite of its weak points, Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics had a strong impact on contemporary art criticism. Bourriaud justly pointed out that one of the essential features of art—any art—is and remains the establishment of communication and interpersonal exchange. 4

Rancière’s Aesthetic Conditions

In the preface to The Order of Things Michel Foucault raises an issue on which this work of his is based: “Between the already “encoded” eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself … In every culture, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and of its modes of being.”13 This passage from Foucault can help us shed light on a large segment of Jacques Rancière’s philosophical and aesthetic project which started in recent years to have a visible global impact not only among philosophers but also among contemporary artists and art critics. As Rancière explains in a 2002 interview, “something of Foucault’s archeological project—the will to think the conditions of possibility of such and such a form of statement or such and such an object’s constitution—has stuck with me.”14 What is relevant for Rancière in Foucault and what recalls Kant’s transcendental philosophy is precisely his interpretation of the constitution of aesthetics, of the way aesthetics as a concept became possible, thereby aiding in the development of a general notion of art. His aesthetic project consists

12 13 14

Bishop, 79. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences (New York: ­Vintage Books, 1994), xxi. Jacques Rancière, “Politics and Aesthetics: An Interview,” Angeliki 8/2 (2003): 209.

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of nothing less than a thorough overhaul of the current dominant theory of modernism and autonomous art. Rancière—a former student of Louis Althusser and involved in his Reading Capital book project who later, like Alain Badiou, dissociated himself from Althusser—published works on pedagogy and on political philosophy, to become in the last decade known also outside the Francophone world and to become at the moment probably the most influential continental philosopher pursuing “aesthetics.” In his view, described, often repeated, and somewhat developed in a series of thin volumes, conference papers and interviews which in his words “allow him to say as much as possible in as little space as possible,”15 Rancière persistently repeats a few main tenets of his philosophy of the aesthetic. Here are some of the central ones: Aesthetics is a discourse born two centuries ago and is the condition of possibility for thinking art in general. “It was in this same era that art, in its indeterminate singularity, was first set in contrast to the list of fine, or liberal, arts.”16 “For art to exist what is required is a specific gaze and form of thought to identify it” (6). A specific gaze is the gaze of the aesthetic regime of art. But without having aesthetics as its transcendental condition, art would not attain the singular generalized mode which has allowed us for two centuries to speak about art as well as to pose questions about its nature and its universal properties. In this way aesthetics has carried out a “distribution of the sensible,” that is, it developed the notion of art—and thus the whole field of art—in a specific way, including some and excluding some other forms of production and creativity. What Rancière is after are conditions that make possible categories such as art, critical art, autonomous art, etc. The aesthetic regime of art which, he argues, came into existence more or less simultaneously with aesthetics, has essentially replaced the representative regime of art which was erected upon the verisimilitude of the representation and the represented. The aesthetic regime purportedly rejected such a hierarchical system, allowing for an osmosis among elite and abstract art and arts and crafts, thereby bringing together under the same roof the abstractions of Malevich and the Bauhaus projects or Stendhal and the Arts and Crafts movement. Rancière attempted to turn aesthetics into a tool of interpretation of ­contemporary art by proclaiming modernism, especially modernism of the Greenbergian type, obsolete and counter-productive for an analysis of the art of the last two centuries. In his view, the notion of modernism (a part of which 15 Ibid. 16 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 6.

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he calls “modernitarism”) raises all kinds of problems, such as the division of art into formalism and politicized avantgardism or the lumping together of theories as diverse as those of Adorno and futurism. Despite some persuasive arguments, Rancière’s attack on modernism seems problematic and risky especially because it requires a complete reinterpretation of the art of the last two centuries; the same is true of Rancière’s theory overall. A question also arises as to the delimitation of art and crafts in the aesthetic regime. Today nobody defends the “pure” art that Rancière chastises and we all agree with him that modern art is a mechanical mixture of artistic (formal) and extra-artistic (heteronomous) elements. According to Rancière then, there exist three regimes or modes of art, with the “aesthetic regime” being the one instituted by the aesthetic revolution at the end of the eighteenth century when works were proclaimed art without possessing the representational properties which previously purportedly distinguished art from non-art. Since then, and Rancière is quite adamant about this, the aesthetic regime of art stretches on into contemporaneity, disregarding issues such as the autonomy of art or the modernism/postmodernism dilemma, the theory of the end of art, or that of the purity of art. All these are, claims Rancière, issues created by the false supposition that modernism is a concept rooted in historical reality and not simply an ideological notion created post festum. 5

Terry Smith: Contemporaneity

In his Aesthetic Theory Theodor Adorno claims that “the principle of method here is that light should be cast on all art from the vantage point of the most recent artworks, rather than the reverse.”17 In both authors so far discussed it is obvious that their starting point is contemporaneity, although in Rancière’s case this contemporaneity paradoxically runs through an ahistorical and synchronic continuum within which only the starting point—around 1800—is explicitly noted, which then stretches into an undefined contemporaneity. Terry Smith’s theoretical endeavor warrants attention for he tackles the issue of contemporary art head-on. Like Bourriaud, Smith also approaches the art of his time, only his time is currently also ours and he does not ascribe historic proportions to the current epoch as Bourriaud did. Also, if the art discussed by Bourriaud included recent non-European and non-American art, such art 17

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 359.

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was nonetheless mostly the creation of artists who permanently emigrated to Europe and the U.S. from other continents. In Smith’s case the art presented is more locally defined and determined, or it is explicitly “global.” Smith’s project—presented especially in his 2009 book What is Contemporary Art? but also in his other publications—consists of an attempt to untangle the incessantly loose ends of contemporary art and to establish some common points and features in what appears to be a jumble of contradictory, excluding, or parallel works and events that apparently share only the title of “art,” which they appropriate by being presented within an environment that is designated as that of a museum, a gallery, a biennial, or some other artistic space/ place/location. Their shared characteristics often have nothing to do with their shared locality but with their common, related, or similar concepts. Also if in the past, as Bauman claimed in 1989, philosophers acted as “legislators”— think, for example, of Hegel’s cannonic role in determining our perception of past art—then they turned in recent decades into “interpreters.” Today, indeed, even this role of interpreters is questionable, for the number of art worlds has multiplied exponentially. It is such a situation that makes Smith claim that universalisms such as modernity or postmodernity will not achieve totality, nor allow for a sustainable compromise. Smith’s main position concerning contemporaneity could be condensed into the following statement: “Contemporaneity consists precisely in the acceleration, ubiquity, and constancy of radical disjunctures of perception, of mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world, in the actual coincidence of asynchronous temporalities, in the jostling contingency of various cultural and social multiplicities, all thrown together in ways that highlight the fast-growing inequalities within and between them.”18 Smith argues that in contemporary art a pattern exists between universal determination and random plurality. The pattern of which Smith speaks reminds one of the set theory that Alain Badiou posits in his main work, Being and Event (1988), as his ontology. The important feature of Smith’s theory is that it limits the import of common features to a pattern which is based on resemblance and not on a causal relationship. According to Smith, contemporary art consists of three main currents which form the aforementioned pattern. The first is institutionalized contemporary art, which amounts to an aesthetic of globalization and is related to neoliberal economics and art institutions. The second is a current that emerges from 18

Terry Smith, “Introduction,” to Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008), 8–9.

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decolonization within the former colonial worlds and includes its impacts in the former First World. It is within this current that postmodernism is to be included as a segment thereof. In Smith’s view, “postmodernism” is a term too thin to denote this great change that is still continuing. He argues that postmodernism is today but a pointer to the first phase of contemporaneity. The third explores new possibilities of interactivity and communication, drawing upon elements of both of the previous two contemporary art currents, while displacing some of the contextual aspects and ideas associated with their typical artistic manifestations. The outcome of Smith’s theory of contemporary art is that there exists not one but three answers to the question of what is contemporary art. There exist then three interrelated kinds of contemporary art, the essence of which is raised on empirical grounds but which nonetheless possess some broader philosophical characteristics. Such interpretation of contemporaneity and its art have often met with criticism and denigration—as at a conference in 2004 which resulted in the collective volume Antinomies of Art and Culture. Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (2008) where some participants flatly refused to accept Smith’s claims about contemporary art. Art is contemporary in an infinite number of ways, insists Smith, offering again a statement very similar to Alain Badiou’s argument about set theory, where there is no all-encompassing mathematical set. In Badiou this truth carries universal proportions, that is, it is not only historically or geographically valid, but is instead, like Kant’s epistemology, valid universally. Because contemporary art is not only globally created and exhibited but also globally conceptualized, it is also universal. 6

Towards a Theory of Contemporary Art

In this brief sketch I have pointed to some of the encounters of aesthetics and art in recent decades. They witness that in spite of numerous examples proving the opposite, art and aesthetics occasionally become or remain partners in our attempts to fathom, legitimize, and appreciate art. What occurred within and after postmodernism was a series of individual poetics and expressions. This development was detected, presented, and analysed also by some contemporary aesthetic and art theories. I have noted three. The first represents a reflection upon a segment of the art of the nineties. It offers a theory in a situation when there was obviously none available. The second theory represents an attempt at a thorough overhaul of the ruling discourse on modernity and modernism, collapsing modern past and present art

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into the aesthetic regime of art. The third theory, that of Terry Smith, offers at the moment a starting point, since for the time being it remains in an underdeveloped state. It promises to think the contemporaneity of contemporary art anew, which is a much-needed endeavor. Let me therefore conclude this essay with two propositions by Smith: One: “Art everywhere today is contemporary in every sense.” Two: “Today art is still modern, in part, but residually so. It sees postmodernism as a recent repository of useful strategies that do not, however, add up to a whole.”19 I would subscribe to both statements. It remains to be seen whether this theory of contemporary art will acquire a significance that will reach beyond the needs stemming from the ambiguity whether today we should refer to the museum of modern or contemporary art—or perhaps both. We know what theories are behind the notion of modern art, but which theories are to philosophically support the notion of the museum of contemporary art? 19

Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art of the World Today,” unpublished manuscript, shared with author in 2010.

section 2 Aesthetic Revolution and Avantgardes in East, Central, and Western Europe

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Power, Freedom, and Subversion: Political Theater and Its Limits (2009) 1 Introduction A large segment of global cinema-goers is probably familiar with Emir Kusturica, the Serbian film director, who twice received at the Cannes film festival the main award, Palme d’Or, and is regarded by some as one of the most creative directors in cinema during the 1980s and ‘90s. He is known for movies such as When Father was Away on Business (1985), Arizona Dream (1993), Underground (1995) and Black Cat, White Cat (1998). With his movie Underground he openly sided with Serbia in the Yugoslav conflict, later praised Slobodan Milošević, and left Sarajevo for Belgrade. Kusturica, a Bosnian Serb, continues to promote the Serbian cause. The last public instance of doing this was a fiery, derogatory as well as highly poetic speech at a rally in Belgrade on February 21, 2008, which was being transmitted worldwide and which ended with the torching of the American, Croatian, Slovenian and Turkish embassies by the angry crowds. Kusturica addressed the protesters, angry because of the proclamation of independence of Kosovo, with a speech in which he likened the people of the NATO countries and others who supported the Kosovar independence to traitors, cowards, and sheep. In this time of political passivity, of what is often described as the “posthistorical situation,” it is rare to see people take sides and actively and passionately promote, defend, and fight for political causes. For some, such people are zealots and fundamentalists, while others—definitely a minority—see in them the only survivors who are still fighting for freedom which is freedom precisely because it is remains undefined. Let me note in passing that this contradiction perhaps explains well the division regarding freedom in most of the revolutionary movements and events, with the philosophical roots of this division going back to Hegel and Schelling. As it has been claimed, Unlike Hegel, Schelling leaves the problem of how to understand freedom open. A dialectic of recognition, of the kind that Hegel employs in the Phenomenology, that enables me to apprehend my own freedom by acknowledging the other as free subject, cannot, despite Hegel’s claims, tell me what my freedom is … I must already be prereflexively aware what © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_014

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it is to exercise my freedom, otherwise there would be no way of understanding another person’s demand that I exercise my freedom in relation to their appeal to my capacity for decision.1 It is not yet entirely clear whether we should refer broadly to the contemporary situation of current events, in our case in Serbia, as that of modernity, postmodernity, globalism; or whether it is a more particular situation of those on the cultural, economic and political fringes of the First World—something that for Serbia has been its historical role at least since the battle of Kosovo in 1389. What is clear is that it is not a situation inherently engendered by the countries of the First World. Let me turn to the actual theme of this essay. It is not a discussion of the life and work of Kusturica—although we shall soon discern similarities—but the career of Ljubiša Ristić, another figure from the recent cultural history of the ex-Yugoslavia. Ljubiša Ristić—less known than Kusturica, also because working in a more hermetic medium, namely theater—chose a similar trajectory in life, but carried it further than the renowned film director. To say that Ristić took his theater seriously may be an understatement. In his case one would almost exclaim that for him “The world’s a stage,” for in his life Ljubiša Ristić (born in 1947) put events on the stage and staged political events. The theater director, who was one of the main figures of Yugoslav theater from the seventies until the nineties, who was praised, in the eighties, at home and abroad for his “political theater” and his personal search and theatrical research of the revolution and the vicissitudes of those who identified with its ideas and utopia, who, after the beginning of the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early nineties, moved to Serbia as the last stronghold of Yugoslav beliefs and ideology, to become there the leader of a political movement, the aim of which was to bring together all leftist and progressive parties, while continuing his theatrical work. He lives today in Belgrade in the old Sugar Factory in which until two years ago his theater “KPGT,” which executed 1,000 theater plays and consisted of 50 to 120 members, used to be located, with his wife, son and his elderly mother. He has left both politics and the theater, or, in his view, the two have left him. He feels persecuted, cannot attain any support for his theatrical work, and appears to be left in a past that no one cares about any longer. In Ristić’s view, what is happening, is pure corruption of artists and “cultural workers”:

1 Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 116.

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As long as I remember, political influence and the political criterion in culture were never equal to that of today. Today we have a double ideological intervention in culture and in art. One is the intervention of the party apparatus of the parties in power and the other is the intervention from abroad. Our culture is being run by foreign ministries of foreign affairs, foreign foundations, our cultural centers are financed by other countries, or culture is financed by the international community through the broken down booths of NGO’s and various foundations … What was once called Stalinism, is today at work in a much more efficient form and is called political correctness. Against Stalinism one could fight as an anti-Stalinist, as a leftist, a conservative, it does not matter. Today against political correctness you cannot fight.2 2

Political Aesthetics

In his 1988 book Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, or as the title has been translated into English, The Total Art of Stalinism, the Russian philosopher, art critic and curator Boris Groys makes the following observation: “There would have been no need to suppress the avantgarde if its black squares and transrational poetry had confinend themselves to the artistic space, but the fact that it was persecuted indicates that it was operating on the same territory as the state.”3 Groys’s statement is valid if we regard the avantgarde actions within the historical framework of totalitarian or authoritarian society: there the realm in which the enunciation of politically dissenting or competitive voices is severely limited. But there is also a related, yet different story in modern history, namely the story of artists who intentionally entered the political arena—not as actual politicians as in cases such as that of the Czech playwright Václav Havel who became the first president of the post-1989 Czech republic, but as artists who became involved in broader political, utopian, social projects: aesthetic projects in short. These were projects initiated by political parties, groups or individuals whose purpose was not a straightforward acquisition of political power for the purposes of pragmatic political action or for personal or party gains, but who possessed a vision, believed in a utopia, and possessed the desire to bridge the gap between the sensible and the rational and thus create a unity which Horkheimer and Adorno found lacking in the contemporary realization 2 Ljubiša Ristić, “Interview with Ljubiša Ristić by Radmila Stamenković,” Politička misao i društvena istraživanja 1–3 (May 12, 2007), on-line edition. 3 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 35.

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of the project of Enlightenment. In brief, I have in mind the master narratives that Lyotard discussed, with which, as Michel Foucault claims, he had in mind especially Marxism. We find the first explicit discourse promoting the connection or even unity of the rational and the sensible in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). In 1825 Saint Simon refers to this link between the artists and politics as an already accepted liaison. The trend then reaches its temporary apogee at the time of the classical avantgardes that Peter Bürger terms the “historical avantgardes.” I have in mind for example the general ideas promoted by the Italian and partly Russian futurists, with these endeavors reaching their most obvious and visible manifestation in the foundation of Marinetti’s Futurist Political Party (1918), or in actions of various active participants of the October revolution as found among Russian futurists and constructivists. The telegram sent by the Berlin dadaists to Gabrielle d’Annunizio who occupied Fiume/ Rijeka in September 1919, proclaiming “the capture of Fiume [to be a] dadaist masterstroke,”4 reveals the extent to which art, politics, life, and perhaps death (we only have to consider the gesture of Italian futurists, forty-three of whom joined in July 1915 as volunteers the Lombardy volunteer bicycle batallion of the Italian Army) were all parts of the same aesthetic universal work of art. (We only have to consider the gesture of Italian futurists, forty-three of whom joined in July 1915 as volunteers the Lombardy volunteer bicycle battalion of the Italian Army.) A more minor role was that of sympathizers—such as Pablo Picasso who sided with the Soviet Union and the French Communist Party—although even these sometimes ended up doing more than simply showing intimate sympathy for various political movements and ideologies. Consider, for example, the pro-Soviet orientation of the majority of French surrealists, or, still better, the case of the American poet Ezra Pound and his political propaganda in support of Mussolini and the Axis powers. 3

The Third Avantgarde

Contrary to Bürger and his canonical interpretation of the avantgardes of the previous century I wish to claim that it is too early to delete the notion of the avantgarde art from our vocabulary, although it is true that it has to be rethought and reconceptualized. 4 Hans Richter, Dada Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), 109.

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In my opinion there exist two main trends in avantgarde art of the previous century: the first is art which professes autonomy of art and often also exists within such autonomy. Theodor Adorno could be considered its main theorist, with artists that he promotes and values—Beckett, Kafka, Schoenberg, Picasso—representing its excellent and paramount examples. There exists also another kind of avantgarde in the twentieth century. Some call it the politicized, the radical, etc. avantgarde—with its main characteristic being its fundamental necessity to overcome the limitations of art as such, its autonomy and its isolation from life within the institution of art. We may agree with Bürger that the project—if it ever was a conscious project and not mainly an intuitive desire—of these avantgardes has first faltered and then disappeared, and that they were returned into the institution of art. Nonetheless, as Groys implies, there is a region of social existence in which art competes with politics. If politics attempts to reach into and even perhaps to “control” all realms of social life, then art—as a subversion of the ruling ideology and politics—often emerges as an important player in such life. But before this happens there is usually a period in which the political and the artistic avantgardes share the same aims. If art, on the contrary, remains limited to the institution of art and becomes or remains a commodity, then it can, especially as a product of culture industry, fit unproblematically into the system of capitalist commodity production and material and symbolic exchange. My claim in this respect would be that there exists also the third kind of avantgarde art which emerged in the former or present socialist countries and that we can see nowadays mainly in the visual arts emerging from contemporary China. What is typical for this avantgarde art is that it possesses all the characteristics of the classical avantgardes and the neo-avantgardes except the orientation towards the future and is therefore a continuation of the avantgarde impulse from the earlier periods of the twentieth century. Another feature of this art is that it exists within the framework of postmodernism. In contradistinction to much of western postmodern art the recent art from these countries is often highly politicized, this being so because the whole social environment in which it comes to existence is highly politicized, thereby representing an aberration within the present and recent global context. In a book published some years ago,5 I and collaborators discussed the visual arts, mostly conceptual art and the fine arts that emerged in recent decades as a specific “third” form of avantgarde art. Here I want to turn to another 5 Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

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instance of such art or, rather, artistic and life practices, namely the theater projects and ideas—theatrical and political—of the aforementioned Ljubiša Ristić, one of the prime theater persons of the former Yugoslavia. As we shall see, with Ristić we leave the autonomy of art, to enter the problematic realms of recent political life. 4

Ristić’s Radical Theater

Although even in Slovenia this has today been mostly forgotten, in many respects Ristić, historically speaking, represents a predecessor to Slovenian and other postmodern theater artists from the space of the ex-Yugoslavia, such as Dragan Živadinov or Tomaž Pandur and others, be it in Slovenia or elsewhere in the ex-Yugoslavia. The themes of Ristić’s theater are still themes related to the first wave of the turn against the revolution—especially the October Revolution. In his plays, Ristić, as many writers of the eighties as well as theorists of that time, regards the October Revolution and the Soviet state as “problematic” only at the time of Stalin. It is not the revolution per se that is to be blamed and criticized; it is not the idea, but its materialization in ideology and political practice that carry the burden of guilt—this being an anonymous guilt which is therefore no guilt at all, but a blind historical course of events. Ristić furthermore regards the historical story of Yugoslavia—its break with Stalin in 1948, its development of self-management socialism, its mixed economy etc.—as the only real alternative to the essential defects inherent to the Soviet system as developed by Stalin. Ristić staged his political plays mainly in the eighties when also the Yugoslav system was breaking up. As was the case with Soviet Union which no longer had its future before it, within Yugoslavia too this future, the socialist “future,” slowly began to emerge behind it, with the ethnic borders beginning once again to strengthen and self-management socialism being replaced by post-communist societies and states. Instead of further developing self-management, Ristić saw in the 1990s the development of nationalist separatism that was turning, in his belief, the wheel of history backwards. The younger generation of artists, be it in theater or the visual arts, disregarded such political issues. When they didn’t, they exploited them for their own artistic aims, employing the then still ruling political ideology as yet another repository of props. Ristić, too, found himself at that time in the position of what Fredric Jameson has called the “vanishing

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mediator”—being someone who believes into the system and wants to help change it, with his purpose thus being not to eliminate it but to make it work better. 5

Who Is Ljubiša Ristić?

Ljubiša Ristić was born in 1947 in a Serbian family in Prishtina, Kosovo. In 1977 he founded the mentioned “KPGT”: Kazalište, Pozorište, Gledališče, Teatar— four words which denote the term “theater” in four main languages of the former Yugoslavia—in Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian. The name of the theater group was of course a political and an ethnic statement: Yugoslavia, which came into existence after World War I, was a multiethnic country, with its constituent national groups possessing different histories, religions, languages and even alphabets. In 1980 Tito died and in 1991 the first among Yugoslav republics, Slovenia, went independent. For some of its inhabitants Yugoslavia was the best possible country. An illustration of this could be the case of Bálint Szombathy, an artist from what used to be the autonomous province of Vojvodina, now officially a part of north Serbia. For him, being of Hungarian origin, Yugoslavia was the best possible ethnic solution. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Szombathy made its disappearance the main project of his artistic career. With the demise of Yugoslavia the government of Slobodan Milošević took away Hungarian cultural autonomy and dissolved the autonomous region of Voivodina, turning it into an integral part of Serbia. Since the early nineties this Hungarian minority artist devotes his life to the recreation and to the memory of no longer existing symbols, representations, arti-acts, and paraphernalia of the state of Yugoslavia that is no longer there. Szombathy thus exhibits in the form of installations items such as money bills and coins, flags and train schedules for travel, for example, from his home town in Vojvodina, Subotica, to Ljubljana. Twenty years ago one traveled this distance without any hassle, but now one needs three visas to make the trip. His whole artistic life revolves around remnants of a past that is no longer here.6 At the time of Yugoslavia Ljubiša Ristić was a well-known theater director, travelling and working all over the country. During the eighties he worked mostly in Slovenia, becoming known, in 1981, for his “political theater.” In 6 For more on Bálint Szombathy see Miško Šuvaković, “Art as a Political Machine,” in Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, especially 116, 120.

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1995—four years after the actual disintegration of Yugoslavia—Ristić became the president of JUL, a political organization whose aim was to politically unite and coordinate various leftist political parties within the remnant of Yugoslavia, with “JUL” (also meaning the month of July) being an acronym for the “Yugoslav Left,” “Jugoslovenska levica.” When Ristić became the president of JUL, Mira Marković, the wife of Slobodan Milošević (the latter being arrested in 2001 and then sent to the Hague) and until her emigration to Moscow in 2001 an influential political figure in Serbia, stated that they chose Ristić for the president of JUL, for he was a more respected person than her. It soon turned out that the project of bringing together various leftist political parties was not feasible and that the only member party that actually had political support among voters was the Union of Communists, the Movement for Yugoslavia, led by Slobodan Milošević himself. Ristić thus became a political public figure: from a well-known theater director he turned into a politician. Nonetheless, he stated in an interview in October 2007, that this is “not being involved in politics in a classical sense, but [is] a logical continuation of what I have been doing and thinking earlier.”7 Let me add that prior to this interview he had became involved in politics in various ways: in 2000, for example, he was the president of the Foreign Policy Committee of the Federal Council of Yugoslavia, publicly predicting the creation of a federation between Russia, Belarus and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. One of Groys’s thesis in the book The Total Art of Stalinism is that Stalin in Soviet Union actually carried out an artistic project—a thesis that met with much criticism. Of course, we have to understand the notion of an “artistic project” in the sense of an “aesthetic” project, namely in the sense articulated by Schiller and Schelling. While Groys actually broadens the notion of an artistic project to almost absurd dimensions, it is necessary to take seriously his remark regarding the avantgarde artists and their black squares impinging upon the same territory as the state, for the project of the Russian avantgarde in many respects crossed the borderline between art as an autonomous social phenomenon and art as a stepping stone into the realm of life as a social utopia. In the realm of society both the utopian social practice and the utopian artistic practice met—and, not surprisingly, it was the social practice that won, but mostly devoid of its utopian content. A very similar view can be found in Ristić, who claimed that “Theater must fight for a status equal to that of the world. It must take part in the production of the world. Theater either has this status or it is only a service station of the

7 Ljubiša Ristić, “Interview with Ljubiša Ristić by Radmila Stamenković,” online.

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state, just like traffic police, a hospital, or a school.”8 Theater, thus, does not exist within the sphere of artistic autonomy but is equal to the state. Or, as a younger Slovenian theater director claimed in 1984, also perhaps under the influence of Ristić, “theater is the state” and artists are, as the music group Laibach proclaimed at approximately the same time, politicians, with art being the highest form of politics. Ristić directed a hundred or more plays throughout Yugoslavia, organized theater festivals, and was the director of numerous theater houses throughout the country. In 1980 he staged the play Mass in A Minor in the Slovenian Youth Theater in Ljubljana. At that time this theater was a somewhat marginal Slovenian theater whose target public was high school kids. With the arrival of Ristić the theater soon became known across Yugoslavia. Until today it has remained one of the central experimental theaters in Slovenia. In the opinion of Tomaž Toporišič: The first form of politicized postmodernist theater in Slovenia, characteristic of the second world of Central and Eastern Europe, appeared at the beginning of the eighties with Ristić’s performance Mass in A Minor … With his variant of political theater, Ristić entirely abandoned the classic relationship between literature and theater and, at the same time, heralded the entrance of art into the field of politics … The maverick character of this kind of political and explorative theater was then illuminated by the young critic Vili Ravnjak: “The structure of such performances is of course no longer that of drama, but that of the essay. Instead of a story, there is a commentary … The theater performance can therefore also be created independently from a literary and dramatic text. The traditionally understood playwright has therefore completely fallen out of this aesthetics, being replaced by the director, who is no longer a traditional artist either, but primarily a social critic.’ Thus, direction and the theatrical event no longer formed the imaginary artistic, but the concrete political space. The political theater of the eighties emerged as the meeting point of literature and spectacle. Its characteristic was precisely the linking of political engagement and theatrical experiment, the revolution of the mind and form. Interestingly, it sprang from the reading of tradition, for example, that of Bertolt Brecht; Peter Brook and his staging of Peter Weiss (Marat-Sade), Heiner Müller …, Arianne Mnouchkine, etc.9 8 Ljubiša Ristić, quoted in Dušan Jovanović, “Doručak kot Tifanija,” Scena (Novi Sad) 42/4 (2006): 31. 9 Tomaž Toporišič, “Traces of Political Seduction. Mladinsko Theater, 1980–2005” in Has the Future Already Arrived? Fifty Years of Slovensko Mladinsko Gledališče, ed. Tomaž Toporišič et al (Ljubljana: Slovensko Mladinsko Gledališče, 2007), 92.

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6 Enthusiasm As Jean-François Lyotard notes, when referring to criteria, it “does not mean that … authority has at its disposal no criterion by which to make its evaluations, but that the applicability of the criterion in the given case is itself subject to evaluation.”10 As we know, in his essay “The Contest of Faculties” published in 1798 and discussed by Lyotard before Michel Foucault did, Kant— made some of his most renowned remarks about the French revolution, and famously introduced “enthusiasm” as the affect that accompanies the revolution in the souls of its more or less distant observers. Ever since Michel Foucault drew attention to Kant’s essay in his prominent first lecture at the Collège de France (1983) and Jean-François Lyotard published his short but significant book L’enthousiasme (1986), “The Contest of Faculties” has been something of a philosophical resurrection, especially in the realm of political thought.11 The theme of Kant’s essay was the relation between law and philosophy, for law does not cover the realm of moral and practical aspects of humanity as does philosophy. To prove his point Kant referred to the French Revolution, which had happened some years before, to try to establish a criterion that could serve as the basis for determining the existence of the progress of humanity. In Kant’s view, echoed by Lyotard, the criterion for such a progress, and therefore a “sign of history” which must be fulfilled in the present, the past, and in the future is an affect, that of enthusiasm, of the participants and even bystanders in the revolutionary events. In the words of Alenka Zupančič, “That which is objectively (and ‘eternally’) good about the revolution, yet never directly visible, registers as objective only by provoking a certain affect in the larger public. In other words, affect is an effect testifying to the existence of a cause that cannot be found on the level of what is discernible as empirical causality.”12 According to Kant, the enthusiasm they feel is a modality of the sublime feeling.13 What best determines the sublime is the indeterminate, the ­Formlosigkeit: “the sublime of nature … can be as if without form or figure”; 10

Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sign of History,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 395. 11 Alenka Zupančič, “Enthusiasm, Anxiety and the Event,” Parallax 37 (2005): 31. 12 Ibid., 33. 13 Lyotard, 402.

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“no particular form of nature is represented therein.” The same must be the case for the Revolution, and for all great historical upheavals—they are the formless and figureless in historical human nature.14 In other words, in historical events a formlessness sets in which makes us clueless regarding how to interpret them, how to establish a “cognitive mapping,” to use this notion of Fredric Jameson from 1984, that would allow for the setting up of our evaluative coordinates. “There is no empirical causal chain that one could point out as leading directly to the event. An event is always an interruption in the usual course of things.”15 In Kant’s case the event is the enthusiasm, the “attitude of the onlookers as it reveals itself in public while the drama of great political changes is taking place.”16 “The incontestable event of good is thus enthusiasm, an affect that accompanies the revolutionary events, and not these events themselves.”17 7 Conclusion Let us stop at this point. It is not my purpose to judge Ljubiša Ristić and his creation of, or partaking in, various historical events. The independence of Kosovo is a good instance of a situation in which the international law was sidestepped so as to make room for the legitimate and ethically equally defendable rights of the Kosovar Albanians to attain independence. In this case too, there exists no criterion by which we can make our evaluations, for the applicability of the criterion in the given case is itself subject to evaluation. There only exists a différend. It is true that in the nineties Ljubiša Ristić may have been defending a system which at least in the space of Yugoslavia, as the Szombathy story shows, had positive aspects and effects. Nonetheless, the Yugoslav story too was soon to become obsolete, and became a side effect or collateral damage of the global demise of socialism—not to mention the actions of Slobodan Milošević and his supporters. The system and the country collapsed, and Ristić’s step from theater to politics was a step of a similar kind. Or was it? The enthusiasm that

14 15 16 17

Lyotard, 404. Zupančič, 32. Kant, quoted in Zupančič, 32. Zupančič, 32–33.

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Kant speaks of and that made Boris Davidovich18—like so many other communists who ended in a gulag but still believed in communism, a victim of this very same revolutionary enthusiasm—also existed in the case of Ristić, whether we refer to his political theater or to his political actions. His freedom was the freedom of those who can and must be in opposition, who are against and not for, except when it comes to the utopia represented and presented by the events and actions on the theater stage. In this sense only on the stage there is to be found a difference between the aesthetic in life and the aesthetic in art. On some occasions theater becomes the world, and Ristić made every effort to make the two interchangeable. Nevertheless, in Ristić’s case the world has deleted the theater, proving once again, that it is difficult if not impossible to unite the two, except as a temporary event within an unbound and undefined freedom. While Ristić may have seen his political actions as a continuation of the theater by other means, his life and his actions actually prove, as it was already the case with productivism in the twenties, that the border between art and life cannot be dismantled without losing one or the other. Art may create an event, but such an event can never exist (or perhaps it can remain to exist only for an instant) in the realm of actual human history—and vice versa. The “real” of “life” is presented in art (theatrical or other) only as a representation: art’s step beyond its confines necessarily causes its elimination. Thus art that desires to transcend the autonomy of art and consciously reach into politics can paradoxically accomplish this—and thereby accomplish much or even the maximum, speaking artistically-wise—only if it consciously limits its actions to an active existence on the art’s side of the razor blade that separates “art” and “life.” 18

See Danilo Kiš, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, trans. Duška Mikić-Mitchell (Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001).

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“Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge!” (2014) 1

The Avantgarde’s Double Revolution

Between 1905 and 1930 in Europe the radical artistic trends—the avantgarde movements—also represented “the spearhead of modernity.” The most radical and politicized among them were Italian futurism and Russian constructivism. Others, such as dadaism (as a radical but unevenly politicized movement), the early surrealism, and the less radical expressionism, cubism, Bauhaus, and De Stijl, although they didn’t limit their “revolutions” to style and technique, nonetheless did not depart from the realm of art and cross the line between art and “life.” What therefore distinguished the radical (“politicized,” “extreme,” “social,” “aesthetic”) avantgarde movements from the rest of the avantgardes was that the former programmatically demanded “that art move from representing to transforming the world.”1 What this meant can be illustrated by comparing cubism and Italian futurism. In their time both were considered “revolutionary,” but in different ways. Let us take the case of Italian futurism: Life was to be changed through art, and art to become a form of life. The futurist project of innovation encompassed all aspects of human existence, and was conceived as a total and permanent revolution. What was [in 1915 in a manifesto by the same name] called “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” was aimed at a transformation of mankind in all its physiological and psychological aspects, of the social and political conditions in the modern metropolis.2 To sense the difference between futurism and cubism and thereby between pronouncedly politically and artistically radical avantgardes let us consider the following description of cubism offered by the previous cubist painter, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Cubism, claimed Rivera, was: a revolutionary movement, questioning everything that has previously been said and done in art. It held nothing sacred. As the new world would 1 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 14. 2 Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics (Providence, Rhode Island: Berghahn Books, 1996), 47. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_015

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soon blow itself apart, never to be the same again, so cubism broke down forms as they had been seen for centuries, and was creating out of the fragments new forms, new objects, new patterns, and—ultimately—new worlds.3 Cubism too, argued Rivera, strove to realize the “creation of new worlds,” but we of course also sense that these “worlds” were those of the mind and not of the material historical and social reality. They were limited to art and did not extend beyond it, into “life.” Italian futurism—to continue this parallel reading of two very different strands of avantgarde art from a century ago—in contradistinction to cubism fused art and life. To see how this futurist perspective differed from that of cubism, let me quote from an article by the futurist Giovanni Papini which was published in the journal Lacerba on December 1, 1913. The reader should note that although Papini mentions art, the stress in his article is on “life” to which “art” is obviously either subordinated or which constitutes only its segment: I am a futurist because futurism signifies a total appropriation of the modern civilization with all its enormous wonders, its fantastic possibilities and its horrible beauties. […] I am a futurist because I am tired of Byzantine tapestries, false intellectual profundity, […] of harmonious rhymes, pleasant music, pretty canvases, photographic painting, decorative, classical, antique and ambiguous painting. […] I am a futurist because futurism signifies love for risk-taking, for danger, for what didn’t attract us for what we have not tried, for the summit that we didn’t expect and for the abyss that we have not measured. […] I am a futurist because futurism signifies a desire for a greater civilization, for a more personal art, for a richer sensibility and for a more heroic thinking. I am a futurist for futurism signifies Italy as it was in the past, more worthy of its Future and its Future place in the world, more modern, more developed, more avantgarde than other nations. The liveliest fire burns today among the futurists and I like and I am boasting that I am and remain among them.4 A similar statement can be found in Tatlin: “What happened from the social aspect in 1917 was realized in our work as pictorial artists in 1914 when ‘materials, 3 Quoted in David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America 1910–1990 (New Haven: Yale ­University Press, 2002), 11. 4 Quoted in Giovanni Lista, Le Futurisme: Manifestes, Documents, Proclamations (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1973), 91–92.

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volume and construction’ were accepted as our foundations.”5 If in Italy the change implemented by futurism produced among futurists such as Papini a novel sensibility, a new “distribution of the sensible” (Jacques Rancière) then for Tatlin too, radical art such as constructivism had already became a fait accompli, to be followed by the social upheaval, i.e. the October Revolution. What characterizes Italian futurism and Russian constructivism and distinguishes them from cubism is that they form complete worldviews and strive to affect extra-artistic life of the national or class community, while cubism remains limited to the domain of art in the sense that it is characterized by autonomy and the ensuing institution of art. To understand what that means, it suffices to remember the lesson of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Duchamp’s intention when introducing in 1915 the readymades was to subvert the institution of art—to show, by bringing a urinal or a bottle-rack into an exhibition, that it is the context that makes a work into an artwork and not the other way around—an ambition in which he totally failed, for these objects, instead of serving as prime examples of non-art were swiftly assimilated into the realm of art. Or in the words of Duchamp: “I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into the faces of [the public] as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”6 One would think that the two poles of avantgarde art—namely Italian futurism and Russian constructivism on the one hand and cubism or expressionism on the other—would cover the variety of artistic options developed by the early (also called “classical” or “historical”) avantgardes from a century ago, but this was not the case, for even more radical varieties of politicized or radical avantgarde movements that questioned the legitimacy of further existence and creation of art were soon developed. Aleksei Gan thus in 1922 claimed: Our constructivism has declared uncompromising war on art, because the means and properties of art are not powerful enough to systematize the feelings of the revolutionary milieu. It is cemented by the real success of the [October] Revolution and its feelings are expressed by intellectual and material production.7

5 Vladimir Tatlin, quoted in John E. Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avantgarde: Theory and Criticism (London: Thames and Hudson 1988), 206. 6 Quoted in Edward Lucie-Smith, Movements in art since 1945 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), 11. 7 Aleksei Gan, Konstruktivizm, Tver 1922; quoted in Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 338.

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In other words, constructivism wanted—independently of the events in New York triggered there at about the same time by Duchamp’s readymades—to eliminate art as a bourgeois invention, believing that a new society, that of revolutionary communism, required new expressive means, among which there was no place for art, for it was considered to be an obsolete part of an obsolete bourgeois society and therefore of an obsolete period in human history. To replace such past art, the constructivists went into two directions: one was productivism—the designing of useful everyday objects such as stoves and warm clothes—while the other continued the tradition of machine aesthetics (associated with anarchism) elaborated already in the nineteenth century when a whole philosophy of industrial aestheticism developed—a tendency realized also in the Arts and Crafts movement (1860–1910) and later continued in Bauhaus. In much Western scholarship, at least, constructivism has become an integral part of the historiography of the October Revolution and tends to be appreciated almost exclusively as an immediate result of the new political order and to be granted an inordinate primacy in the development of early Soviet culture. All the more surprising, then, is the fact that constructivism produced very little of permanence. It was a movement of built-in obsolescence, of ready-to-wear and throw-away, of designs often intended for multiple and mass consumption, of theories, statements, and projects which left behind a precious, but very scant, legacy of material objects. In other words, in remembering the icons of the constructivist process, and Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International is an obvious specimen, we realize that constructivism is now celebrated more for what it did not create than for what it did.8 In the opinion of Aleksei Gan, constructivism was both a Soviet and a Western invention, but the two varieties were not the same. The distinction between them hinges precisely on the concept of art. Gan argued that, for the West, constructivism was merely the name given to the new artistic trend. “They [the West] simply call the new art constructivism,” he asserted. He ­particularly singled out [two of his fellow constructivists] Ehrenburg and Lissitzky for blame. “The basic mistake,” he stressed, “of comrade Ehrenburg and comrade Lissitzky consists in the fact that they cannot tear 8 John Bowlt, “5 x 5 = 25,” unpublished manuscript.

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themselves from art.” Gan stressed that the Russian constructivists had dispensed with art and that it was the Revolution which ensured that this would happen.9 In a society thoroughly permeated with political ideology, such as that of ­Russia of the twenties, art shared the destiny of this society. What distinguished the Western notion of art from that of the former socialist countries was the latter’s social and political context in which there was no art market. “Art becomes politically effective only when it is made beyond or outside the art market—in the context of direct political propaganda. Such art was made in the former socialist countries.”10 Let us take two examples of art that could be called “propaganda” or political, but which could equally well be described as creating and erecting a new artistic paradigm which was inextricably linked to political purpose. The first is the aforementioned Monument to the Third International commissioned in early 1919 by the Department of Fine Arts and to be erected in the center of Moscow. “During 1919 and 1920 [Tatlin] worked on it and built models in metal and wood with three assistants in his studio in Moscow. One of these was exhibited at the Exhibition of the VIIIth Congress of the Soviets held in December 1920. ‘A union of purely artistic forms (painting, sculpture and architecture) for a utilitarian purpose’ was how Tatlin described it.”11 The monument, resembling a leaning Eiffel Tower, was to be three times as high as the Empire State Building, with its glass body moving at different speeds: the cylinder once a year, the cone once a month and the cube on the top once a day with a continuous flood of political and propaganda activity going on inside it and emanating from it. “Unfortunately the project never got further than the models which Tatlin and his assistants built in wood and wire. These models came to be a symbol of the Utopian world which these artists had hoped to build. In many ways it is typical of their hopes: so ambitious, so romantic and so utterly impractical.”12 Another such work was El Lissitzky’s poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919). It is this poster that will be the focus of this essay. The poster as a whole, besides being a work of political propaganda … also exhibits an overt aesthetic function. Its simple graphisms convey 9 10 11 12

Lodder, 237. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008), 7. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–1922 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1971), 225. Ibid., 226.

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Figure 2 Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, maquette, 1920 Public domain

an excess of signification. Pure ideological statement and pure aesthetic object never meet in a single space … In the case of the poster … the aesthetic effect engendered by pure geometric forms augments the ideological effect of the written statement, and vice versa. The image and the narrative exist in two distinct spaces. They merely intersect, producing

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Figure 3 El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge, 1919 Public domain

in our perception not a unified effect, but a doubled or parallel impression—a binary effect.13 In the Soviet Union such works flourished until the late twenties when the agitprop “factography” replaced the avantgardist “Faktura.”14 Already from the early twenties on, especially Lissitzky and Rodchenko discarded their previous artistic avantgarde modernist endeavors to turn to political education and state propaganda, with Rodchenko becoming the editor of the magazine USSR in Construction. It is from within this context that Benjamin Buchloh poses a question resembling that of Boris Groys: Why did the Soviet avantgarde, after having evolved a modernist practice to its most radical stages in the postsynthetic cubist work of the 13 14

Aleš Erjavec, “Introduction,” in Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 44. See Benjamin Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (1984): 82–119, and ­Yve-Alain Bois, El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility,” Art in America, (1988): 161–181.

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s­uprematists, constructivists and Laboratory Period artists, apparently abandon the paradigm of modernism upon which its practices have been based? What paradigmatic changes occurred at that time, and which paradigm formation replaced the previous one?15 In the West the answer to this question remained obscured by grouping much (or all) such later Soviet avantgarde work under the rubric of political propaganda. The problem with this criticism, is that criteria of judgment that were originally developed within the framework of modernism are now applied to a practice of representation that had deliberately and systematically disassociated itself from that framework in order to lay the foundations of an art production that would correspond to the need of a newly industrialized collective society.16 The intent of these Russian avantgarde artists was to effect—or to take an active part in—a “’double revolution’ by redefining revolutionary art practice so that it became revolutionary social practice as well.”17 As Victor Margolin claimed, “The ambition of the artistic-social avantgarde … was to close the gap between discursive acts, which were confined to postulation and speculation, and pragmatic ones, which involved participation in building a new society.”18 It was for this reason that Lissitzky could write in his diary shortly before he died, in 1941, that in “1926 my most important work as an artist began: the design of exhibitions.”19 From the early twenties on many Russian avantgarde artists decided to take an active part in the building of the Soviet state. They considered such an endeavor to be a personal as well as an artistic continuation of their previous futurist, Suprematist or other avantgardist artistic work: for them classical painting and traditional art forms have attained their final developmental form before 1917 and had nothing more to offer to the new society or to the new art. This view coincided with Walter Benjamin’s fascination with the Soviet revolutionary cinema and its technique of montage. Cinema, in his view, not only 15 16 17

Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” 85. Ibid., 108. Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy Nagy. 1917–1946 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 3. 18 Ibid. 19 Buchloh, 102.

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demolished aura, but also offered a collective experience, with montage—a technique related to the earlier avantgarde practice of collage—offering an Adornian “resistance” when compared with the products of Hollywood film industry. 2

The Red Wedge

In his book on public monuments Sergiusz Michalski discusses an unrealized “Project for a monument commemorating the victory over General Krasnov,” The Red Wedge, from 1918, which was proposed by the constructivist architect Nikolai Kolli (1894–1996). This “was,” claims Michalski, “the first fully abstract political public monument in the world. This piece consists of a black pedestal from which rises a white stone, splintered at the top by a red wedge. A peculiar word play was intended here, since it had been by means of the red (krasnij) wedge that the ‘bands of Krasnov’ had been defeated.”20 Kolli’s project—continues Michalski—was deftly plagiarized by El Lissitzky in his famous poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge! (1920), which showed a white circle (for the White Guards) being pierced by a red wedge, thus broadening Kolli’s play on words. But the sequence of transformations and ripostes did not end here. In the fall of 1920, the famous avantgarde artist Malevich and his students erected a plywood monument to the October Revolution in Vitebsk which depicted a circular form splintered by a wedge.21 The red wedge also represented the Bolshevik army emblem. In 1921 Walter Gropius developed what resembled an expressionist monument that was to honor victims of the working-class in a putsch in Weimar. It immediately brought to mind Lissitzky’s work. Later Kandinsky used the same motif and the image of the “wedge” to criticize Bolshevik symbolisms. These variations of the basic theme—white circle and the red wedge, supplemented with a few words to the same effect—witness that there must have existed some profound reasons why the whole composition met with such a widespread and positive response.

20 21

Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments. Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London: ­ eaktion Books, 1998), 112. R Ibid., 113.

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Figure 4 Nikolai Kolli, The Red Wedge, 1918 Public domain

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Figure 5 Walter Gropius, Monument to the March Dead, 1921 Public domain

With her book The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–1922 in 1962, Camilla Gray introduced the Russian avantgarde to the Western public, including the work of El Lissitzky. In her view Lissitzky’s 1919–20 poster was linked to his abstract material bodies, the “prouns” the first of which was also made in 1919. “A poster of his of 1919,” muses Gray, “reading ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge,’ is an amusing illustration of those ‘leftish artists’ contribution to ­Bolshevik propaganda.”22 How did Lissitzky himself view the poster? Most certainly within the framework of his desire to partake in the avantgarde’s attempt to redefine revolutionary art practice and to transgress the limits of art, moving into the territory of industrialism and constructivism. Benjamin Buchloh used this peculiarity of Lissitzky’s “art” to point out the dividing line between Western modernism and Eastern avantgarde such as constructivism, a gap that even today continues to remain wide and unbreachable, in spite of existing for almost a century. Hal Foster asks himself whether already then “Barr understood that constructivist practices spoke to a historical rupture in the mode of production, not to the historicist logic of the institution of art. “In any case,”—continues 22

Gray, 254.

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Foster—”MOMAist logic soon demanded the displacement of a heterogeneous, collectivist constructivism by a Western cubistic-constructive tradition.”23 Lissitzky’s 1919–20 poster remained half-way between suprematism and constructivism and even if it was an abstract work it nonetheless also contained explicit and implicit figurative representations as well as written text. In the opinion of Christina Kaier, Lissitzky’s 1919–20 poster contains also explicit sexual imagery: “The floating geometric forms of Lissitzky’s suprematist composition represent not only the penetration of the White Guard front by the Red Army, but the fantasy of the complete penetration of traditional Russian social life by the invigorating sharpness of Bolshevik ideology.”24 It was to this motif that Lissitzky turned in 1929 when creating the stage design for the play I Want a Baby by Sergei Tretyakov. Here is the resume of the play: In I Want a Baby, an unmarried party member named Milda, whose extensive public organizing work to benefit the collective leaves no time for marriage or children, suddenly realizes that she wants to have a child. As an agronomist well-versed in eugenics as well as Leninism, Milda decides that the prospective father must be of 100 percent healthy proletarian stock. Rationalist and antiromantic, she searches out an appropriate specimen … She offers him a contract stating that after conception she will make no claims for his support of her or the child, nor will she ask him to play the roles of husband or father in any way … Their son is raised communally in collective Soviet children’s institutions … In the play’s conclusion, set four years later in 1930, [the father] catches a glimpse of his son when the child wins first prize in a “Healthy Baby” contest—­displayed as an object of collective consumption, rather than of traditional, individual parental pride.25 For the stage design of the play I Want A Baby, Lissitzky employed elements from his poster of ten years before, recycling the composition and its main elements—only now they functioned in a very different setting. On a 1929 photograph we thus see “Lissitzky leaning into the model of his stage set to adjust the

23 24 25

Hal Foster, “Some Uses and Abuses of Russian Constructivism,” in Art Into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914–1932 (Seattle: The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 1990), 246. Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2005), 260. Kiaer, 245.

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fragile railing around a glass circle.”26 Tretyakov’s play is suspended between a tragic existential human situation personified by the circumstantial father on the one hand and Milda’s eternally one-dimensional world of satisfaction and contentment. The continuous strength and persuasiveness of Lissitzky’s work lie in the combination of the image and the text, that is, the narrative. Such a creative gesture of synthesizing the pictorial and the discursive elements that are simultaneously kept apart by an unbridgeable void, can be viewed both in Lissitzky’s poster from 1919–20 and in his 1929 stage design. There is something enigmatic in the white circle, the red wedge and the narrative that accompanies them, something that prevents us to regard the work from a single vantage point—a strictly ideological one, for example. The work offers what I have designated as the “binary effect,”27 comparing the nature of its impact to Fichte’s dialectics, a dialectics that consists of thesis and anti-thesis without these two elements

Figure 6 El Lissitzky working on a stage design of Sergei Tretyakov’s play I Want a Baby in the Meyerhold Theatre PRIVATE. AUTHOR ANONYMOUS. PERMISSION FOR IMAGE USE BY PURCHASE FROM ALAMY

26 27

Ibid., 263–264. See Erjavec, “Introduction,” 44–46.

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ever meeting in a common or shared space. From this viewpoint Lissitzky’s work seems to represent an instance of socialist modernism. It creates or builds upon an abstraction but one that at the same time possesses an excess of signification and one that carries an evident heteronomous content which is paradoxically revealed precisely through the use of abstract forms. In his “Study of Ideologies and Philosophy of Language” from 1929 V. N. ­Voloshinov makes an important observation as regards the notion of ideology. In his view, “All manifestations of ideological creativity—all other nonverbal signs—are bathed by, suspended in, and cannot be entirely segregated or divorced from the element of speech.”28 This statement, evoking in a single gesture a paraphrase of Marx and Althusser, is dependent also on Lenin’s essay “What is to be Done?” from 1902, in which Lenin makes the distinction between the bourgeois and proletarian ideology. The prime location of ideology is the word. Or in Voloshinov’s own words, “The word is the ideological phenomenon par excellence.”29 It is this same notion of ideology that is so very present in Lissitzky’s poster: political ideology does not hinder the artistic potential of the poster. It instead enhances its aesthetic effect, for it is expressed through a combination of colors which, although possessing a secondary signification, they nonetheless also evokes abstract meaning and creates an aesthetic effect. In the spring of 1968 Jean-François Lyotard held a seminar at Nanterre devoted to political posters. He was particularly interested in the work under discussion in this talk, namely in Lissitzky’s “Street Poster”—as Lissitzky’s poster in this talk is also known. In my earlier book Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, too, I commented on Lyotard’s interpretation of Lissitzky: The poster as a whole, besides being a work of political propaganda, also exhibits an overt aesthetic function. Its simple graphisms convey an excess of signification. Pure ideological statement and pure aesthetic object never meet in a single space, for this would destroy the perception and reception of each of them. The effect produced by the poster resembles visual paradoxes where, by changing our inner perceptual vantage form, we see the same object in a different way, or as a different object. In the case of the poster (and in many other works by the same artist or by Malevich) the aesthetic effect engendered by pure geometric forms augments the ideological effect of the written statement, and vice versa. The 28 29

V. N. Voloshinov, “The Study of Ideologies and Philosophy of Language,” Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture, eds. Alla Efimova and Lev Manovich (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 8. Ibid., 6.

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image and the narrative exist in two distinct spaces. They merely intersect, producing in our perception not a unified effect, but a doubled or parallel impression—a binary effect.30 If this is true, then we can claim that in the poster the image exists in one “­reality” (or its dimension) and the discourse or narrative in another—despite both actually existing in a single visual space of the poster. It may thus be true, as Lyotard argued in his Discours, Figure,31 that a letter is a figure and a discourse at the same time, but perhaps even more could be said: that the discourse supplements and intensifies the effect of the image. This may be especially true when dealing with an image that is basically abstract. Already Gray had noticed that after the introduction of “prouns,” “Lissitzky’s interest in lettering was soon combined with these new abstract compositions.”32 Lissitzky was obviously aware that a picture that contains an abstract pictorial and a concrete discursive component achieves its maximum aesthetic effect when the two elements exist in a tension which is in his poster furthermore strengthened by the dynamic positioning of the red wedge. Perhaps we could even claim that Rodchenko’s, Moholy-Nagy’s and Lissitzky’s later constructivist photographs (such as those presented in the twenties and thirties in the journal USSR in Construction), just as in the case of Lissitzky’s work under consideration, built on the same principle of dynamism of geometrical forms which instantly evoked the aesthetic effect. It was probably this abstract aesthetic property of constructivism that attracted the attention of the post-war Western artists. The discursive ingredients of the image—the text—thus offers an explicit statement but one that avoids the simple ideological effect of ordinary political posters. Works such as these open up a territory between pure propaganda (be it ideological or commercial, as created in the twenties by Mayakovsky and Rodchenko) and autonomous western art. If then indeed Barr wanted to promote and retain the global place for Western art, he really had, as he put it during his winter 1927–28 visit to Soviet Union, to “find some painters [in the USSR] if possible.”33

30 31 32 33

Erjavec, 44. Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). Gray, 254. Quoted in Foster, 246.

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The Afterlife of the Wedge and the Circle

In this way Barr partook in a dispute that has still not been resolved, although it is one of the exemplary instances of simultaneous autonomization and heteronomization of art. According to Western artistic standards, is art (or an artwork) such as Lissitzky’s 1919–20 poster, “ideological” or “autonomous” art? I would argue that it is an instance of both: On one level it represents a pure propaganda gesture, even in its first appearance, i.e., in Kolli’s initial sculptural project. On the other hand it has today drifted into the institution of art and has lost its ideological potential, retaining only the aesthetic one. What used to be regarded in 1920 as a work of political propaganda that simultaneously possessed an aesthetic function and existed in a space opposite that of the artistic autonomy and the institution of art, was after decades of historical assimilation transformed into a yet another instance of institutional art, thereby being assimilated, becoming essentially abstract and “beautiful”—becoming an object of a gaze similar to that despairingly evoked by Duchamp in relation to his readymades. Its textual component retains today only its visual aestheticized effect, this one being enhanced by the Cyrillic script. In this way the poster has undergone the processes that avantgarde art of the twentieth century underwent soon after its artistic and political successes and impacts. After World War II Lissitzky’s poster turned from a specific avantgarde work of political propaganda into an assimilated modernist work more akin to Western constructivism than to its original signification. Its context was gone so its ideological meaning was gone too. The wedge and the circle started to reappear in Soviet Union and some other socialist countries again in the 1970s, 80s and 90s in works that were usually postmodern, namely ironic, referential and double-coded. In all instances these more recent versions of the circle and the wedge built upon what by now became the archetypal image associated with the October revolution. In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 Russian and Eastern European artists have thus sometimes evoked Lissitzky’s abstract geometric design from his 1919–20 poster with the frequent postmodernist practice of quoting wellknown historical works. What probably attracted them in Lissitzky’s poster was its binary nature: the dualism of the aesthetic and the ideological,34 the latter of them with the unfolding of time becoming increasingly aestheticized too. Nevertheless, the poster continued to contain a political potential, even 34

Another Russian artist from the eighties who uses the “binary approach” is Erik Bulatov.

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if it now contained only sarcastic or ironic signification—as in the work by Leonid Sokov titled Lissitzky’s Poster (1987), where Gorbachov’s “Glasnost” replaced the red wedge or in the works by Afrika (Sergei Bugaev) where the same motif was used, starting with Afrika’s “Anti-Lissitzky Series.” Works from the series bore titles such as Blue Wedge Beats Pink, or Don’t Beat Anybody with Anything (1990). Such examples are not to be found only in Russia or in Eastern Europe. In 1979 Huang Rui, a leading member of the Chinese “Stars” painterly movement, designed a logo of the “Stars” group. It is unexceptional, except that apart from the blue background it is a copy of El Lissitzky’s poster from more than half a century before, namely of the poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.35 Let me conclude by raising a few obvious questions: First: How did an artist such as Huang Rui who was basically a “modernist” in the seventies stumble upon Lissitzky’s constructivist image, and find it congenial? Second: Why did Huang Rui think that a work that stood for the opposite of the autonomous art that he and his group were professing would suitably express and represent the nature or essence of the artistic orientation of the “Stars” group? It would seem that both questions would have to be posed to Huang Rui. Nonetheless, perhaps we can venture and attempt to answer them by ourselves. I think it is important that in the “Stars” logo the political statement is gone. What remains is the abstract geometric image that incessantly reveals, expresses and confirms the aesthetic potential of geometric forms—just like in Lissitzky’s “prouns.” It is this gesture of removing the political and ideological statement that turns the poster into an empty shell of aesthetic form and allows the militant statement of the poster to be finally transformed into the aestheticized artwork that Huang Rui could employ to express the spirit of the “Stars” group. Put differently, the avantgardist and ideological signification of the street poster has with the removal of the ideological statement been transformed into a formalist work of art thereby confirming Voloshinov’s statement about the ideological nature of discourse. Perhaps the incessant driftings of works such as Lissitzky’s that lose their heteronomous nature and acquire (or retain) only their autonomous one, is what not only differentiates the original Lissitzky’s work from that of Huang Rui’s logo, but also separates Western modernism from its Eastern variety. Sokov’s or Afrika’s ironic exploitation of the symbolic capital acquired since 1920 by Lissitzky’s Street Poster appears insignificant when compared with the impact made by the original or by Huang Rui’s logo. 35

See Huang Rui, The Stars’ Time: 1977–1984 (Beijing: Thinking Hands + Guanyi Contemporary Art Archive, 2007), unpaginated.

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They no longer “make ideology visible” (Althusser) and they are not ideology itself. Instead they exist on razor’s cutting edge separating ideology and politics from the beautiful and truth. “If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.”36 36

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, eds. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 9.

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Art, Aesthetics, and Politics (2014) 1

Is Art Political?

Those among us who come from former socialist countries and are old enough to remember them when they were still socialist, be they the former Soviet Union, the European East, or the persevering Cuba and China, still recall well the infinite and meandering discussions about art and politics. Is art political or not? If it is, is it always political? Is it political or politicized? Case One: In 1978 the Slovenian student newspaper Tribuna of whose editorial board I was then a member, featured the poetry and an interview with the East German dissident Wolf Biermann (the East German “Bob Dylan”). As soon as it was printed, the Biermann issue of Tribuna was confiscated, sent to the paper mill, and shredded. When we inquired why, the answer was: in the very same week in which we published Biermann, the Conference on Security and Co-Operation in Europe was taking place in Belgrade (at that time the capital of Yugoslavia). Slovenian and Yugoslav politicians feared that the East German participants of the Belgrade conference would get the impression that Yugoslavia had published Biermann to provoke—for whatever reason—their country and its representatives at the Belgrade meeting. In this way the purported addressees of the Biermann issue of were not readers of the students’ newspaper in Slovenia but the imagined representatives of East Germany. Case Two: Political art existed already in the nineteenth century, much of which remains within the frame of traditional representational artistic framework and involves “content-based commitment” (as opposed to the formal “commitment” exemplified by the specific use of collage, montage, etc.). An instance of the former would be the art of an artist such as Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), the realist painter of works such as The Stonebreakers (1849) who became a politician during the siege and the Commune of Paris in 1870–71 and, in his own words, a member of “four of the most important offices in Paris.” He was imprisoned during the political persecution of the Communards, only to return later to the life of an artist. His artistic activities were related to his political beliefs and were interdependent with them in a direct way, as in social and critical realism, i.e., via content. His art was “political” by its motif but not “­revolutionary” in a formal artistic sense—by its style and technique—nor avantgarde in the sense that his painterly work extended beyond the confines of autonomous art. In other words, “Courbet as an exemplary artist-revolutionary © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_016

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thus does not exemplify the overlapping of art and revolution, but rather the rapid succession of the roles of artist and revolutionary politician.”1 Case Three: Expressionist writer Franz Kafka is considered to be one of the most important modernist novelists of the twentieth century. Little is known today that his work underwent a series of contradictory and mutually excluding ideological and political interpretations. Immediately after his death in 1924 there appeared in Rudé právo, the journal of the Czech Communist Party, an obituary in which Kafka was declared to have been a sympathizer of workers and to have had an insight into their suffering. Different and opposed interpretations followed: between the two world wars Kafka was declared to have been Marxist, Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and Existentialist writer, while after World War II he was proclaimed to have a premonition of the inhumanity of totalitarianism: his work was interpreted not only as criticism of Nazism (especially with his short story “In the Penal Colony”) but also as criticism of Stalinism. Due to this latter interpretation Kafka’s writings met with official denigration among French Communists who in a 1946 issue of their official party magazine Action on the cover page raised the question: “Faut-il brûler Franz Kafka?” (Must we burn Franz Kafka?). Of course, the question whether Kafka should be burnt was a poignant one for Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn his works—something that Brod did not do but instead spent his life editing and publishing Kafka’s novels, short stories and parables. In the fifties Kafka was not published in Czechoslovakia or, for that matter, elsewhere in the East bloc. Although he was published in the sixties in the Soviet Union the editors of the edition tried hard to persuade the reader that reading Kafka would be a waste of time. Then in 1963 the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences organized in Liblice a symposium on the work of Franz Kafka.2 Was its purpose to set the record straight and to depoliticize his work? On the contrary: the purpose of the Liblice conference was to prepare the way for the emergence of the Czech version of “socialism with a human face” that culminated in the Prague Spring of 1968. In Liblice Kafka and his literary works thus served as proof that under socialism as well alienation and reification occur. It was only later, in 1975, that Deleuze and Guattari published their book on Kafka (Toward a Minor Literature), that was less concerned with the 1 Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. Aileen Derieg (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 98. 2 See Franz Kafka aus Prager Sicht (Prague: Verlag der Tschechslowakischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1965).

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ideological and political issues so typical for previous interpretations and evaluations of Kafka and his oeuvre. It was only after the sixties that Kafka became an object of non-politicized literary studies. Was this newly acquired autonomy good or bad? Was it better or worse than the previous heteronomy? Art is never only autonomous or heteronomous but both, but to different extent. Is art really the highest form of creativity and is it essentially linked to emancipation? Should it be regarded from a class perspective or from a universally human one—and, either way, what does this mean? Is all art a part of the class struggle or is it a part of the relatively autonomous superstructure? Is it a form of ideology but if it is, how is it possible (as Louis Althusser claimed) that art also makes ideology visible? 2

The Uneasy Relationship of Art and Politics

From the sixties and well into the early eighties of the previous century— which is the time frame of dilemmas confronting us under circumstances described above—art and politics, as well as politics and philosophy, existed in a permanent uneasy relationship that often erupted into conflict. This happened because art, theory, and in particular philosophy were some of the rare venues wherein critical positions and questions could be enunciated or implied, all of them revealing themselves as symptoms of chaotic and disorganized relations within socialist societies, thereby allowing various conflicts or divergences to appear or at least be hinted at. While art and philosophy and thereby aesthetics as philosophy of art were always drifting between always the same two seasons—from winter to spring and back—they at the same time revealed and constituted the unresolvable internal and external political limits of these politicized societies within which every segment of the social field was subsumed to politics. They formed part of the socialist superstructure that existed within the frame of political struggles, this being so even when it appeared that the conflict between the official and the unofficial was raised on the basis of controlled and controllable facets of society, a situation made worse by the inability of socialist countries to allow for any substantial measure of criticism and self-criticism for they would shatter their fragile social and political fabric. On the other hand, this situation invested art and artists with importance they hardly possessed in other kinds or realms of society. In this respect the outstanding situation was that of transition of socialism into postsocialism that in period that in most countries lasted one or two decades. Within this period

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art, philosophy etc. attained a freedom that was even so much more precious, because it was created in societies in which only recently it had been sanctioned and prohibited.3 Within this ideological and political universe aesthetics was of no great import: it was either subsumed under philosophy or under an abstract and well-intentioned but shallow notions of beauty, art and form. The dominant forms of twentieth-century aesthetics that were related to politics were of course content-oriented aesthetics, whose ideal was realism in art, and formalist aesthetics, whose ideal was modernism in art. The former was defended by Marxist critics and the latter by modernist and modern theorists and critics. (Often “modernist” art and its theory were associated with Greenberg and Adorno and “modern” art with Manet or Cézanne.) Content-oriented aesthetics was often personified by Hegel and formalist aesthetics by Kant, with a similar division occurring among Marxists also in art. Formalist art was bourgeois while figurative, “typical” art was supposedly proletarian--such was, for example, Tretyakov’s proletarian-oriented “literature of fact” that was a combination of journalism and literature. Since aesthetics were predominantly viewed as a philosophical discipline, aimed at defining art and beauty, it was not surprising that a large segment of leftist authors doing aesthetics attempted to find an ideal balance between content and form. Too little content purportedly led to undesirable formalism, while too little form led to raw art and to the defense of the motif or plot at the expense of the aesthetic and well-structured work. A special auxiliary criterion was “partiinost” or the “partisan” political or ideological orientation of a work. In all such instances aesthetics represented a part of a philosophical system: their purpose was to develop an intellectual edifice that could help determine what an artwork was or should be, for such aesthetics were mostly after art. Certain authors—Lucien Goldmann (the author of the work Towards a Sociology of the Novel, 1963), for example, or the Polish phenomenologist and well-known aesthetician Roman Ingarden, as well as anthropological Marxists such as the Polish aesthetician Stefan Morawski and the emergent structuralists – were praised for overcoming the division into and competition between content and form. Nevertheless, there existed an inherent and self-generating paradox encountered everywhere where Marxism was the official ideological and thereby the semi-official philosophical line: in all such cases Marxism remained the infinitely distant ideal, never to be reached and attained, and

3 See Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).

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never to be subjected to theoretical scrutiny and empirical verification and evaluation. Since the sixties and seventies which represented the apogee and then also the beginnings of the decline of the content/form divide, the classical meaning of the syntagm “aesthetics and politics” lost its relevance, interest and importance. The same went for political ideology and for class adherence of art, culture, and aesthetics. In the United States and United Kingdom issues related to aesthetics or art and politics and ideology carried a different and a more academic meaning. Usually they were unrelated to political struggles within individual countries or philosophical orientations. In such a context appeared in 1977 a volume entitled Aesthetics and Politics and was edited by Fredric Jameson, containing polemical essays (mostly on expressionism) involving Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács. In postmodernism, issues such as art (or aesthetics, for that matter) and politics drifted into the background with the vaunted end of ideologies, inclusive of rigidified modernist ideas about art. Also for this reason the idea about “the end of art” (as ran the title of a 1984 article by Arthur Danto) was not a suitable starting point for a discussion of art, aesthetics and politics. 3

The Contribution of Jacques Rancière

In the new millennium the theme aesthetics and politics once more became relevant, perhaps most visibly due to philosophy of Jacques Rancière. This former disciple of Louis Althusser developed a new interpretation of politics and aesthetics, wherein politics was essentially related to subjectivization and aesthetics to the emergence of what Rancière called the “aesthetic regime of art,” which was to replace the previous dominant notions of modernism and postmodernism. Within Rancière’s theoretical framework art leads to emancipation—a vintage Marxist notion that we know well from the leftist philosophy of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Aesthetics furthermore preconditions the emergence of art in the singular, making the two inseparable. The other reason for the growing import of art and aesthetics was the emergence of new forms of capitalism that effectively sidelined all oppositional thought, even though this was not done by traditional weapons. Yet another, although indirect theory involving art and via art also aesthetics and politics was that of Claude Lefort. Lefort developed (especially in his 1978 work Les formes de l’histoire) the idea of totalitarianism according to which a democratic society was distinguished from a totalitarian one by possessing

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different centers of power, while the totalitarian one possessed only one such center. Such situation turned art into a special social creation for within a totalitarian society it carried special social and political significance. Contrary to the traditional usage of politics which in recent years has been increasingly limited to the microphysics of power, Rancière ascribes to politics an emancipatory role. In such context speech acquires a special function. Let me illustrate this by a viewpoint, famously elaborated by Gayatri Spivak with her question: “Can the subaltern speak?”4 Her response, arising from a discussion of Indian women, comes at the end of her essay: “The subaltern cannot speak.”5 It is this speaking, the possession of a voice, that is not only a key issue of politics of representation, but also a key concept within the broader framework of emancipation. This brings us to Rancière: “Man, said Aristotle, is political because he possesses speech, a capacity to place the just and the unjust in common, whereas all the animal has is a voice to signal pleasure and pain. But the whole question, then, is to know who possesses speech and who merely possesses voice.”6 If, then, the people, namely individuals and groups or communities, are successful in making and having their voice heard—this voice stretching from the socio-political to the artistic and cultural realms— then they have taken a political stance and have effected action toward others, themselves, and their place in the world as subjects. “Politics begins when those who were destined to remain in the domestic and invisible territory of work and reproduction, and prevented from doing ‘anything else,’ take the time that they ‘have not’ in order to affirm that they belong to a common world.”7 In this concrete case Rancière’s claim concerns French workers from the nineteenth century, but it can be equally applied to the post-colony and to the postsocialist countries. While other issues of post-colonialism for example (such as orientalism, nation, identity, hybridity) find limited resonance when applied to non-colonial countries, the issue of the “voice” overdetermines other issues that have been just mentioned. In the preface to The Order of Things, Michel Foucault raises an issue on which that work is based: “between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself … This middle 4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 284. 5 Ibid., 308. 6 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Polity, 2009), 24. 7 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (­London: Continuum, 2010), 139.

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region, then, in so far as it makes manifest the modes of being of order, can be posited as the most fundamental of all.”8 What Foucault is attempting to bring to light in the epistemological field are the conditions of possibility of history as a discourse and a form of knowledge. These thoughts of Foucault may aid us in understanding the position of Rancière, who himself states, “If the reader is fond of analogy, aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense—reexamined perhaps by Foucault—as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.”9 In Rancière’s endeavor aesthetics is what historically causes the constitution of the general notion of art, an event that in his opinion occurs towards the end of the eighteenth century. It is such aesthetic practices that make visible and “­disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they ‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to the community.”10 Or as Rancière phrases this thought elsewhere, “Aesthetics is not the fateful capture of art by philosophy. It is not the catastrophic overflow of art into politics. It is the originary knot that ties a sense of art to an idea of thought and an idea of the community.”11 In this way Rancière establishes aesthetics as a discourse that not only creates the transcendental conditions for the emergence of a unified and general notion of art, which in his view stretches into our contemporaneity and beyond, but also connects art with community and reciprocally with politics. The latter is proximate to the notion of “the political,” for it relates to democracy and to making visible those who were previously disregarded and mute.12 4 Conclusion The conclusion of this very brief sketch of the more recent relations among art, aesthetics and politics would be that today these notions retain their previous import which is dependent upon the emergent political transformations effected by the advent of neo-liberal capitalism, on the one hand, and by developments in theory on the other. Some kinds of contemporary art are of course 8

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xxi. 9 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 13. 10 Ibid. 11 Jacques Rancière, “What Aesthetics Can Mean,” in From an Aesthetic Point of View, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 33. 12 See Aleš Erjavec, “Art et esthétique: du moderne au contemporain,” Diogène 233–234 (2011): 211–225.

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also involved in this relation, only that today, contrary to art of modernism, they focus on micro-issues and not on the global, totalizing and revolutionary ones. An important contribution made by Rancière was that he interpreted aesthetics and the aesthetic beyond the narrow confines of the terms in which we today usually employ them, namely, not only within the confines of art but within the framework of the sensible. In this way art too escapes the traditional unproductive division into art vs. politics. In such a way aesthetics can be productively applied not only to art of the last century and a half but to much of “contemporary” art—a notion that would require an analysis of its own.

Chapter 16

Revolutions and the Avantgardes (2016) 1

From Political to Aesthetic Revolution

Most of us will agree that today revolutions are hard to find. A decade ago issues of communism, revolution and class antagonism attracted some attention but only after the global economic crisis stunningly revealed the absence of viable theories relating to issues such as social justice, revolution, social antagonism, etc. Soon it became generally accepted that new times required new theories, but since revolution was no longer happening the term soon lost much of its subversive meaning. As a consequence of such a situation the term “revolution” has been transformed into a quotidian word used in everyday speech to enhance the meaning of extreme change or achievement. We thus hear talk of the “revolutionary” anti-ageing formula that reduces wrinkles by 64%, about a “revolutionary” financial invention that allows one to spend more than he or she earns, or of a gastronomic “revolution” brought about by fusion cooking. What about “aesthetic revolution?” Perhaps not surprisingly, in Wikipedia the term refers foremost to “Lifestyle fitness clothing.” These examples show that, especially in the last decades, revolution has lost much of its previous significance. In the past it affected innumerable human lives and determined the course of communities of sense in ways that very much diverged from those of our contemporaneity. Today revolution has lost its historical and political significance, and this change has opened the door to inflationary use of the term. In Western history the paradigmatic socio-political revolution is the “French Revolution” (1789–1799)—an event of such historic proportions that it produced a specific signification not only in relation to other similar events that followed it but also when transposed into other realms of society. Compared to the French Revolution, all previous revolutions appear insignificant. This holds true both for the English Revolution of 1642 and the “American Revolutionary War,” i.e., “American War of Independence” (1775–1783), as well as for later cases such as the European revolutions of the nineteenth century (of 1830, 1848 and 1871). Kant referred to the invention of his transcendental philosophy as a “Copernican revolution,” while Romanticist philosophers such as Friedrich von Schlegel spoke of “aesthetic revolutions.” After 1789 “revolution” soon became a household word.

© Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_017

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The other historic socio-political revolution in the last two centuries was the “October Revolution” (1917), which, like the French Revolution, sent ripples of fear, hope and anxiety across Europe. “Revolution” also entered the vocabulary of avantgarde artists and helped engender the idea of an “alliance of political and artistic radicalism, this parallel of the two avantgardes.”1 In 1917 the dadaist artist Hugo Ball referred to “the dada revolution”; the leader of the surrealist movement André Breton often referred to the surrealist revolution; and the leader of Italian futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, elaborated on the futurist revolution and the “Italian revolution.” In these last cases it is reasonable to infer that such an omnipresence of the term was linked to the October Revolution. In the Italian case, early on the term signifying the “aesthetic act of gigantic significance” was “war,” which was only later fully replaced by “revolution.” “Scientific revolution” is another concept related to the already mentioned meanings of “revolution.” It was developed in the thirties of the previous century by French philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré. Koyré distinguished several revolutions in modern physical science that were all characterized by discontinuities: the Greek development of the idea of Cosmos, the revolution of Galileo and Descartes, an unspecified revolution in the nineteenth century, and finally the more recent revolution of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. In his view the scientific discoveries in Europe a few decades before and after 1600 constituted the paradigmatic revolution: “Earlier concepts and theories lost their meaning because they no longer made sense in the context of the new world-view; the new concepts and theories at once began to look seductively self-evident for the same reason.”2 The “intellectual mutation,” as Koyré called it—borrowing the term from the French philosopher and historian of science Gaston Bachelard—consisted of “the replacement, by Galileo and Descartes, of the closed, purposive, qualitative Cosmos of the Greeks and of medieval Europe with the conception of the infinite space of Euclidean geometry … The concept of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ denoted, in its original guise, not a historical period so much as an event, or rather a highly interconnected range of events.”3 More recently the concept of the scientific revolution became associated with Thomas Kuhn’s famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn too, saw the main precondition of a revolution in the capacity of natural 1 Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avantgarde, trans. Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Massachusetts: ­Harvard University Press, 1968), 11. 2 Floris H. Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 75. 3 Ibid., 495.

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sciences to create a radically new viewpoint and a novel way of looking at, and explaining, natural phenomena—in other words, to create an intellectual mutation. An issue related first to scientific revolution was the question of whether a revolution is a single and unique (specific) historical event or rather a part of a recurring (or potentially recurring) pattern. The prevalent view is that such scientific revolutions were more than one, but the revolution around 1600 represents the scientific revolution. Another revolution was the philosophical one, made by Immanuel Kant. Kant, who saw his own philosophical endeavor as “scientific,” regarded his transcendental philosophical project as an essential turning point in modern philosophy and thus a veritable scientific revolution. In the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant twice likens his own philosophical “revolution” to that of Copernicus: the latter dared, “in a manner contradictory of the senses, but yet true, to seek the observed movements, not in the heavenly bodies, but in the spectator.”4 Similarly, claims Kant, “Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects.”5 Contrary to this common sense approach, we must, argues Kant, “suppose that objects conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primary hypothesis.”6 In relation to revolutions in science as well as in society, the ambiguity of the term “revolution” was often played upon, for it could denote both a mechanical circular motion, and thus a recurrence of the same, and an instance of radical historical change intrinsic to human knowledge or historical progress, based on the negation of the past and a vision of a future. The major revolution in the twentieth century was the October Revolution, with yet another historic revolution on grand scale being the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (1966–1976) in China. Of course social and political revolutions also existed elsewhere: in Latin America, for example, where the major ones were those in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. In the Cuban case the idea of a social and political revolution was linked to a characteristic component of cultural revolution, namely that of a “New Person” (an idea initially conceived by Leon Trotsky) who resembled a kind of a communist superman. 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 25. 5 Ibid., 22. 6 Ibid.

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Since the nineteenth century and especially in the first half of the twentieth, the social agent of socio-political revolutions was considered to be, according to Marxism, the proletariat (or the working masses), with class struggle serving, in the words of Louis Althusser, as the “engine of history.” Such revolution, led by the communist party as the vanguard of the proletariat, was often designated as a “proletarian revolution.” An alternative agent of such revolutions was the nation. Marinetti thus claimed in 1921 that “The Nation is nothing other than a vast political party,”7 while in 1920 Chen Duxiu (1880–1942), one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, argued: “I recognize the existence of only two nations: that of the capitalists and that of the workers … At present, the ‘nation’ of the workers exists only in the Soviet Union; everywhere else we have the ‘nation’ of the capitalists.”8 “Political revolution” is related to social revolution, which is—especially according to Marxism—the pivotal form of revolution, around which cluster other revolutions: the political, the economic, and the cultural. Together with the political, social revolution designates a radical (and often violent) transformation of the political and social system of a society as a whole. Such an interpretation was not limited to Marxists: Mussolini claimed, “For a revolution to be great … it must be a social revolution.”9 Since the French Revolution, modern revolution has been based on the idea of social justice—that a radical change is “just” even if it is against extant laws. In the nineteenth century it became related to the communist political agenda and its belief in an ontological antagonism that exists as a clear polar division of society and is materialized also in state institutions and their repressive or ideological mechanisms—in what Althusser called “ideological state apparatuses” and Jacques Rancière the “police.” Another possible cause for social upheaval, more common under populist regimes, is the creation of an enemy on ethnic or racial grounds. Let me now for a moment stop at “cultural revolution.” It concerns two possible interpretations of culture within a society that is undergoing a social and a political revolution. In its conventional sense it concerns both, although it is usually carried out within the framework of the latter—but with the intention of achieving results also within the former, for it aims at remolding a society from the economic base to its superstructure. While social revolution 7 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Beyond Communism,” in Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 341. 8 Quoted in Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 28. 9 Benito Mussolini, “Address to the National Corporative Council,” in A Primer of Italian ­Fascism, ed. Jeffrey Schnapp, trans. Jeffrey Schnapp, Olivia E. Sears, and Maria A. Stampino (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 163–164.

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aims primarily at transforming the economic base of a society and thereby effect a transformation in the means of production, cultural revolution aims either to transform segments of the already extant culture (by pursuing a certain cultural policy) or—and in such instances we speak of cultural revolution proper—to transform the very mentality and mindset of a people: “all systemic revolutions have had to confront this problem: … the production of a new culture in the narrow and specialized sense of literature, film, and the like; and the remolding of the culture of everyday life in the more general sense.”10 Lenin employed the notion “cultural revolution” in 1917 and the term in 1923 when he argued that “in our country the political and social revolution preceded the cultural revolution, the cultural revolution that now confronts us. This cultural revolution would now be sufficient to transform our country into a completely socialist state.”11 The need for rapid cultural transformation of society was especially urgent in underdeveloped countries such as the Soviet Union or China, prompting the respective communist parties to accentuate the need for a cultural revolution so as to accelerate the pace of economic transformation. It was within such a context that Joseph Stalin referred to writers and cultural workers as the “engineers of the human soul.” The Cultural Revolution in China attempted to change not only the property of the means of production and thereby the class composition of Chinese society, but also the essential subjective and existential conditions of the lives of the Chinese people. Mao Zedong sought to transform norms, values, and culture as such, subsuming all forms of social and private lives to the aims of the Revolution. It offered the point of departure for the New Wave movement of the 1980s that attempted “to effect an aesthetic and ethical transformation of Chinese society and to redefine the Chinese identity.”12 Yet another revolution is “artistic revolution,” which designates an emergence of a new style and a new technique in art, a new mode of expression or language of art that can be relatively independent of simultaneous historic political or social transformations. Cases abound: impressionism (1870s and 1880s), expressionism (1905), cubism (1907), or abstract expressionism (1950s) were all instances of unprecedented artistic inventions. Artists were well-aware of the capacity of art to transform our perception of the world and perhaps even to contribute, in its own way, to the transformation of the world itself. Thus the Mexican muralist painter Diego Rivera 10 11 12

Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2010), 267. Quoted in Jameson, 270. Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avantgarde, 1979–1989, A Semiotic Analysis (Hong Kong: Timezone, 2003), 182.

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proclaimed cubism to be “a revolutionary movement, questioning everything that has previously been said and done in art. It held nothing sacred. As the new world would soon blow itself apart, never to be the same again, so cubism broke down forms as they had been seen for centuries, and was creating out of the fragments new forms, new objects, new patterns, and—ultimately—new worlds.”13 A related point was made by Herbert Marcuse in his book The Aesthetic Dimension (1977): “Art can be called revolutionary in several senses. In a narrow sense, art may be revolutionary if it represents a radical change in style and technique. Such change may be the achievement of a genuine avantgarde, anticipating or reflecting substantial changes in the society at large.”14 Nevertheless, both statements also imply that the “revolutionary” gesture is essentially that of a novel form of representation as opposed to the transformation effected by a movement such as Italian futurism, which as early as its initial 1909 “Futurist manifesto” announced its intent not only to change the established representations of the world, but also to transform the world itself. 2

The Avantgardes and Revolutions

The link between political and artistic revolution and between the artistic and the political avantgarde was highlighted by the Hungarian researcher of avantgardes, Miklós Szabolcsi, who observed that “a [political and social] revolution without an avantgarde [in art] is really a pseudo-revolution.” He furthermore argued that “we can speak of a true avantgarde only if it overlaps with a political revolution, realizes it or prepares it.”15 What Szabolcsi was claiming was that without a connection to some kind of political avantgarde project, a true artistic avantgarde just doesn’t exist. In Szabolcsi’s view this is valid also the other way around: without the identification of avantgarde artists with the political revolution (and their ensuing support), such a revolution doesn’t stand a chance—not because artists would be such great soldiers, but because practically every authentic revolution contains an essential emancipatory kernel that is to be found in art. Such art is often (although not necessarily) also avantgarde: if a political and social revolution is avantgarde too, then these broader 13 14 15

Quoted in David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 11. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (­Boston: Beacon, 1978), xxi. Miklós Szabolcsi, “Ka nekim pitanjima revolucionarne avangarde,” Književna reč 3/101 (1978): 14.

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circumstances find an affinity with similarly revolutionary (avantgarde) art: “The avantgarde movements saw the artistic and the social revolution as an inter-dependent process, as a single continuum. That is why artists and critics often described the October Revolution as a continuation of the revolutionary process started in cubism and futurism in the early 1910s. They believed that artistic and the social revolutions complement and reinforce each other.”16 The affinity between the political and the artistic avantgardes is manifold: they often share a certain Weltanschauung, they both find themselves in a marginal and subordinate position and thus in similar circumstances, and both are forms of emancipation—just like the broader social revolution. Such affinity most frequently doesn’t last long: soon the anarchic spirit of the avantgardes in art comes into conflict with the emergent institution-building spirit of the political avantgardes. What is avantgarde art? “Avantgarde” is a military term that was in use long before the French Revolution. It designated the advance guard—a small unit of soldiers who moved ahead of the main military force to explore the path on which the main unit will proceed. In the nineteenth century it started to be used also in politics and in art. What avantgarde means in politics is fairly wellknown: it usually applies to the communist party. Why? Because according to Marxism (Leninism), the transitional period of socialism is to lead to a classless society, but to get there the proletariat—and society as a whole—needs someone to guide and lead it. This falls to the communist party for it purportedly represents the advance guard or unit of the working class as a whole. The communist party is a collective revolutionary subject. This is why it is anonymous and why its members are replaceable: they are but cog wheels in the machine that is taking them—with much effort and friction, alas—to a classless society. In the Soviet case the party claims to possess the objective truth of history, this being possible only if it considers itself to be simultaneously exterior and interior to history. It is here that the difference between avantgarde art that involves changes in style and technique and that which involves the “descent into the street” occurs. The early meaning of the avantgarde is perhaps best explained by ­Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant in 1845: to know “whether the artist is truly of the avantgarde, one must know where Humanity is going, know what the destiny of the human race is.”17 In other words, as in politics, we can speak of an avantgarde in art only if the avantgarde artist knows where society is heading, what 16 17

Jaroslav Andel, “The Constructivist Entanglement: Art into Politics, Politics into Art,” in Russian Constructivism 1914–1932: Art into Life (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 225. Quoted in Poggioli, 9.

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its ­historical purpose is—something that is possible if the artist ascribes to certain political ideas and visions of the future. Of course, in art these visions of the future are not as obvious as in politics; in art this future can also be present as an opposition to the past, as its transgression by new styles and expressive inventions—something that is typical of avantgarde art as well as of modernism as a whole. Nonetheless, Laverdant’s description of avantgarde art differs from its contemporary meaning, one that has been formed on the basis of twentieth-century experiences both with Realsozialismus (where it was the “real” that aborted the spirit of the revolution) and with its socialist aesthetics and cultural policies. If in the nineteenth century we speak of avantgarde artists (forming what Stefan Morawski named “proto-avantgardes”18), then in the twentieth century we refer to avantgarde movements—loose groups of artists who often disclaim such designation and proclaim their aim to transcend art in the classical sense. These movements share some common features: working as groups; publishing manifestoes; scandalizing society by provocative statements, behavior and actions; being active in different artistic genres or ignoring borders among them altogether; and, often, being also politically provocative and revolutionary. But there is also an important difference within the avantgardes: there are those who limit their revolutionary actions to the realm of art—cubism for example—and there are others who demand “that art move from representing to transforming the world,”19 that it step out of museums, galleries and so on into “life”—be it as political propaganda or as the transformation of society and the individual in other ways. What this means can be described by an unlikely author, namely Karl Marx from the eleventh of his “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845): “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” All we have to do is replace “philosophers” with “avantgarde artists” in order to discern where avantgarde artists were ­heading—to the demand “that art move from representing to transforming the world.” We see that there is thus a deeper unity or resemblance between the political and artistic avantgardes—a feature that, to a different extent, can be found throughout the previous century when appearances of avantgarde art coincided with political revolutionary events.

18 19

Stefan Morawski, “On the Avantgarde, Neo-avantgarde and the Case of Postmodernism,” Literary Studies in Poland 21 (1989): 83. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avantgarde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 14.

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As I have claimed in more detail elsewhere,20 in the twentieth century there existed three waves or generations of avantgarde art: the early (between 1905 and 1930), the neo-avantgarde (after World War II) and the post avantgarde (in the eighties in former or present socialist countries). The politicized avantgardes sometimes found a political avantgarde with which to share their ideas and visions and sometimes they did not, in which case they played both roles—that of the political agent and the artistic creator. The early avantgardes represent the paradigmatic instance of avantgarde movements in the twentieth century. The early avantgardes—futurism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, constructivism and so on—wanted to change the world, society and art and didn’t care much about money, profit or success. They were like political revolutionaries, completely devoted to their cause. The revolutions they created were both artistic and political, which is why I call them “aesthetic revolutions.” They conflated artistic and political aims, pursuing these in the artistic, political and social spheres of society. Other instances of aesthetic avantgardes will be discussed in the closing part of this essay. 3

Revolutions through Art

We may agree that the purpose of the political avantgarde is to carry out a socio-political revolution, while the purpose of the politicized artistic avantgardes is to carry out an aesthetic revolution that changes not only artistic styles but also the ways in which we perceive the world and life in general. At first glance all revolutions seem to fail, not only as attempts to “move from representing to transforming the world,” but also in their efforts to revolutionize life and society. In the 1920s Marinetti and the Italian futurists abandoned their ambitions to lead an independent and progressive politics and started to support or coexist with fascism, sharing the latter’s nationalist affinities; Russian futurists—soon to be identified with the radical journal LEF— became increasingly exclusivist and in 1925 lost the support of Lunacharsky, who proclaimed the LEF group “to be an almost obsolete thing.”21 The constructivist artists Rodchenko and Lissitzky turned to publication design, making the propaganda magazine USSR in Construction (1930–1941) the means of 20 21

Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). Leon Trotsky, quoted in Halina Stephan, LEF and the Left Front of the Arts (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1981), 53.

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their increasingly solitary constructivist research. The surrealists in the thirties underwent a transformation from a movement into a school, slowly losing or abandoning their special role as “adoptive children of the revolution,” no longer supporting Stalin but Trotsky and the Fourth International.22 Yet in the decades following World War II, the early avantgardes underwent an unexpected change: “the failure of the avantgarde utopia of the unification of art and life coincides with the avantgarde’s overwhelming success within the art institution.”23 Since “life” is not a definable category, “the avantgarde project is predisposed to failure, with the sole exception of movements set in the midst of revolutions,”24 such as Russian constructivism. Bürger was the first to make such a claim, for he “viewed the situation from the perspective of the avantgarde rather than the traditional arts, and he therefore judged success not according to lasting aesthetic potential but according to radical political effect … [A]s he argued, the avantgarde’s failure lay precisely in its being accepted as nothing more than the producer of legitimate works of art.”25 The dilemmas then are these: should the fact that the radical early avantgardes ended up progressively influencing other art the same way as the non-radical ones did be considered failure or success? Moreover, should the fact that they did not transform the world by fusing art and “life” be regarded as a sign of their ultimate failure or not? In this respect their success equaled that of the “purely” artistic avantgardes such as cubism. The answers to these questions are important in relation to the assessment of the nature of an aesthetic revolution: “an aesthetic revolution could only be realized in conjunction with a total overhaul of society,”26 the latter being contrasted with the “partial, the merely political revolution, which leaves the pillars of the house standing.”27

22

23 24 25 26 27

Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Selected Writings 1927–1934, Vol. 2, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingston and others (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), 209. Peter Bürger, “Avantgarde and Neo-Avantgarde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avantgarde,” New Literary History 41/4 (2010), 705. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avantgarde at the Turn of the Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999), 15. Brandon W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avantgarde (­Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003), 12. Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence, Rhode Island: Berghahn Books, 1996), 47. Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” quoted in Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx (London: Verso, 2003), 326.

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The “bare” definition of a revolution runs as follows: “Revolution is a term with a precise meaning; the political overthrow from below of one state order, and its replacement with another … [R]evolution is a punctual and not a permanent process. That is: a revolution is an episode of convulsive political transformation, compressed in time and concentrated in target, that has a determinate beginning … and a finite end.”28 The opposite opinion is that of revolution as a continuous process and as a permanent revolution. Such revolution is a “déroulement”—an unfolding that transgresses the “end as a necessary failure” paradigm. Revolution is here described either as an event or a process, or as a tension between the two. In this last case we regard it as both at once. In such a case, “revolution must be conceived … as an irreducible duality oscillating between process and event.”29 Its nature as a temporal process causes it to remain unfinished and therefore a failure and a defeat: “self-criticism of the revolution … is the very condition for its reactivation, the condition for the ‘inversion’ of the void into a new opening on to the event.”30 A revolution is thus a combination of a process and an event. This is true of a social and political revolution, but is it true also of aesthetic revolution? It seems that it is but to a lesser extent, for the sensible and sense-perception are not easily defined and articulated. It was the Croatian literary theorist Aleksandar Flaker who attempted to resolve this issue, a part of which concerned also the almost standard question of political and aesthetic utopia. Flaker introduced the notion of “optimal projection” in the etymological sense of projectio, namely a shot forward, into the distance. He argued that the self-designation of individual avantgarde movements, such as futurism, constructivism, Zenitism and Ultraism, contained a projection toward the future. In such an instance at stake was not a “­utopia,” warned Flaker, but movement. Utopia is a static entity and therefore the opposite of a movement: “The utopian project is a structure projected into the future, while optimal projection is only the direction of the movement. When we say: utopian project we by that very designation disqualify it as unrealizable while when speaking of optimal projection, we speak of a movement, which is realizable.”31 In this way a series of avantgarde activities acquires sense: manifestoes, public statements, political agendas, imaginary representations of the future 28 Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 144 (March–April 1984): 112. 29 Kouvelakis, 27. 30 Ibid., 341. 31 Aleksandar Flaker, ”Optimalna projekcija,” in Poetika osporavanja (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1984), 68.

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to come that are immediately denigrated and overturned, leading Marx to abstain from depicting the classless society. Some of the same activities appear on the side of the political avantgardes, especially once they gain power: the infinite planning in the former socialist countries, the detailed projections of the future and reports both equally fictitious, constitutes an imaginary movement into a socialist future that exists in documents and political speeches but not in historical reality—nor is it ever to appear therein. It is perhaps for this same reason that avantgardes “theorize endlessly.”32 Upon closer scrutiny the idea about the failure of the aesthetic avantgardes seems premature, for an important segment of the “transformation of the world” includes not only punctual events within a revolution, but also profoundly changed sense perception and a redistribution of the sensible engendering new visions of world and of life, leading not only to a transformation of the expressive means of future art, but also to already lived as well as imagined or projected life all at once. In this regard, a transformation of the world does not have to be deferred to an imaginary or distant future, but is “already here.” Within such framework “life” ceases to be an empty concept but becomes instead “a concept designating all material being and all that is immediately present to the senses.”33 Life can also designate the shared life of individuals, of a social class or of a community. It is what they all have “in common,” with art being at the same time their expressive means and an experiential object of their perception. Although an aesthetic revolution may be announced by an event—the founding manifestoes of various movements would count as such events— it necessarily involves a process whereby the extant, assimilated, and therefore often unnoticed, kinds of sensibility are replaced by some other kinds, with this change being constituted by and affecting different spheres of life. An aesthetic “revolution” thus always involves a profound change or transformation of perspective that necessarily exceeds the limits of art as “pure” art, especially such art that focuses primarily on its own expressive means or that possesses no function except to be without any evident function. If one compares the provocative and disorderly serate of the early Italian futurists or Giacomo Balla’s 1914 Il vestito antineutrale, with “shoes ready to deliver merry kicks to all neutralists,”34 on the one hand and the pastoral artifacts of developed cubism 32 33 34

Stefan Morawski, “The Artistic Avantgarde: On the 20th Century Formations,” Polish Art Studies 10 (1989): 88. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 101. Catherine Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 194.

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from across the globe on the other, then one senses the difference between the radical and the artistic avantgardes and therefore between different facets of art. As already mentioned, there is a link between aesthetic, artistic and political revolution: “The coming Revolution will be at once the consummation of and abolition of philosophy; no longer merely ‘formal’ and ‘political,’ it will be a ‘human’ revolution. The human revolution is an offspring of the aesthetic paradigm.”35 In this way the politicized avantgardes represent in art a particular parallel and complement to the revolutionary political avantgardes: they both strive to transgress the borders between the relatively autonomous spheres of life that were erected in modernity and that art, by its very nature, transgresses incessantly. The avantgarde movements of the twentieth century—whether “early” (the “classical,” the “historical”) avantgardes, neo-avantgardes, or post-avantgardes—have been characterized by revolt, be it against art, tradition, the bourgeoisie, society or all of these. But not all of them have bound revolt to revolution—not all of them have bound the often individual and always counter-reactive action and discourse of revolt to the often programmatic and always collective and future-oriented project of a revolution. Those that did experience the conflicts inherent to political struggles, which, as a rule, avantgarde artists appear to have lost: they seem not to have been successful in welding the individual experience of freedom to the other, collective revolutionary experience. Since our view is usually that of autonomous art, its political aspirations and involvements arising from this striving for the “marriage of artistic and social revolution” fall victim either to the charge of cooption of art by politics or of the willful desire to turn its revolt into revolutionary action. 4

Aesthetic Revolutions36

There is a romantic author, often described as a major aesthetician in the romantic movement in Germany, who profusely employed the notion of “aesthetic revolution,” namely Friedrich von Schlegel (1773–1829). In Schlegel the “aesthetic revolution” relates to two theses: that art of his contemporaneity (as well as any art of the present or the future) is not restricted by the seemingly 35 36

Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 120. See also Aleš Erjavec, “Estetska revolucija: Schlegel, Malraux in Rancière s Schillerjem,” Filozofski vestnik 33/1 (2012), 77–90.

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unattainable ideals of Greek antiquity but is “futuristic, or to use Walter Benjamin’s terminology, a messianic one, considering art within a process toward ever higher achievements.”37 In Schlegel there thus exists no historic closure of art as in Hegel. Instead, art continues on its path, which is determined by philosophy: art of different epochs, whether of modernity or futurity, meets on the same comparative theoretical ground and in every epoch, be it present or future, continues on its path. Last but not least, Schlegel claims that in modern art—or with the demise of the ancient world—boundaries among genres have collapsed, thereby setting the stage for the general notion of art as such, which has become the dominant artistic designation for the next two centuries and beyond. Such a claim is echoed in Jacques Rancière and in his view that in the so-called “aesthetic regime of art” different genres and works coexist within an undifferentiated realm of art. Another author employing the notion of the aesthetic revolution was André Malraux (1901–1976). Especially in his La Métamorphose des dieux (1957), Malraux outlined his own theory of “aesthetic revolution.” Again resemblance both with Schlegel and Rancière can be discerned, probably based in their common reference to Kant and his Copernican revolution, which resulted not only in the transcendental position as regards our interpretation of the sensible world but also related to an analogous “way of seeing” in the aesthetic sense. In Malraux “aesthetic revolution” refers to the enormous expansion of the realm of art occurring since 1900: The metamorphosis of the past was first a metamorphosis of seeing. Without an aesthetic revolution, the sculpture of ancient epochs, mosaics, and stained glass windows would never have joined the painting of the Renaissance and the great monarchies; no matter how vast they might have become, ethnographic collections would never have surmounted the barrier that separated them from art museums.38 What caught Malraux’s attention and the reason why he designated it an “aesthetic revolution” was the phenomenon that occurred toward the end of the nineteenth century as Europeans for the first time started to regard—and thus to see and interpret—artifacts from historically and geographically distant cultures as subsumable under the general category “art,” even in instances in which such artifacts were created in settings that were unfamiliar with the notion of art altogether. As Malraux writers: “There seems in short to have been 37 Rancière, Dissensus, 60. 38 André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux (Paris: NRF, La Galerie de la Pléiade, 1957), 21.

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a puzzling transformation. An object that was (for example) once created to be a god, in a culture that had no word for art, has become a ‘work of art’ in a Western culture that, often enough, is unsure even of the name of the god that the object once embodied.”39 What happened toward the close of the nineteenth century was that objects that were previously valued by Europeans for their material value only were then transformed in the eyes of their beholders: coins or statues comprised of precious metals, for example, that were previously simply melted down started now to be regarded as precious objects, their value to a large part unrelated to the material from which they were made. It was this essential transformation of the interested look into a disinterested aesthetic “gaze” that was of concern to Malraux: “The Egyptian statue that we now admire as ‘art,’ he suggests, is not ‘timelessly or essentially art any more than it was timelessly or essentially the Pharaoh’s double.’ It is both—and neither: ‘both’ in the sense that it has been a ‘double’ and is now a work of art; ‘neither’ in the sense that it is not essentially either.”40 Malraux touched upon the issue of artifacts that have become art due to their being exhibited in museums, thereby joining Renaissance and modern western works in the “imaginary museum” of “art.” In other words, by detecting the changed stance of the European public and art establishment toward a whole body of artifacts that until then were not considered art but rather ethnographic objects or even precious metals only (what he called “a metamorphosis of our way of seeing”), Malraux diagnosed a hitherto unnoticed “aesthetic revolution” whereby the realm of art (and of the beautiful) was substantially broadened, setting the stage for its further expansion in the remainder of the twentieth century. Schlegel and Malraux employed the notion of aesthetic revolution in related as well as in dissimilar ways. In Schlegel it applied both to the theory and to the object of its inquiry. In Malraux it applied to reality only, namely to the hitherto disregarded transformation of the way of seeing art objects and thereby to a profound reconfiguration of the realm of art. In this respect the aesthetics of Jacques Rancière follows the logic of Malraux, for they both allow us to see the essential transformation as concerns “art” in the manner in which certain objects have begun to be regarded. Rancière distinguishes three regimes: the ethical regime of images, the representational regime of art, and the aesthetic regime of art. The first is based on ethics and the second on the veracity of the 39

Derek Allan, “André Malraux and the Challenge to Aesthetics,” Journal of European Studies 33/1 (2003), 28. 40 Ibid., 131.

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representation: by comparing the representation and the represented referent we can determine the “quality” of an image. Contrary to these two regimes the “aesthetic regime of art” abolishes the system of genres and creates “art” in the singular. The prerequisite for the creation of the aesthetic regime is a so-called “aesthetic revolution.” In Rancière the “aesthetic revolution” concerns a hitherto unrecognized (or incorrectly designated) move from the representative regime of art, which is normatively based on representational criteria of veracity to the depicted referent, to the aesthetic regime of art. This latter regime is, according to Rancière, much more democratic and transformative of the extant relations between the visible and the invisible): “In this regime, the statue of Juno [Ludovisi] does not draw its property of being an artwork from the conformity of the sculptor’s work to an adequate idea or to the canons of representation. It draws it from its belonging to a specific sensorium.”41 This new sensorium is based on “aesthetic free play,” a feature in Rancière’s eyes essentially characteristic of the novel regime of art that emerged two centuries ago. The new regime introduced by Rancière covers all the art of more than two centuries. According to Rancière, then, the “Kantian revolution” engenders an aesthetic “silent revolution” that creates the conditions of possibility for perceiving modern artifacts as art (very much along the lines noted by Malraux). Aesthetic free play thus “ceases to be a mere intermediary between high culture and simple nature, or a stage of the moral’s subject self-discovery. Instead, it becomes the principle of a new freedom, capable of surpassing the antinomies of political liberty.”42 An “aesthetic revolution” is realized by spontaneous collective action, contrary to a political revolution, which is most often realized by a directed political action. The former involves not individuals but movements: cases where the discursive, practical and material activity and creativity of a group (or sporadic singular instances thereof) eventually generated an “enthusiasm” that transformed solitary cases into historically recognizable and mutually related events realized by groups or movements that are today displayed in material and discursive repositories of culture and art history or have been retained as material cultural artifacts. Italian futurism, surrealism, and other aesthetic avantgarde movements are not “just” a series of artistic phenomena that have been political and politicized simply by coincidence. They have become such things intentionally and have accordingly effected historical innovations 41

Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Concoran (Cambridge: ­ olity, 2009), 29. P 42 Ibid., 99.

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and consequences. As instances of the “aesthetic,” they have intentionally attempted to unify the artistic and political components of human and social existence in a “futurist moment” or an “optimal projection.” In Schlegel, Malraux and Rancière we encounter different albeit related usages of “aesthetic revolution.” In Schlegel the “aesthetic revolution” is not really a concept but a descriptive term referring to aesthetics and to its object, i.e. the beautiful in art. At the same time it is involved in Schlegel’s development of a different historical interpretation of art. Malraux’s use of the term is in some respects uncannily close to that of Rancière for it also involves a “way of seeing,” thereby pointing to the transmogrification of anthropological artifacts into works of art before the eyes of the public in an “imaginary museum.” At the same time, however, “aesthetic revolution” does not carry considerable conceptual import in Malraux either. A different case is that of Rancière, who imputes to Schiller’s commentary on the Juno Ludovisi not only “aesthetic revolution,” which purportedly represents a “silent revolution,” with both revolutions naming the emergence of the “aesthetic regime of art.” He also, moreover, connects such a revolution to the Kantian “Copernican revolution” and to aesthetic experience, judgment of taste and the sensible. What Rancière is thus doing is transposing Kant’s “revolution” into the realm of the sensible, proclaiming aesthetics to be the transcendental precondition for contemporary notion of art. While Rancière shows much sympathy for aesthetic avantgardes, he nonetheless regards them within the frame of his aesthetic regime of art. What is characteristic of an aesthetic revolution is that it is carried out by aesthetic avantgarde movements and that it accomplishes a pivotal modification in what Rancière designates as the “distribution of the sensible” (or, rather, its “re-distribution”) in the sense that it represents a unity of art and politics, which are “consubstantial insofar as they both organize a common world of self-evident facts of sensory perception.”43 An aesthetic revolution resembles other kinds of revolutions except that it is realized by aesthetic avantgardes that strive for a unity of art and “life.” It also produces a new sensibility and engenders a “new way of seeing.” At the beginning of this essay I pointed out the obvious: recently the notion of the revolution has lost much of its former subversive potential. This doesn’t signify that this cannot change in the future and that revolution will never again acquire “revolutionary” significance. If it does, such an emergence will 43

Gabriel Rockhill, “The Politics of Aesthetics,” in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2009), 196.

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signify that certain conditions for the resurrection of revolution have been met and that these are now once more mirrored in contemporary social and political circumstances. The next time around such circumstances and context may transgress the dominant Western paradigm of this notion as it has existed since the French Revolution and through the October and Chinese Cultural Revolutions, even though such interconnectedness is weaker than expected. It is equally possible that if a new revolution were to arise, it may reflect the fact that today society is organized differently than in the previous two centuries. Thus, today the world is one, but its singularity is less uniform than it was no more than a few decades ago. Revolutions are furthermore internally divided. It has thus been pointed out that “The French Revolution … was really three revolutions—a democratic republican revolution, a moderate Enlightenment constitutional monarchism invoking Montesquieu and the British model as its criteria of legitimacy, and an authoritarian populism prefiguring modern fascism.”44 Every revolution can be divided in similar ways. In this essay it was my intent to explain the relation between revolution and avantgarde art and movements, a tandem that has very often existed together and that reached its apogee in the very beginning of the twentieth century. At that time and somewhat later, the forceful emergence and existence of aesthetic avantgarde movements such as Italian futurism and Russian constructivism shared a strong state, persuasive political ideology, and often clear identification of the enemy. Today this situation is a thing of the past. Only the resurrection of these and related ­characteristics will allow for the avantgardes to be born again. Revolution may follow a similar path. 44

Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 695.

Chapter 17

Ideology as World-View and Two Early Avantgarde Movements (2017) 1

Ideologies and Avantgardes

Some of the theses that I wish to put forth in this essay are: Firstly, ideologies in the sense of world-views, conceptions of the world and especially political ideologies were connected with the majority of avantgarde movements, especially the early ones. I consider anarchism to be the ideology that had, until the early 1920s, the most profound influence on avantgarde movements. The other ideologies decisive for the early avantgardes were Marxism (often identified with Leninism and “communism”), nationalism and to some extent fascism. Even though fascism emerged only at the end of World War I, it quickly affected the situation in Italy and futurism in a plethora of contradictory ways. Secondly, ideologies are doctrines or beliefs that are shared by the members of a group (by a “community of sense”) and form the basis of a political, economic or other system, i.e. a world-view or Weltanschauung. Ideologies reached their apogee somewhat later than the early avantgardes. The demise of the avantgardes coincided with the end of ideology as theorised by Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, Raymond Aron, and F. R. Ankersmit. This end roughly coincided with the “end of art” (Arthur Danto)1 and the onset of pluralism in art (Arthur Danto and Hal Foster).2 Thirdly, in the first half of the twentieth century, many avantgarde movements existed in close proximity to various ideologies or were intertwined with them. Among the artistic avantgardes, the most pronounced and radical movements were Italian futurism and Russian constructivism, followed by surrealism and a series of concurrent or earlier militant avantgarde movements, ranging from vorticism to zenitism. These and other early avantgardes often strove to attain ideological and political hegemony: “There would have been no need to suppress the avantgarde if its black squares and transrational poetry 1 Arthur Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Death of Art, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Haven, 1984), 5–35. 2 See e.g. Hal Foster, “Against Pluralism,” in Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1985), 13–32. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_018

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had confined themselves to artistic space, but the fact that it was persecuted indicates that it was operating on the same territory as the state,” writes Boris Groys.3 Not only in manifestos but also in actual life, Italian futurism promoted violence and war as the “sole hygiene of the world.” It went so far as to announce its aim “to descend into the street” and actually carry out a physical battle with its opponents. While Italian futurism and Russian constructivism were more radical than most of the other avantgardes, even the less militant of these other avantgarde movements were regarded as revolutionary, not only in an artistic sense but also in social and cultural ones. Fourthly, as implied the most radical early avantgarde movements regarded their activities as total acts or actions: for example, they seriously considered the actual elimination of their enemies and adversaries. A different example of this same position and act was the decision of Marinetti and his followers and fellow futurists to take part in World War I as volunteers. In July 1915 the Milan group of futurists joined the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists. During the war, thirteen futurists were killed, including Umberto Boccioni and Antonio Sant’Elia, while forty-one were wounded, among them Marinetti himself, Luigi Russolo, Ardengo Soffici and Ugo Piatti. In the futurist case such “absolute” or “total” gestures revealed the complete devotion and identification of artists involved with their aesthetic aims, and the fusion of futurism as political (national) ideology and art with human destinies willingly put at risk of death. In a letter to Gino Severini, Marinetti wrote on 20 November 1914: “Try to live the war pictorially, studying it in all its marvelous mechanical forms (military trains, fortifications, wounded men, ambulances, hospitals, parades, etc.).”4 Sometimes national political sentiment was transformed or replaced by class struggle. An example of such behavior was the Latvian artist Gustav Klutcis, who left Riga permanently for Moscow.5 A class “in the Marxian sense ceases to be something purely economic and becomes a political factor when it reaches this decisive point, for example, when Marxists approach the class struggle seriously and treat the class adversary as a real enemy and fight him either in the form of a war of state against state or in a civil war within a state.”6

3 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avantgarde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. C. Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 35. 4 Tommaso Filippo Marinetti, quoted in Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (­London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), 177. 5 See Iveta Derkusova, “The Most Recognised Latvian (?) Artist in the World. The Case of ­Gustavs Klucis (1895–1938),” Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi 21/3–4 (2012), 30–55. 6 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of ­Chicago Press, 2007), 37.

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Italian futurism, Russian constructivism and some other avantgarde movements declared such “total” actions, which often echoed anarchist positions. “Futurism is an impassioned attempt at introducing life into art,”7 wrote Marinetti in 1914. “Art into life,” “art into everyday life,” and “art into technology” were Vladimir Tatlin’s slogans.8 Similar views, according to which the most radical avantgarde critics and artists of the new Bolshevik society not only required the creation of new art but also strove to eliminate art altogether, were expressed by Aleksandr Rodchenko: “Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and as long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception. Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium.”9 The “art” of constructivism was to be the post-revolutionary equivalent of what can only conditionally be called “art”; in the new society with no parallels in any previous culture, state or epoch, art could not be simply a continuation of its bourgeois predecessor. Constructivism thus attempted to express universal and communal values with the aid of geometric forms that possessed no connotations in the natural or human world. The artistic endeavors of the early avantgardes organically connected or overlapped with their ideologies. Throughout its existence, Italian futurism and its leader Marinetti accepted and propagated numerous anarchist ideas, either when it came to the organization of a future futurist state or to the transient nature of authentic art. Marinetti was at the same time fiercely nationalistic, which translated into support for any idea or action that would enhance Italy’s role in the world. An essential feature of the avantgarde which then became its specific trait was described by Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant in 1845: to know “whether the artist is truly of the avantgarde, one must know where Humanity is going, know what the destiny of the human race is.”10 We can speak of an avantgarde in art only if the avantgarde artist knows where society is heading and what its historical purpose is, thereby making any avantgarde a politicized and ideological entity. Another early thinker concerned with the political and social role or place of 7 8 9 10

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “ln This Futurist Year,” in Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 233. See Vladimir Tatlin, “Art into Technology,” in Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova, Tatlin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 310. Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Against the Synthetic Portrait, For the Snapshot” (1928), in Russian Art of the Avantgarde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934, ed. John Ellis Bowlt. New York: Viking Press, 1976, 253. Quoted in R. Poggioli, The Theory of the Avantgarde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968), 9.

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artists and the avantgardes was Henri de Saint-Simon, who hoped for a new society built by artists, engineers and scientists: “The golden age of humanity is not behind us; it is to come, and will be found in the perfection of the social order.”11 Accordingly, the utopia that the Russian constructivists envisioned a century later was to be constructed by a union of art, technology and industry. Margaret A. Rose suggests that Saint­Simon’s concept of the artist as an avantgarde leader of men was what Russian constructivism appropriated into its own conceptual and ideological framework.12 In the very first years of the revolution, the constructivists El Lissitzky and Rodchenko were also to echo Saint-Simon’s encouragement of artists and engineers to cooperate in bringing to birth the new “golden age” in their slogans, and to attempt to put the latter into practice in their monuments, engineering ventures, and new experimental designs for Soviet goods and propaganda.13 Although it was one of the early avantgardes, an unexpected exception among them was dadaism. In contrast to early Italian futurism, for example, which issued its first “Political Manifesto” as early as 1913, dadaism was characterized by the absence of any vision of the future. Its evolution was without a goal, though it was not without an effect. Dadaism lacked the “positive” designation characteristic of other early avantgardes. An exception was the Berlin dada, which was more explicitly political and even revolutionary in orientation. As noted, most of the early avantgarde artists were influenced by anarchism. It has been said that anarchism was so successful and so influential at the turn of the century that it was incorporated and assimilated into avantgardes. It lost its political impact but gained a cultural one. Different avantgardes developed different positions as regards anarchism. When it came to Italian futurism, anarchism was for some time its permanent ideological support, but then the situation changed: “Patriotism got the upper hand of anarchy and the message 11 12

13

Quoted in Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts, Western Europe: A Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968 (London: Duckworth, 1970), 119. See Margaret A. Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx & the Visual Arts (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 1984), 131. For an implicit differing opinion see Nina ­Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avantgarde (­Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012). The author of this more recent lengthy study of the relationship between anarchism, art and artists in Russia ­limits her mention of Saint Simon to a brief footnote; see Gurianova, 283. Rose, 127.

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of the “Founding Manifesto [of Futurism]” way back in 1909: “We wish to glorify war—sole hygiene of the world” turned into: “From this moment on we are one thing only: Italians.”14 Italian futurists were not the only ones who were strongly influenced by anarchism: so too were Russian avantgarde artists (Rodchenko, Tatlin, et al.) in the years 1917–1919, after which their ideological adherence changed: Rodchenko’s capitulation came in March of 1921, when he, Gan, and Stepanova joined with Konstantin Medunetskii, Karl Ioganson, Gregorii Stenberg, and Vladimir Stenberg to form “The First Working Group of Constructivists.” The group drew up a manifesto wherein they dedicated themselves to “Soviet construction” guided by “scientific communism, based on the theory of historical materialism.” Repudiating artistic anarchism circa 1918, they declared that art had no role to play in the “social production of the future culture” because “it arose from the mainstreams of individualism.”15 2

Conceptions of Ideology

One difference between the various theories of ideology is that some were intended to describe and study ideologies, while others (Lenin’s, for example) strove to develop normative positions with the aim of influencing social and political reality. In Marx, ideology ceased to be regarded as a psychological phenomenon or a product of individual human consciousness and was explained instead as being produced by broader material and social circumstances, making the change in social relations a precondition for the practical overcoming of ideology. A novel interpretation of ideology, marking a decisive turning point in its historical transformations, appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century. It acquired special significance because its author was to become—similar to Napoleon—an influential political and ideological figure. I am referring to Lenin and to his essay “What Is to Be Done?” from 1902. In this essay, Lenin criticized the view that workers would spontaneously develop proletarian consciousness. Instead, argued Lenin, “the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its becoming subordinated to

14 15

Tisdall and Bozzolla, 177. Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (­Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2007), 89.

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the bourgeois ideology.”16 What was to be done instead was the development of the proletarian Weltanschauung, namely the ideology of the working class: “The working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism, but the more widespread (and continuously revived in the most diverse forms) bourgeois ideology nevertheless spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class still more.”17 Lenin’s 1902 essay is of pivotal significance among the twentieth-century interpretations and uses of ideology for it developed and articulated the official “Marxist” (“communist” or “socialist”) position as regards ideology. The ideology, which had hitherto mostly been designated as false consciousness and had been illustrated by Marx by the metaphor of the camera obscura, Lenin transformed into a positive political one, bringing it—for all practical purposes—close to the meaning of Weltanschauung. It should be added, though, that the more “theoretical” or “philosophical” interpretations of ideology persisted, sometimes under other names, encompassing theories such as those of Georg Lukács, Jürgen Habermas, Maurice Godelier, Louis Althusser, and many others. Althusser developed another pivotal theory of ideology, linking ideology to the unconscious. For Lenin there was no “third way” or “middle ground” when it came to ideology. Since there could be no talk of an independent ideology being developed by the masses, the only choice was either bourgeois or socialist ideology, with the latter being developed by the party as the collective subject of history. There was no middle course (for humanity had not created a “third” ideology and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there could never be a non-class or above-class ideology). Hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way meant the strengthening of bourgeois ideology.18 In the decades that followed the October Revolution, Lenin’s position resonated wherever the Marxist class position was the exclusive, dominant one, or at least was well-received by a segment of the society, namely by communities that shared the Marxist Weltanschauung: “In the world today, all culture or literature and art belongs to a definite class and party and has a definite political line.”19 Lenin’s interpretation of ideology had another, less visible consequence: by effectively limiting the meaning of ideology to political ­ideology, 16 17 18 19

V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (Beijing: Foreign L­ anguages Press, 1973), 49. Lenin, 51n. Lenin, 48. Mao Zedong, in Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference of Literature and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1980), 75.

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he ­substantially diminished the signification of ideology as “false consciousness.” He interpreted ideology in an operative way, strengthening and legitimizing its connection with politics. When Lenin spoke of ideology viewed as a body of predominantly political ideas, he was referring to class struggle; soon such ideas were confronted by, or assimilated to, nationalist ideology. In the political turmoil that followed World War I, the idea linking the two became common currency. Thus in 1920 Chen Duxiu, one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote: “I recognize the existence of only two nations: that of the capitalists and that of the workers … At present, the “nation” of the workers exists only in the Soviet Union; everywhere else we have the “nation” of the capitalists.”20 In the same year Marinetti wrote the essay “Beyond Communism,” in which he discarded any links of futurism with communism and Bolshevism. He then made an insightful observation as regards the situation in Italy at that time: “The Nation is nothing other than a vast political party.”21 This “party” status was possible only because members of a certain community (class or nation) were successfully interpellated as its members. Between the two world wars and during the Cold War that followed, class and national interpellations formed a major basis of political (and to some extent also artistic) divisions. Later they were replaced by the belief in the omnipresence of ideology (in Marxism) or in the self-proclaimed “non-­ideological” capitalist system that defended the thesis of the end of ideology. Practical and pragmatic uses of this term aside, ideology until the 1970s mostly designated a Weltanschauung as expressed in Lukács’s “class consciousness,” in Antonio Gramsci’s class Weltanschauung, in Lucien Goldmann’s vision du monde, and in cognitive mapping, conceived by Kevin A. Lynch in 1960 and employed by Fredric Jameson since 1984. Throughout these decades, there also existed the sense of ideology as false consciousness. Such a meaning was predominant in academic circles. As already noted, I am employing ideology in this essay in the sense of the Weltanschauung of a certain community, especially a class or nation. Or, in Gramsci’s words: “One might say ‘ideology’ here, but on condition that the word is used in its highest sense of a conception of the world …”22 While

20 21 22

Quoted in Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 28. Marinetti, “Beyond Communism,” in Critical Writings, 341. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 328.

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Gramsci’s notion of class Weltanschauung is very close to my own use in this essay, I would replace “class” with “world-view” more broadly. Leninism supported an uncompromising ideology. This position was also applied to art, including the avantgarde. At least in this case Lenin’s adversaries were no less militant than him. The authoritarian behavior of constructivists, who strove to become the cultural and ideological avantgarde of the new Bolshevik state, is well known. In this respect their ideology was too extreme even for Lenin, whose own views on art were conservative and traditional. Like Benito Mussolini, he declined to proclaim any particular style of art to be the official one. 3

Ideologies of the Early Avantgardes

Anarchism, communism, liberalism, socialism, conservatism, fascism and religious ideologies were regarded as political ideologies in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. They were distinguished from each other by their goals and methods. Often they were divided even further: “communism,” for example, split into Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, and Stalinism, or was otherwise grouped in some relative way (such as Leninism being subsumed under Marxism, etc.). Were the early avantgarde movements substantially constituted by ideologies? Definitely some, but not all. Also, these ideologies were hardly sets of fixed doctrines, but were instead mixtures of numerous and often contradictory theories and ideas that usually functioned not as homogeneous bodies but rather as continuously changing ideological constituents and supports of the aforementioned avantgarde movements. It is precisely this plethora of meanings and uses of ideology, all of which are incorporated into a Weltanschauung that I am evoking in my use of this term in this essay. As I use it, it is not a developed and universal theoretical concept but a provisional descriptive tool for the identification of transient characteristics, links, fusions, juxtapositions and interchanges between various avantgardes in art,23 on the one hand, and various ideologies, on the other. Ideologically, the early avantgarde movements were constituted mostly by anarchism, Marxism, nationalism and fascism. Among them, anarchism 23

Let me note in passing that the main characteristics of avantgarde movements in art are their provocative nature and behavior (especially versus the bourgeoisie), group activity, a frequent Gesamtkunstwerk practice, negation of the past, manifestoes, theorising and affinity to politicization.

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possessed special import, not the least because it developed and expressed ideas that very much resembled those of modernism, of which the avantgardes were, in the memorable words of Matei Calinescu, “the spearhead.”24 From the middle of the nineteenth century until World War I, anarchist ideas were shared by a great number of artists, especially avantgarde artists. Anarchists saw art as transient and ephemeral, and the museum as an edifice to be torn down. Georges Sorel, whose works were published in Palermo and Manciano more frequently than in Paris, stated that all creation for museums and collections would end in death, while art must connect with life. The following description sounds surprisingly contemporary: Theorist of anarchism understands art as experience. Against art to which we subjugate ourselves, he places art that we create … He proclaims the death of the masterpiece, the eradication of the museum and of the concert hall. He fights for spontaneous “art of the situation,” that depends upon the moment and the place (Proudhon). The artistic act is more important than the work itself.25 Sorel supported his views with the ideas of Marx, Henri Bergson and Ernest Renan, and was one of Marinetti’s main ideological references: “From political theorists Arturo Labriola and Georges Sorel, [Marinetti] borrows the Marxist concept of transformation of the world; in anarchist thinkers such as Max Stirner, Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, he emulates especially the position of protest against art and cultural institutions of the past.”26 But Marinetti’s stance toward Sorel varied. He spoke of “professoralismo aprioristico e cieco quello di Sorel” (A prioristic and blind professorism such as Sorel’s) and added: Sorel claims that “art, religion and philosophy are inseparable.” This is not true. Philosophy and religion are for us, futurists, two kinds of police, created out of fear of this here—war and revolution—and fear of that there—hell. For us art is inseparable from life. If it becomes art-action, it is as such the only one capable of prophetic and divine power.27 24 25 26 27

Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avantgarde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 119. André Reszler, L‘Esthétique Anarchiste (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973), 6. Noëmi Blumenkranz-Onimus, “Une poétique de l’heroisme: l’esthétique de Marinetti,” in Presence de F. T. Marinetti, ed. Jean-Paul Marcadé (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1982), 51. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Democrazia futurista,” in Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), 315.

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In Russia Max Stirner strongly influenced not only Kazimir Malevich but also Rodchenko, who in 1919 appropriated Stirner’s axiom “At the basis of my cause I have placed nothing.”28 Any anarchist influence ended in March 1921, when Rodchenko, Aleksei Gan, Konstantin Medunetsky and others formed The First Working Group of Constructivists and dedicated themselves to “Soviet construction” guided by “scientific communism.”29 After being omnipresent at the turn of the century, anarchism almost disappeared at the beginning of World War I, when it underwent a shift from politics to culture. In the Soviet Union, anarchism was swept away after 18 March 1921, when hundreds of anarchists were thrown into prison, while in Europe anarchism died due to the rise of communism and fascism. At the turn of the century Italy continued to be politically divided and culturally underdeveloped. Still valid was the exclamation of the Italian statesman Massimo d’Azeglio, who said in 1861: “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians!” Only in 1902 did the Giornale d’Italia, the first newspaper in Italy, introduce the terza pagina or cultural page. By continuing to fuse art and politics, Marinetti turned this combination into one of the most successful promotional cultural projects of the twentieth century. Most avantgarde movements were influenced by different world-views. Especially in the period 1918–1922, Italian futurists were to be found on both political sides: communists (Vinicio Paladini and Piero Illari) and fascists (Mario Sironi, who became Mussolini’s chief ideologue in art). Early on some futurists were members of local Proletkult organisations. For a short period of time “it was even conceivable to have a Communist Party official wearing a suit from Depero’s workshop.”30 Futurist activities encompassed not only traditional arts, such as painting, sculpture, poetry and architecture, but also interior design, fashion and, later, tactilism and futurist food. One of their early areas of activities was futurist evenings, where, in Marinetti’s words, success was gauged not by the amount of applause but by the quantity of refuse and vegetables thrown at the performers. The first such evening was on 12 January 1910, in the Teatro Rossetti in Trieste. At that time this city belonged to Austria. During the evening poetry was recited and political state­ments were pronounced. When Marinetti cried, “Long live war, the only hygiene of the world!” the audience protested and Marinetti was arrested: “With futurism the poet, the artist, climbs the stage, 28 29 30

Quoted in Antliff, 85. Antliff, 89. Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996), 198.

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descends into the street, fights for his ideas with the blows of his fists … He no longer demands from History to register his words and his witnessing, it is he who makes History.”31 In Bolshevik Russia in the early 1920s, constructivists were a revolutionary segment of the Russian avantgarde who strove hard to become the leading cultural force in the country. Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, Lyubov Popova and others were the leading artistic figures of this movement, with Osip Brik, Boris Arvatov and Aleksei Gan being its theorists (and ideologues). Their starting point was straightforward: a new society required new art or, better, no art at all (based on the premise of art being a bourgeois invention) but rather “constructions” that negated representations. What do revolutionary artists do after they renounce anarchism? In the Soviet Union, the newly minted constructivists numbered amongst the most militant pro-communist groups in the spectrum of post-revolution culture. The Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops (Vkhutemas), founded in 1921, served as their base of operations through the 1920s (the workshops were closed in 1930).32 4

The Waning of Avantgarde Ideologies

Anarchism, Marxism, nationalism and fascism were four ideologies or worldviews that strongly influenced these two early avantgarde movements. None of them was hegemonic for more than a limited time and often single individuals (or movements) appropriated and identified with more than one ideology when forming his (or its) Weltanschauung. Until World War I anarchism was the most widespread, the most continuous and the most influential world-view among artists, especially avantgarde ones. Besides being a world-view or Weltanschauung, anarchism was also a philosophy, a social theory, and contained many clusters of ideas that were of relevance to intellectuals and workers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that could all be included within the provisional term Weltanschauung. One reason for such high standing among artists was that anarchism very much resembled art and its ideals: it was individualistic, cherished personal and creative freedom, ascribed to art

31 Giovanni Lista, Futurisme: Manifestes, documents, proclamations (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1973), 17. 32 Antliff, 97.

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and artists a pivotal role and place in society, and propagated numerous values that artists shared (and still do). Fascism is distinguished from the other three ideologies by the fact that it emerged much later and thus had a more limited presence. In its early phase, fascism assimilated numerous programmatic ideas developed by futurism, but later dropped most of them. From its emergence, nationalism was typical of Italian futurism, especially its first stage, which was not yet “contaminated” by Mussolini’s hold on power and by the ensuing dominance of operative fascist ideology. Italian nationalism emerged in the nineteenth century, continued into the twentieth, and then (in Italy) was hijacked by fascism. Nationalism in Italy had very wide support. In this respect, there was no great difference between futurists, fascists, Gabriele D’Annunzio and many other intellectuals, this being witnessed by the fact that, contrary to in Germany, the only prominent Italian intellectual who fled the country during Mussolini’s reign was Enrico Fermi. The influence of anarchism was also present in Russia, where Peter Kropotkin was greatly appreciated by Lenin. As mentioned, the Moscow avantgarde artists, ranging from Rodchenko to Lissitzky, before turning pro-communist, strongly identified with anarchist ideas (Rodchenko especially with Max Stirner’s) and contributed to the Moscow journal Anarchia. “Historically, of course, the chief radical rival of all the varieties of communism in modern times has been anarchism, which rejects the idea that society is gov­erned by rational laws.”33 Before the success of the October Revolution, Marxism in Europe was not really influential among artists, avantgarde or otherwise. After the revolution, its interpretations of art stretched from a defense of socialist realism to the promotion of avantgarde art and from a defense of critical realism to a criticism of “naturalism.” What was consistent in Marxism was that it viewed art in terms of class. Marxism was seen by Marxists predominantly as a science or as objective knowledge, causing the majority of Marxist thinkers to interpret ideology in relation to art according to the “theory of reflection.” Orthodox Marxism in particular regarded art primarily as a form of political propaganda, while its Western variety interpreted it mainly as a paramount form of human creativity. Which interpretation was dominant at a certain moment and in a certain place depended upon circumstances. Lenin’s interpretation of ideology allowed the treatment of art as a form of ideology, thus not only making it a part of the class struggle but also legitimizing its treatment as a form of propaganda. A similar theory was developed by Russian 33

Egbert, 43.

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constructivists. They claimed that artistic forms were vehicles of ideology; therefore, the creation of a new society required the creation of new forms. In the Leninist terms explained earlier, this meant that bourgeois society could develop only bourgeois ideology and art. To overcome this situation the new Soviet society required its own art and ideology, both of which were to be built from scratch. In times of social and political crisis, actions that at the beginning were of an artistic nature (poetry, plays, concerts, futurist evenings, etc.) turned into street violence. Their humorous appearance was revealed not as simply avantgarde acts but as violence hidden behind aspects of great and militant Italy. While futurism lost its political influence and power, fascist ideology soon became dominant in Italy. After the Matteotti crisis in 1924, Italy for all practical purposes became a totalitarian state, even if futurism was still interpreted as a liberal and avantgarde movement. In 1921 the radical Russian avantgarde, which was embarking on a construct­ ivist path, was criticized by Lenin for being too radical and exclusivist. The pro-avantgarde journal LEF was founded in March 1923 with a circulation of 5,000 copies, but by 1924 the circulation had dropped to 2,000, reflecting the decline of constructivism. When the New Economic Policy (NEP) ended in 1928, the avantgardists lost most of the support of the government. In the next few years avantgarde artists faced the dilemma of either joining government-sponsored artistic institutions and organizations or ceasing to be artists altogether. Earlier the “artists-constructors” saw the number of their design students diminish and finally their design school close. In this situation, Rodchenko and Lissitzky started to work on design and photography. The result of such activity was their intensive involvement in the propaganda magazine USSR in Construction (1930-mid 1941). In the late 1920s in Italy and in the Soviet Union, avantgarde activity became increasingly marginalized. The initial ideas on which two different yet related world-views—Marxism-Leninism and fascism—were erected were transformed into official ideologies. In Italy the government-sponsored art became the traditionalist Stracittà and Strapaese, while in the early 1930s the Soviet Union officially declared socialist realism its official style in art and literature. Avantgardes and their world-views became a (mostly forgotten) part of the historical past. With them the historic significance they had possessed only a few decades earlier, both in Italy and the Soviet Union, drifted into oblivion.

Chapter 18

The Avantgardes, Utopias, and Clothes (2017) 1

The Utopian Impulse of the Avantgardes

The avantgardes are an essential constitutive part of modernism, they are “the spearhead of modernity at large.”1 For many artists their modernist status and that of their art are being perpetually questioned, this questioning itself being a characteristic of modernism. For all practical (if not always also theoretical) reasons they nonetheless are considered to be modernist. Modernism reached into realms that used to be off-limits both to art and its theoretical reflection. In fact, one of the characteristics of modernism was its constant transgression of the confines set up by previous works and thus a continuous broadening of the frontiers of what is art. This perpetual questioning of the status of modernist works of art complements the broadening of art’s frontiers. The final consequence of such situation is that anything can become art: either by spatial and institutional contextualization or by conceptual argumentation. The avantgardes are a paramount example of this—whether they exist as (a) nineteenth-century “proto-avantgardes”2 that are bound up with the birth of the socialist movement; as (b) the early or classical avantgardes of the first three decades of the twentieth century; as (c) the post-World War II neo-avantgardes; as (d) movements simultaneous with, but otherwise very different from, the neo-avantgardes, such as Situationism; or as (e) what I have designated as “the third generation avantgardes” or the “postmodern ­postsocialist avantgardes.”3 In 1845 when Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant wrote the passage about the avantgarde which we often quote today, he linked the identity of the avantgardes to human totality, to humans (i.e. “artists”) as members of a particular species who are “of the avantgarde,” aware of wither “Humanity is going, and what the destiny of our species is.”4 This destiny and the direction in which Humanity is going became standardized, a change that we owe partly to Marx and partly to 1 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avantgarde, Decadence, Kitsch, ­Postmodernism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987), 119. 2 See Stefan Morawski, “The Artistic Avantgarde. On the 20th Century Formations,” Polish Art Studies 10 (1989): 79–107. 3 Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition. Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 4 Quoted in Calinescu, 107. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_019

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Lenin. In spite of its enormous impact and the opening of a window of opportunity to emancipate the whole world, the aftermath of the October Revolution resembled the reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The only way to salvage utopia as a relevant concept implied by Laverdant’s “­destiny of our species” was with the idea of progress, i.e. the idea of a desired future. A related concept was the enlightenment project of emancipation and thus the connectedness of aesthetics and ethics. This bond was what in 1970s allowed Miklós Szabolcsi to claim that a political and social “revolution without an avantgarde [in art] is really a pseudo-revolution.”5 He furthermore argued that “we can speak of a true avantgarde only if it overlaps with a political revolution, realizes it or prepares it.”6 It is such revolution that opens the doors to a possible utopia in a positive sense. There exist of course other views about this relation, according to which “the assumption of a necessary relation between cultural avantgarde and left politics is misleading as well as incomplete, because the political activities of avantgarde artists (of all kinds) have included other politics than those of the left.”7 It is for such reasons that it remains highly questionable whether the project of utopia remains relevant today. Instead we could side with Thierry de Duve, for example, who argues that the “emancipation project has to be replaced by the ‘emancipation maxim’”8 because “humanity will never reach adulthood— understood as the entirely rational and autonomous state of enlightened subject.”9 The early or classical avantgardes employed various new realms of human practice to create unprecedented works and to express new ideas and positions, thereby broadening the sphere of what was hitherto considered art. The new avantgarde spirit reached into all crevices of life. This was especially true of expressionism, Italian futurism, Russian constructivism and French surrealism. Some avantgardes—such as Russian constructivism—reached also into arts and crafts. In this respect, Russian productivism to some extent resembled Art Deco practices, the Arts & Crafts movement, the Deutscher Werkbund, Bauhaus, etc., thus creating works that were also meant to resemble art of the post-October Russia.

5 Miklós Szabolcsi, “Ka nekim pitanjima revolucionarne avangarde,” Književna reč 3/101 (1978): 14. 6 Ibid. 7 David Cottington, The Avantgardes. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 100. 8 Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998), 443. 9 Ibid., 437–438.

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Avantgarde Overall

In the early twentieth century a fairly new expressive terrain was clothing, but one could also mention cuisine, smell, touch, furniture, and all sorts of novel expressive devices, ranging from Futurist photo-dynamism, the cinema, Russolo’s 1910 noise intoners (intonarumori), and Giacomo Balla’s clothes as presented in “The Male Futurist Clothing Manifesto” (1914), to the Russian fusion of avantgarde experimentalism in stage design and theater staging as such with cinematic montage, scenography and costumes: “Applied arts were … the instrument to materialize the Soviet utopian ideals in post-­revolutionary Russia.”10 Until the nineteenth century clothes remained on the fringes of theoretical and reflexive attention. Relating to the theme of utopia, let me begin by pointing to the zero point of utopia, namely to Thomas More’s Utopia: “In the ideal society outlined in Utopia by Thomas More (1516), people wear practical clothes that are ‘quite pleasant,’ ‘allow free movement of the limbs’ and are suitable for any season. In Utopia people are ‘happy with a single piece of clothing every two years.”11 By the second half of the nineteenth century, clothes had become important expressions and manifestations of people’s utopian expectations: “[T]hey seem to break the continuum of history, articulating another vision of the world—the utopian idea of a total reorganization of life.”12 Even before romanticism artists expressed their life philosophy with their life-styles, their clothes, hair, general behavior and even with the choice of food and drink. Thus, in the seventeenth century drinking hot chocolate was fashionable among the European nobility (and denoted aristocracy), while in coffee shops where patrons supported the enlightenment, coffee was the required beverage accompanying liberal discussions. The semantic individuation offered by the dress codes of the middle ages was gone, but the more easy-going and eclectic Bohemian style became typical of the nineteenth-­ century artists and poets and has remained in this respect unchanged until today, only that since the 1960s it has been typical mostly of pop musicians and less frequently—if at all—of poets, painters or installation artists. There were exceptions, such as American conceptual artists of the 1970s whose conservative dress code—black suit and white shirt—from the outset had been their trademark. Similarly, members of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) organization in Slovenia dressed from their beginning in the early 1980s in black, the 10

Flavia Loscialpo, “Utopian Clothing: The Futurist and Constructivist Proposals in the early 1920s,” Clothing Cultures 1/3 (2014): 17. 11 Loscialpo, 2. 12 Ibid., 4.

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more general style of their dress being made specific in the case of one of its central groups—the group of visual artists, the IRWIN group—in black suits, white shirts, and black ties. A specific case was and remains Dragan Živadinov, the leader of the theater chapter of the NSK who was under the strong influence of Malevich, his Suprematism, and to some extent also Russian Constructivism. In the 1980s and 1990s Živadinov wore a special suit: overalls. For him, too, this dress signified more than mere clothes possessing a simple practical value: “Overalls were introduced about 1750 as a protective article of clothing intended to prevent work related wear and tear to breeches and stockings, which were the standard clothing items required by fashion at the time.”13 The first use of overalls as part of military uniform was by the Americans, while the earliest written mention of the “overalls” in English language was from 1776. The term was retained by the U.S. army until the 1850s. “By the 1859s, the overalls became a single piece and worn over the trousers. The standard colors slowly became standardized with white being for painters, pin striped for railroad workers, and finally the blue shades for the rest of the working class.”14 In the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries overalls were used by mechanics and later by aircrews. In the early twentieth century overalls (coveralls) acquired additional aesthetic and ideological functions. Their political ideological function related mostly to the fashionable “artist-constructor”—the Russian (pro-Bolshevik) constructor from the early 1920s. The image of the “artist-constructor” was also promoted in the early 1920s by Aleksandr Rodchenko and László Moholy-Nagy, two well-known personalities who shared many political and ideological views. In this they were both preceded by John Heartfield as witnesses the painting Monteur John Heartfield by Georg Grosz from 1920. In Russia overalls became one of the symbols of the new Soviet society. In many respects, Russian constructivism coincided with Italian futurism. As early as 1911 and 1912, Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero developed theoretical positions on clothing according to which clothing should follow principles of futurist painting. As he did on many similar occasions, Marinetti modified the text of the relevant manifesto so that it expressed the militant opposition of futurists to “neutralists,” i.e. those who wanted Italy to stay out of the Great War (socialists for example). On September 11, 1914, Giacomo Balla published the manifesto “Anti-Neutral Clothes.” It was meant not as an attack on 13 14

Walton & Taylor Mercantile, “A Brief History of Overalls and the Origins of Blue Jeans,” http://www.waltontaylor.com/overallshistory.html (accessed 23 May 2023). Blair Mountain Reenactment Society, “The History of the Overalls,” https://blairmountain reenactment.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/the-history-of-overalls/ (accessed 23 May 2023).

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neutralists so much as an opposition to conformist dress and the promotion of clothes that were asymmetrical, colorful and daring. Shoes, for example, were intended to “deliver merry kicks to all neutralists.”15 The early futurist clothes were primarily a theoretical concept not meant for mass consumption. A completely different story was that of tuta, an invention of Ernesto Michahelles (aka Thayat) and his brother Ruggero Michahelles (RAM). Thayat (1893–1959) created the tuta (also written as TuTa) in 1919 with the purpose of offering Italians a dress that was practical, functional, simple, and inexpensive at the same time that it overcame class divisions. The two brothers received support from the Florentine newspaper La Nazione, made a film about the tuta, and printed postcards with the slogan “Everybody in tuta” (Tutti in tuta): “[M]ore than 1000 people in Florence had adopted the tuta, which was considered the most provocative garment of the summer of 1920.”16 When Thayat created his tuta, he did not yet fully embrace futurism, as he did later. Despite such “ideological” ambiguity, his works and ideas already at an early time exhibited affinity to ideas held by futurists, making the question whether the Tuta can be considered a Futurist invention somewhat irrelevant. Italian futurism and Russian constructivism thus held views that perhaps possessed no causal relation but shared features on the level of global society and its Weltanschauung. What was a tuta? It was an overall, a simple dress in the shape of a letter T. From its inception, the tuta was an anti-bourgeois project, born as a protest against the high prices of the post-war period and the obsolete stylistic conventions. Thayaht’s aim was to “initiate a transformation similar to an ‘industrial revolution’ of fashion, making the masses feel well dressed and cultured.”17 The Russian overalls—the prozodezhda, the production clothes—had much in common with the Italian invention, the tuta—not to mention their historical simultaneity: the tuta was created in 1919 and the Russian overalls in 1918/19. Both underlined the social function of art and the importance of industrial production. Both suits represented “a crucial moment in the utopian vision of a total reorganization of life.”18 This is how Galina Chichagova, a young female art student at the VKhHUTEMAS (Higher Art and Technical Studios), remembered seeing her teacher Aleksandr Rodchenko for the first time, just as he was entering the room to instruct the school’s Basic Course: “A man walked into the studio, from his appearance he looked like a combination of pilot and motorist. He was wearing a beige jacket of military cut, Gallifet-breeches of a grey-green color, on his feet 15 Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), 194. 16 Loscialpo, 13. 17 Ibid., 11. 18 Loscialpo, 3.

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Figure 7 Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles) showing his tuta, 1920 PHOTOGRAPHER: Pietro Salvini. Public domain

were black boots with grey leggings. On his head was a black cap with a huge shiny, leather peak … I immediately saw that this was a new type of man, a special one.”19 We know how Rodchenko’s overalls looked like (and how he looked in them) thanks to the photographer Mikhail Kaufmann, who took a picture of 19

Quoted in Margolin, 87.

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Figure 8 Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles), Tuta, 1920 PHOTOGRAPHER: Saiko. Permission for use by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License

him in overalls in 1922. In the photograph we see Rodchenko smoking a pipe, his head shaven, looking sternly to the right, with two enormous pockets that are immediately noticeable on the front of his overalls and were designed (just like the overalls themselves) by his wife, Varvara Stepanova. As in medieval pictures, three-dimensional constructions behind the artist (most probably Spatial Construction from 1920–21) illustrate his craft: the production of constructivist objects. Rodchenko’s overalls were not a product of the fashion industry; it is fairly obvious that what mattered about them was their message and not the fine details of the handiwork of a professional seamstress. In this respect, Rodchenko’s clothes were different from the overalls of the other well-known constructivist who also belonged to the avantgarde, namely those of László

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Moholy-Nagy, of whom we possess a photograph as well. We observe his photographic image taken by his wife Lucia Moholy in Dessau in 1925. In his case the fabric of the overalls falls over his body in soft folds, and his trousers are impeccably ironed. The Hungarian artist—at that time already a master at the Bauhaus—resembles a fashion model more than a militant constructivist. Although Rodchenko emanates the spirit of self-assurance and vivacity, he nonetheless looks very different from his Hungarian friend: modest and provincial, in overalls made at home, in the kitchen perhaps. Moholy-Nagy’s piece of clothing, on the other hand, is easy to imagine being sewn in a high-end couture shop from which a special delivery boy brings it to Lucia Moholy. The artist-Constructor was to announce a new time and new society, one in which Construction would replace all previous art, with this being so much easier and legitimate for it was created (or was to be created) in a Soviet Union that was on its path toward a classless society in which new art was to replace that of the old bourgeoisie. Nonetheless, the story of the overalls doesn’t end here. For a long time it seemed to me that Rodchenko was the source of the avantgarde overalls and that Moholy-Nagy simply appropriated them and wore them in Bauhaus in Weimar and in Dessau. Moholy-Nagy projected “the modern image of the artists as an engineer and technician, thereby replacing the expressionist image of the expressionist artist that had dominated the school before his arrival.”20 In this he differed from the previous leading figure and foundation course instructor, the spiritualist Johannes Itten, who dressed in unusual clothes, adhered to Zoroastrianism, and was easily recognizable by his image and behavior. Moholy-Nagy was offered the post of director in part because conceptually and philosophically he was a complete opposite of Itten: practical, technically oriented, a believer in the special aesthetic and practical value of machinery and construction, he also highly appreciated the role of design. In correspondence with the author of this essay, Prof. Dr. Alexander Lavrentiev from the Moscow State Academy “Sergei Stroganov,” (who is also the grandson of Aleksandr Rodchenko) explained that as far as he was familiar with the matter, the person who was the main promotor of overalls was “John Heartfield [Johann Hartfelde] who was known as ‘monteur’ and wore blue robes while doing his collages and photomontages in 1919 and 1920. Rodchenko designed his productivist suit as a demonstration of the general principle of the specialized functional cloth which had its origin in the costumes of the aviators and 20

Louis Kaplan, “The New Vision of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,” LUMA: Modern Photography from First Half of the 20th Century, ed. Aya Lurie (Tel Aviv: Shpilman Institute for Photography, 2012), 161–166.

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drivers, in the principle of the uniform as well. A costume as part of the profession, as a professional instrument.”21 Stepanova and Popova added to overalls a geometric design that referred to the imagined order and efficiency of the Soviet state. Some of the clothes created by constructivists also found their way into the theater. Popova, for instance, in planning the costume and set design for the Meyerhold production of The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922), declared her intention “to find a general principle of prozodezhda for the professional work of the actor in connection with the essentials of his present professional role.”22 According to Christina Lodder, “Among the first practical realizations of [production] clothing was the work-suit which Stepanova made for Rodchenko … Rodchenko’s work-suit, resembling a jump-suit aggressively demonstrating its fastenings and its storage pockets, transformed these essential components into significant formal elements. Otherwise it was extremely simple, and economic in cut, sewing and material. It was a very specialized and individual garment.”23 Another photograph exhibiting the overalls is that of El Lissitzky: Vladimir Tatlin at Work on the Monument to the 3rd International from around 1922. Yet another, entitled The Constructor from 1924, employs photographic montage and is in fact El Lissitzky’s self-portrait. 3

Clothes and the Slovenia Avantgarde

One of Gropius’s students at Bauhaus was the Slovenian artist Avgust Černigoj who in 1925 held a constructivist exhibition in Ljubljana. To the consternation of the local population, he walked around the city, which then had no more than 50,000 inhabitants, dressed in overalls, like a mechanic—an obvious reference to the figure of the artist-constructor and particularly to Moholy-Nagy whom he met at Bauhaus. Picasso and Braque also wore overalls because they were practical for work in the studio, were anti-conventional and distinguished them as artists. In 1984 in Ljubljana there took place a colloquium organized by the Slovenian Society for Aesthetics. Among the participants were artists and academics who had first-hand knowledge of the classical avantgardes from the 1910–1930 period; likewise, there were those of us who were born after World War II. Articles and essays from the colloquium were then published in three 21 22 23

Letter from Aleksandr Lavrentiev to the author (17 April 2015). Loscialpo, 19. Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 149.

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issues of the magazine Sodobnost. One of the contributions in the colloquium was by France Klopčič, who was one of the founding members of the Slovenian Communist Party (founded in 1923). In his paper Klopčič drew a vivid image of that time, among the most memorable ones being his recollections of a visit to the constructivist exhibition organized by Avgust Černigoj in Ljubljana in 1925. Klopčič, who was no art connoisseur, nonetheless sensed the revolutionary nature of this new art that Černigoj took as his own and which he presented at the 1925 exhibition from a fairly militant standpoint. This is how France Klopčič recalled his visit: “The exhibition of constructivism was organized by Avgust Černigoj, who in Germany learned much new from the architect-artist Groppius [sic] and his school Bauhaus … In the hall were hanging big posters, standing upright, diagonally or upside down: “Capital is theft,” “the Artist must become an engineer,” etc. In the exhibition there were objects and pictures. Among the objects one could see individual bicycles, scooters and a typing machine, for the organizer of the exhibition started from the principle: Construction is the first expression of art of that time. It is here that originated the name of the current—constructivism. Between the pictures were circles, squares and similar combinations in white, black and red color. “I visited the exhibition in the company of Ludvik Mrzel, Stane Melihar, Ivo Grohar and some other male and female comrades … We were greeted by Avgust Černigoj. What I saw overturned all my previous conceptions of artistic exhibitions. I liked the slogan ‘Capital is theft,’ for until then something like that did not exist. With great curiosity I gazed at canvases with black squares and red semi-circles or triangles. And why is here a motor bicycle, where did the wooden bicycle come from? It was unclear to me. But of one thing I was certain; the exhibition marked in essence a protest against the culture and the aesthetic of the bourgeois class, for it destroyed what until then was not allowed to be upturned.”24 Černigoj was especially attracted to Moholy-Nagy: “He made us create from different materials something completely new; it was at the same time temporal and abstract.”25 Soon after Černigoj left for Trieste. He intended to start publishing together with the poet and friend Srečko Kosovel a journal titled Constructor, but the periodical never materialized. Thereafter Černigoj lived and worked for most of his life in Trieste, to be discovered and recognized as a unique Slovenian artist only in the 1980s. In the early 1980s not only were numerous academic gatherings devoted to the avantgardes, but also an extensive revived interest in the classical avantgardes sprung up across the globe—from Ljubljana to 24 25

France Klopčič, “Slovenska zgodovinska avantgarda 1910–1930,” Sodobnost 33/ 3 (1985): 293. Avgust Černigoj, “Slovenska zgodovinska avantgarda 1910–1930,” Sodobnost 33/ 3 (1985): 297.

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Belgrade and from Ukraine to Armenia. In this respect, our activities in Slovenia strongly resembled those all over Europe and beyond. It was during that time that Dragan Živadinov started to dress in overalls. Dragan Živadinov started his career as the leader of various theater groups and has been involved in the activities of the Neue Slowenische Kunst organization, in which he has been most intensively active and interested in theater, ritual, space and space travel (supported by similar ideas emanating in the first half of the twentieth century in Russia). Živadinov soon developed his theater pieces and events in the direction of Russian mysticism, especially that which had its sources in Kazimir Malevich and his personal and artistic mythology. In the 1980s and the 1990s, the figure of the artist-constructor was very much a part of Živadinov’s Weltanschauung—and to some extent still is, except that in his recent works and discourse phrases abound such as “an engineer is constructing a new theater.” This shows that the figure of the artist-constructor is still present, but its previous plethora of significations is now drastically reduced. While such traces of the constructivist past remain noticeable in Živadinov’s works, lately he has focused on space travel and refers in passing to constructivism. Thus, in 2009 he held a lecture devoted to the “Trieste Constructivist Ambiance as an Announcement of Post-Gravitational Art.” (This original “ambiance” was a spatial construction devised by Avgust Černigoj, Edvard Stepančič, Georgio Carmelich and Josip Vlah in 1927 in Trieste.) Especially in the 1990s, Živadinov made use of the term “artist-constructor” 26 and proclaimed himself the “attractor,” a “Constructor” and “an engineer who is constructing a new theater, in which spectators will look around their own axis and learn a new circumvision.”27 In emulating both Russian constructivists and Černigoj, Živadinov thereby prolonged not only the practical but also the symbolic life of this piece of clothing. Yet in general, the image of the engineer has today lost much of its attraction. It no longer relates to the works and ideas of artists and thinkers who attempt to fuse and upgrade art and construction—two elements at the separating the old bourgeois and class society from the new communist society that was putatively in the making but in fact never quite made it. It is already at best a “retro” image, living on in the works and activity of a retro-avantgarde that cites and recites it. 26

See Tomaž Toporišič, “Spatial Machines in Slovene (No Longer-) Experimental Theater in the Second Half of the 20th Century,” in Occupying Spaces: Experimental Theater in Central Europe 1950–2010, ed. Ivo Svetina (Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki muzej, 2010), 456–57. 27 Ibid., 457.

Chapter 19

(Post)Modern Aesthetics on Trial: Revisiting a Century of Avantgardes, Interview with Oana Șerban (2017) Oana Șerban: Professor Erjavec, your study, “Avantgardes, Revolutions, and Aesthetics” which sums up the important working-hypothesis advanced by the authors of each chapter of your recent edited volume, Aesthetic Revolutions and the Twentieth-Century Avantgarde Movements, confronts us with an unconventional and radical new perspective on the revolutionary patterns of modern and contemporary art. On the one hand, you do distinguish revolutionary art from avantgardes. On the other hand, you consider that socially critical art—which avantgardes mostly privileged and emphasized—is partially performed by individuals, contaminated with different political commitments and beliefs, rather than movements. Even though your argument, inspired by Courbet’s artworks, supports, in this theoretical apparatus, the main distinction between the revolutionary artistic canons of the nineteenth century from those belonging to the twentieth, such an argument might be nowadays successfully applied in understanding the politicization of art. So allow me to pose the following question: are the artistic revolutions the consequence, or at least, the cultural subsequent expression, of the political revolutions? Aleš Erjavec: With your question you raise some key issues shared by avantgarde art on the one hand, and revolutionary art, and politicized art, on the other. The more social antagonisms are present, the more revolutionary and politicized are the dominant art forms and the less this role today is left to the avantgardes. Let me to take as an illustration not New York or Paris but the Philippines: on the one hand you find there protest and revolutionary art (promoted by art critic Alice G. Guillermo), on the other you have postcolonial theory applied to the local art (past and present) championed by art critic and historian Patrick Flores. A similar torsion is to be found in South Africa, in ­Taiwan, and even the Balkans. In all these places exists a tension caused by torsion of these different kinds of art. The Philippino art is thus almost socialist realist, for this is the way in which local artists express themselves within the global contemporary. In some other instances these three kinds of art have cut in three different directions across the broad surface that we call art. On the European continent revolutionary and politicized art was claimed alternatively to be modernist, to © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_020

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be non-modernist and sometimes to be anti-modernist. In all three instances this was art that did not fit the simple and linear schema of “things”—­making it an illegitimate artistic entity within art tout court. As we know the matter becomes complicated further by the uncertainties generated by different meanings of “modernism” in different countries and epochs. It was only with the advent of postmodernism that modernism achieved some semblance of uniformity, although such perception turned out to be short-lived. Recently I edited with Tyrus Miller an issue of Filozofski vestnik that we published in Ljubljana, entitled “Modernism Revisited.”1 Articles presented there offered a totally new image of modernism—of Aborigine art seen as a part of modernism, for example. The view taken by some Eastern European authors (such as Boris Groys), as well as by some Western ones (Benjamin Buchloh or Hal ­Foster for example) differs from the usual perspective of two modernisms (that include the three kinds of art mentioned above). The two most radical avantgarde movements in the avantgarde framework were Italian futurism and Russian constructivism. Here I would wish to stress that for me “the most radical” does not automatically signify “the most artistic” or “the most aesthetic.” Although “the most radical” may signify “the most provocative,” “the most daring,” the most innovative,” and “the most contemporary,” such qualifications carry import only within specific constellations, i.e. the heavily politicized ones. Politicization means not only what Aristotle and Rancière understood by politics but also the process, the path of politics—very much dependent upon the notion of democracy. Let me take as an example the activity of the Slovenian music group Laibach for example, that in 1980 called itself by the German name for Ljubljana, thereby recalling that it was during World War II that Ljubljana was called by the German name for the last time. Although similar avantgarde gestures were already made by Johann Hartfelde (John Heartfield), the impact of this gesture by Laibach was still strong enough to make the Ljubljana city council prohibit the group from performing in Ljubljana under the German name. What happened?—Laibach continued to perform but under a different name, and at the same time proclaimed itself a victim of the totalitarian city council. This was both a case of politicization and, with delay, of politics. It also shows what it can mean to be avantgarde. The autonomy/heteronomy divide was established and retained both in traditional and in avantgarde art. The heteronomous avantgarde art ended up in the politically wrong part of the art archive, although outside such an archive it strolled freely, slowly directing its steps towards autonomy. It is such an 1 Filozofski vestnik 35/2 (2014).

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archive, kept and supported by the grand institutions such as the Louvre and the British Museum, as well as school curricula, histories of art and occasional plain reawakenings of past art, that retains the edifice called art in its place and keeps it as an important part of culture and of various communities. It was a great contribution of Jacques Rancière to have drawn our attention to the fact that the dividing line between the mentioned tandem as well as the political and the non-political is flexible and temporary. As to the issue of artistic avantgardes being a consequence of political revolutions: There exists a moment (a “knot”) in the history of most (if not all) authentic political movements in which different paths cross and open up and in which the political and the artistic (the “poetic”) are fused and interchangeable. This happened also in our two countries—Romania and Slovenia in 1991—namely, the fusion of a political and an artistic agenda. The Kantian “enthusiasm” that such a “moment” generated often lasted only a short while, but still sufficiently long to allow a new sensibility and an epochal change in our consciousness to appear. This, then, is but a moment, as Marjorie Perloff has called it (after Giovanni Lista), the “futurist moment” in which the path to the future is opened as an event. So far this event didn’t turn into a linear historical reality. What happened instead, were once more expectations of “exorbitant and misleading promises of an aesthetic revolution which endeavored to transform art’s form into the forms of new life.”2 Oana Șerban: Is there any distinction between aesthetic and artistic revolutions? As it appears, the manner in which the ideologies support the former is responsible for taking this distinction for granted. Nevertheless, when you expose what I would call “the revolutionary rationality” of Italian futurism and the post-1917 Russian avantgardes, you refer to them as “exemplary cases of aesthetic avantgardes,” which perform a symptomatic need for complementing their artistic revolution with a political one. In fact, I am more interested in how do you conceptually distinguish artistic revolutions from aesthetic revolutions, and in how do you identify and argue the interdependencies, not only chronologically, but also methodologically, between artistic, aesthetic and political revolutions, on the other hand. This very specific assumption on the historical order of an artistic revolution, followed by a political one, shows your dedicated concern for difficult yet challenging common concepts, each involving “paradigm shifts,” if applying Kuhn’s definition on scientific and cultural revolutions, in extenso, is valid in this context. I refer to specific concepts, such as the necessity of a revolution, its predictability and its structure. How 2 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 14.

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should we consider them as components of aesthetic, artistic and political revolutions? Aleš Erjavec: In my view an artistic revolution encompasses the “­artistic” revolution in a traditional sense of the meaning of “art,” while the “­aesthetic” involves (simplifying matters somewhat) the “artistic” fused with the “­political.” To give an example: Italian futurism was an aesthetic avantgarde movement, and it engendered an aesthetic revolution, demonstrating and showing the hitherto hidden or unnoticed facets of sensible reality. Let me add something very important: revolutions—whether predominantly aesthetic, artistic, or political—are always compounded and mixed with all three kinds of revolution. The artistic, the political, and the aesthetic revolutions are concerned with different although interrelated aspects or segments of art and life. What each of them accomplishes is to extend and/or to change the realm of the lived world and reality, to transform our Lebenswelt. Today we are used to stumble upon art behind every street corner, and are therefore not so sensitive to it, its nature, and the transformations it (may) cause in our lives and in everyday experiences. In my view art carries much import in our life—not in all life and not in everybody’s, it is true—but still in a sufficient number of lives and in essential ways. Art matters, although sometimes it matters in forms that exceed (or circumvent) what we consider to be art and consider to form a part of everyday life. It is true though, that the legacy of the Frankfurt School weighs heavily upon us and often prevents us from seeing art instead of an infinite mass of mass culture. Oana Șerban: Why should dada be excluded from the field of those artistic revolutions that created aesthetic revolutions? Just because it proved to be the partisan of “apolitical anarchism”? Aleš Erjavec: Ah, dada. I have to admit to being insufficiently clear, for you are the second person who has criticized my position as regards dada in the Duke book. In his review of the Aesthetic Revolutions book Curtis L. Carter has voiced a criticism similar to yours.3 My response to both criticisms is that while I stand by my judgment, I should have made my argument more explicit. Let me explain my position now and let me do this by quoting Thierry de Duve who in this respect holds views very much similar to mine. Thierry writes: “Dada not only had no programme, it was against all programmes … Dada was ‘the absolute whatever’ … Dada never consisted of group marching in step to

3 Curtis L. Carter, Review of Aesthetic Revolutions, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74/3 (2016), 314–316.

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the same ideology.”4 Dadaism was an anarchic negation of the future. In brief, “Dadaism lacked the ‘positive’ designation characteristic of Italian futurism, constructivism, surrealism and the later avantgarde movements.” In my opinion any avantgarde requires what in 1845 G. D. Laverdant has phrased in the following way: “So that in order to know whether art fulfills with dignity its role as initiator, whether the artist is actually of the avantgarde, one must know where Humanity is going and what the destiny of our species is.”5 To summarize: the reason for my exclusion of dada was that it lacked even vestiges of a positive program—something that all aesthetic avantgardes possessed. Oana Șerban: You dedicated many pages to Rancière’s considerations on the so-called unitary program of “aesthetic revolution,” distinguished by three regimes of aesthetic representation. The references, in this context, to Kant’s “aesthetic revolution”—as we see, a paradigm shift of the metaphysical discourse, in the name of rationality, following the scientific model of the Copernican revolution; to Schillers’s perspectives on the aesthetic education of the modern individual; and to Foucault’s meditations on the role of representation as an ultimate form, given to the rivalry between the visible and the invisible, complete your focused analysis of what might be understood as two main historical and theoretical paradigms of interpreting aesthetic revolutions: a German and a French one. Meanwhile, you associate other European geographical and cultural areas such as Italy and Russia with the most important artistic movements, politically committed. However, one of the greatest outcomes of the efforts that made this collective volume possible is represented by the attempt to examine from an interdisciplinary perspective the manner in which philosophical discourse, in its modern and postmodern configurations, faced almost a century of artistic movements and aesthetic revolutions. As a matter of fact, I would invite you to go back to one of the most important paragraphs of your study, which places Marxist thought in proximity with Rancière’s discussions of aesthetic revolutions, in order to explain it: “An aesthetic revolution may lead also to the human revolution as envisaged in the 1840s by Karl Marx: ‘The coming Revolution will be at once the consummation of and abolition of philosophy; no longer merely “formal” and “political,” it will be a “human” revolution.’ The human revolution is an offspring of the aesthetic paradigm.” Aleš Erjavec: As noted, in the book that we are discussing, much attention was directed at the two most radical early avantgardes, namely Italian futurism and Russian constructivism. Here I would like to reiterate that I do not consider these two movements to be, by being radical, necessarily artistically 4 Quoted in Aesthetic Revolutions, 261. 5 Quoted in Aesthetic Revolutions, 263.

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outstanding. No, they were of interest to me because they represent borderline cases of art—somewhat like conceptual art that analytic philosophers have continuously dissected. As concerns Marx and the “human” revolution the situation may be less clear than it appears. We are back at Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: how does the passage from representation to transformation occur? The theoretical value of Marx’s own interpretation has often been questioned and with good reason. Recently some have argued that the manifesto supported by Searle’s theory of the construction of social reality could be interpreted as an exemplary form of “transformation,” while yet others have additionally researched the actual meaning of “life” within the constructivist setting. (Tatlin: “A brotherhood of artists and architects will be born and will create not only temples and monuments to human ideals but also complete artistic towns. To link art with life – this is the task of the new art.” (October, 1918) Of course, this issue brings us to Leibniz, Kant’s Ding an Sich, and, finally, to Aesthetic Politics (F. R. Ankersmit).6 There are unexpected but interesting theoretic links that are as of now still almost untouched. Oana Șerban: You know that Gilles Lipovetsky, for example, adds to modernity and postmodernity a new cultural-historical dimension: hypermodenity.7 To what extent are these distinctions important for the main talk about the contrasts between aesthetic and artistic revolutions? Could they affect, until a certain point, our wide understanding on what you recognize as different “generations of avantgardes”? Aleš Erjavec: I am somewhat wary about the incessant stream of new terms. It seems that especially French authors are prone to invent new terminology, with Rancière also being one among these. One could here mention Régis Debray, Nicolas Bourriaud, and, earlier, Jean Baudrillard. Achille Bonito Oliva’s “trans-avantgarde” made to me more sense and was more needed than some of the mentioned conceptual inventions. Terry Smith was correct in claiming that in the recent past postmodernism lost much of its conceptual value and has been swallowed up by the notion of modernism on the one hand and by that of contemporary art on the other. Postmodernism promised a lot but then failed and did not acquire long-lasting import. If we are to repeat with Hal Foster: “Whatever happened to postmodernism?” “For me”—wrote Foster in 1993—“as for many others, postmodernism 6 See F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 7 See Gilles Lipovetsky with Sébastian Charles, Les temps hypermodernes (Paris: Bernard ­Grasset, 2004).

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signaled a need to break with the exhausted modernism, the dominant model of which focused on the formal values of art to the neglect not only of its historical determinations but also of its transformative possibilities.”8 Unfortunately, it turned out, postmodernism wasn’t ready to serve as a new theoretical concept. Oana Șerban: Nowadays, many art consumers are quite reticent about contemporary art, in the sense of fine arts manifestations. As a paradox, even though people are seduced by the 4D techniques that the postmodern cinema embraced, its spectacle of multilayered and narrative reality, fewer people show an affinity for contemporary art, blaming it for not providing a specific meaning, for being too generous in its character of opera aperta, for involving the authors’ skills but not an incontestable artistic talent, for being too easily makeable. If Robert Morris isolated the artistic quality of a work of art from its aesthetic contents, through his notorious “Declaration of Aesthetic Withdrawal,” today, people lost their confidence both in the aesthetic and in the artistic qualities of a supposed artistic object. What is the relevance, in this context, of any research on aesthetic revolutions? Aleš Erjavec: You raise the question of the indifference of general public towards contemporary art. In response I would point out that the contemporary situation in art is but a continuation of that which finds its roots in the 19th century and then in the 20th with its hermetic art and its Adornian elitism. In Adorno’s time (and when confronted with the culture industry) such a position may have been necessary, but this changed later on. In other words, elitist modernist exclusivism may at that time have been useful, but only for a few decades. In 1960s a survey was made in France in which people were asked which art they considered to be “of their own time.” It turned out that they considered Picasso from 1910s to be a example of such art, while in the 19th century the public recognized art made in its own time as art of their contemporaneity. In other words, since the end of the 19th century art has continuously lagged behind its own time, so to say (or, rather, the public has). This signifies that art has taken its own path, one that is separate from developments in other realms of human existence. It is mostly in its existential role that I see the pervasive contemporary function of art. For that of course (and as Arthur Danto has observed already in 1964) to understand what contemporary art is about, one has to be familiar with a lot of philosophical literature. To some extent such an observation applies also to Robert Morris and conceptual art. 8 Hal Foster, “Postmodernism in Parallax,” October 63 (1993): 3.

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Oana Șerban: My last question goes to you, as a specific editor of the Aesthetic Revolutions volume. If you were to restart this project from the beginning, would you change the selected topics and approaches? And, taking into account that this interview is a direct dialogue with all your readers, either as amateurs or as scholars belonging to this specific domain of aesthetics, would you reveal to us what do you suppose being the greatest outcome of your volume and its main insufficiency or, let’s put it otherwise, disadvantage? Aleš Erjavec: The avantgardes remain a void: although they have been around for more than a century, they still remain opaque and only superficially grasped by theory—even when simple empirical facts are at issue. For example, only now the special role played in the development of Russian avantgarde by anarchism is coming to light. Now to come to your questions: 1. Would I change the selected topics and approaches in the Duke book? No, definitely not. Earlier the book Postmodernism and the Postsocialist ­Condition: Politicized Art Under Late Socialism was such an edited volume.9 It discussed art in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, and Cuba. The University of California and the Duke books were conceived not as ­simple collections of articles but as if each of the books was written by a single author. In such a way I was able to cover the chosen topic as a global issue, i.e. I was able to take into consideration all the illustrative and relevant cases. In the case of Aesthetic Revolutions the situation was to some extent similar although less demanding. I did not want to include only the traditional western cases, which is why I have brought in Latin A ­ merica and once again the NSK movement. I should also note that the Duke book should be read as a sequel to the California book. 2. What would be the most important aim of the 2015 book?—The book was intended to make other researchers of the avantgarde to consider the issue of the representation/transformation of historical reality by a specific type of avantgarde action. 3. In the two mentioned books I have introduced or expanded three notions: “aesthetic revolutions,” “aesthetic avantgarde movements” and the “third generation avantgardes.” This last issue is very dear to me for with it I have pinpointed a specific type of avantgarde, i.e. one that emerged with the demise of Soviet-type socialism and then mostly vanished with the advent of parliamentary democracy. 9 Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art Under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).

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An insufficiency or deficiency of the 2015 Duke book is that one of the central issues of the book, namely the passage from “interpretation” to “transformation” has so far not been sufficiently analyzed and has been deferred to the future. I shall consider the book to be a failure if in ten-year’s time no one is familiar with the terms “third generation avantgardes” and the “postmodern avantgardes.” Expecting “aesthetic revolutions” to become a household word would be expecting too much—although one never knows “where Humanity is going.”

SECTION 3 Spatial Turns: Central/East European Aesthetics in National, International, and Global Contexts

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Philosophy, National and International (1997) 1

Philosophy and National Differences

In recent decades in the fields of economy as well as culture we have witnessed an increasing trend towards internationalization and thus to a large extent towards homogenization. Cultures and traditions that had previously been relatively isolated—including philosophical ones—started not only to take each another into polite consideration, but also to exchange influences. In this respect more visible or pronounced changes in the global context began to occur a decade or two ago. One of the crucial events was, I believe, the process of the disintegration of the socialist world whose whole political and social philosophy was built on a totalizing idea and ideal. What commenced as a liberalization of the formerly rigid political systems, which began to pay attention to individual national, historical, and cultural specifics, became describable as a long process of decomposition of what had previously appeared as stable and basically homogeneous societies, whether they built “real socialism,” “self-management socialism,” or variously similar political systems in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World. Sadly, the ideas of the Enlightenment in some cases ended with tribal or civil wars or brought about the very opposite of the Enlightenment values: fundamentalism, built on a similarly fictitious past as those constructed by current nationalisms and caused by the failures or at least deficiencies of modern ideas or their application. One of the main features of such current events was (and still is) their incomprehensibility: it seems as if we don’t possess the necessary conceptual tools to grasp them.1 The “difference” can no longer be subsumed under a universal criterion of truth, for “the other side” appears as non-subsumable under a common denominator. For some of us it was perhaps death sentence pronounced in 1989 upon Salman Rushdie, the author The Satanic Verses, that not so much foreshadowed the events to come (since they were omnipresent anyway), but brought them into the view. It brought an awareness of a conflict of two views, and laws did not contain a common denominator but only a 1 As Fredric Jameson aptly phrases this problem, we are confronted with “the enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience.” Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 21. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_021

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Lyotardian dijferend. Henceforth it became clear that the differences are insurmountable and that we should learn to live with them (albeit not necessarily accept them). It is no longer possible to discard “otherness” by ascribing it to a “primitive” culture and hence to shrug it off or eliminate it by force, i.e., to attempt to make from the “other” the “same.” Nor is it possible to contain such differences in a peripheral location. If not otherwise then by means of the media such events have become a part of everybody’s life. Such “otherness,” it often appears, has nothing in common with the fact that very similar otherness exists within what we view as the First and the Second World. Such differences and differends have become parts of our lives in vastly different ways, depending also upon our individual position, i.e., whether we inhabit or come from the First, Second, or Third world countries. “That there is a Third World literature or culture has frequently, and probably abusively, been said or implied; that the existence of a First World culture follows from this has often been admitted; but that anything like a Second World culture could possibly be conceived of has been ignored, if not passionately repudiated.”2 It is fairly obvious then that in many ways philosophy shares a fate similar to that of culture in general. A feature common to culture in general and to philosophy in particular is that, as a rule, we use them in the Western manner. Philosophy may be empirical or speculative, may be rational or irrational, but it follows certain patterns if not rules of discourse. Hence it is highly improbable that any form of contemporary mysticism, for example, or religion, presenting itself as a philosophical truth, would pass as philosophy in the world philosophical community. As in the case of nations, the time for the success of such new designations is almost certainly forever gone. In this respect the Second World, of which Jameson speaks, is currently (philosophically also) primarily an extension of the First. Important exceptions exist: Russian Formalism, Bakhtin, the Tartu School, the Praxis group, Karel Kosik, Adam Schaff, even Georg Lukács, to mention a few who developed philosophies discernibly different from those of their contemporary Western European or American counterparts. Unquestionably, both traditions are built upon the common European past. It is this that has basically determined what philosophy is and it is within its framework that we most often speak of “philosophy.” The decades in which socialism was the ruling ideology in Eastern European countries didn’t effect a real difference concerning perceptions of philosophy and its practices. It was mostly in literature and the arts where visible changes occurred. 2 Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 73.

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In many cases, it would seem, the most extreme differences in views between the First, the Second, and the Third Worlds could be pated or resolved by applying Rorty’s dictum of perceiving the “not as “them” but as “us.”3 However, such counsel does contain impediments similar to those faced that by Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Although not basically dependent upon the Enlightenment tradition and rationality, it still requires, and is limited to, a willingness and openness not unsimilar to that of any philanthropist. To overcome “difference” takes more than simple understanding: it demands a return the Enlightenment projects of enlightening, of education, and of acquiescence to universal norms—not because they are transcendent or transcendental, but because we cannot afford to be without them. In other words, to appear and leave a mark within the field of philosophy, the “other” essentially function as the “same,” that is, he or she must adhere to imposed by reason, follow argumentation, etc. In spite of the current weakening or relativization of philosophy has mostly discarded the notion of universal truths, there still a sense of a need for such truths or, rather, norms. We are therefore aware that causes we defend or even die for are not universal truths, “caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance.”4 To accept such a contingent truth, however, one must also accept some reasoning and rationality as opposed to religious or ideological mentalism and dogmatism. In this respect it should not be forgotten other cultures, too, contain in their philosophy rationalism or its correlates and analogues. This is especially true of Islam which has today in its militant form altogether discarded its own rationalist heritage. In this essay I shall try to speak primarily from a personal view, is that of someone coming from and living in a small culture, necessitating incessant contacts with other cultures, languages and traditions.5 Such a position, if one wishes to avoid merging into one of the larger cultures by which he or she is being constantly influenced, involves an ever-present consciousness of differences—cultural and linguistic, among others. these differences that entail universal norms, albeit not of a totalizing kind: “[Tjotality cannot arrive without establishing as an absolute particularity which is then inevitably tied to a

3 “We should stay on the lookout for marginalized people—people whom instinctively think of as ‘they’ rather than ‘us.’ We should notice our similarities them.” Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 196. 4 Ibid., 189. 5 I should add that coming from the former Yugoslavia, which tried to find a middle course between capitalism and “really existing socialism,” helps in understanding the First and the Second Worlds, since from the late sixties on we have to a large extent lived in both.

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destruction of other particularities.”6 Philosophy basically radiates from a few centers, with the less developed and less dynamic environments being “taken over” or at least strongly influenced by them. The symbolic exchange at work here resembles that other forms of market exchange.7 Philosophy is also an institutionalized discipline, which is equally true of professional philosophers. As university professors they are “holders of an institutionalized form of cultural capital which assures them a bureaucratic career and regular revenues.”8 Such a situation is anything but new. What perhaps is new is that after more than half a century within certain cultural frameworks, philosophy again being conscripted under a nationalist banner. Hence, contrary to recent modern trends, philosophers also strive to serve nationalist and in this respect reverse the long process of internationalization, globalization and universalization. The reasons for such a tendency vary. In contemporary Russia, for example, it is the Russian philosophy of the pre-October times, especially that of the nineteenth century (which was often overtly anti-Western), that is perceived as the authentically Russian philosophy. The reasons are plain: much of what went on under the name of “philosophy” in the USSR would today hardly be deemed worthy of the name. Similarly, in certain republics of the former Yugoslavia, the tendency to stress their respective national cultural, and hence philosophical traditions, coincides with their desire to dissociate from the former common “Yugoslav” socialist and Marxist theoretical corpus, philosophy included. In this case the aim to create or strengthen the consciousness of one’s national philosophical heritage and its contemporary relevance and to establish a distance between one’s philosophical past and the previous more international philosophy of Yugoslavia conflates the desire to dissociate from the communist legacy and the Yugoslav one, the latter being viewed as essentially identical with the former. A third case would be that found in some Arab countries, where the Islamic world-view no longer tends to be divided into distinct and individuated spheres, as with Weber’s Western model of “­autonomous spheres.” In such a case philosophy ceases to be distinguished from religion, hence forming its integral part.9

6 Wolfgang Welsch, “Modernité et postmodernité,” Les cahiers de Philosophie 6 (1988): 25. 7 Numerous pronounced differences exist. For similarities and differences between the field of culture and that of other forms of production see for example Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). 8 Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Paris: Minuit, 1984), 55. 9 “Cultural” may be a better term than “national,” since in the Arab case the latter notion is not identical to that in Europe. As I am interested here in schematic distinctions, I think this example may still be validly used.

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The recent upsurge of nationalism in some of the former socialist countries could, in certain cases, be viewed as extremist. By this I want to suggest that we have recently witnessed cases of a type of nationalism which tends not only to assert its own national “identity,” or self-consciousness, but also aims to do this at the expense of somebody else’s. Again, distinctions are illusive or unreliable. Hence one could claim that similar events occurred, persist, or are emerging in various European countries, from Spain, the U.K., and Belgium to Italy. Nevertheless, these cases are usually viewed as being more benign than those in Central or Eastern Europe although, with a few exceptions, such views are not substantiated by facts but chiefly by familiarity. Also, it is difficult to comment on a country that is, practically speaking, at war (like Bosnia). It is nevertheless true that in some of these newly independent countries one can perceive not only fairly clear cases of nationalist ideology but also of nationalist extremist philosophy. By this I am not referring to philosophers who retain a distance between their philosophy and their political adherence. I refer to philosophers who as philosophers adhere to, and express, or articulate political (in our case nationalist) ideology under the guise of philosophy. It is true that philosophy, like political ideology of a totalitarian kind, tends to be a totalizing discourse and may therefore lead to totalizing practices. Also, state apparatuses make any dissent difficult. Nonetheless, distinctions can be made. Hence during the Second World War the most important pre-war Slovenian philosopher, France Veber, to appease the German occupation authorities, changed his name to Weber. Also, he published books in spite of a decree by the Slovenian Liberation Front ordering a “cultural silence” while the Axis occupation lasted. Veber’s gesture was in no way linked to his philosophical position (he was formerly an assistant to Alexius Meinong), but his gestures sufficed to compel his retirement after the end of the war. His political behavior was in no obvious way reflected in his philosophy which remains highly influential.10 The philosophers of the Praxis group, on the other hand, were, in the 1970s, demoted from the Belgrade University to a research institute. The Yugoslav government obviously believed that their theory was too influential among the students to allow them to lecture, but it allowed them to conduct research since this did not endanger the then-existing regime. Their philosophy was directly linked to their political views. It would be difficult today to find cases and countries where philosophy and philosophers play a role of similar political and social importance. Philosophy, too, has lost much of the social and political impact it previously had. It is in 10

In recent years it generated a strong interest among analytic philosophers.

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this respect that the situation in environments such as the French Canadian or Basque, on one hand, and the Slovak, Croatian or Russian, on the other, differs. In the first case it is not philosophy per se which plays any particular role in nationalist policies of the members and ideologues of respective nations or national groups. Philosophy in these cases is, for the most part, devoid of any national features, since a long time been a part of the broader or international cultural environment (Anglo-American or French, for example). It is not philosophy that significance in attaining national political autonomy. In some other countries philosophy nonetheless finds itself today position in which it can again play a decisive ideological and political role. Such a role is today mostly viewed with suspicion: I believe that a reference, such as in a recent issue of the main Croatian philosophical review Synthesis philosophica, that a certain Croatian book on aesthetics “means a great deal for Croatian national Being and its cultural roots,”11 makes us feel uneasy as philosophers. For what is a “national Being?” It is an ideological construct with no contemporary philosophical content or status, but with innumerable ideological connotations and long-term practical implications of which philosophers in particular should be aware. Such declines of philosophy are well known in the recent past: orthodox Marxism, for example, often plunged from the somewhat more respectable level of fundamental ideology into the operative one.12 In a such case, philosophy, again, slid into ideology. Some professional philosophers aspire to express (or create) national philosophies, thus partaking in the national aim of strengthening an obviously insufficiently defined or vigorous national “identity.” From philosophers, who are most often part of the academic establishment, aspire to become such, emanate notions such as that of the “national Being.” 2

National Designations

What about national designations of philosophy? Today it is one thing refer to French philosophy, for example, or to the German one, and quite another to speak of Croatian, Slovak, or Slovenian philosophy. In the nineteenth c­ entury such designations may have played a liberating national role but today they seem more ambiguous, not to mention that they are not substantiated by 11 12

Ivan Kordic review of Novija hrvatska estetika (Recent Croatian Aesthetics) by Z. Posavac, Synthesis philosophica, 8/2 (1993): 568. (English in the original). See Martin Seliger, Ideology and Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), 109.

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facts. Not only do their proponents isolate themselves from the world philosophical community, they also cause a questionable division into “them” and “us,” a division based on national roots, on names, religion, etc., on anything, in short, that can serve as a national designator. In this respect a “national” designation of philosophy is just as problematic as a political one. In the German or French case, it seems, we are either accustomed to its existence or view it as a spontaneous event, similar to Edmund Burke’s views concerning the development of human society. It is of course true that any cultural influence, the philosophical included, helps to spread not only cultural but also political power and influence.13 Small “imaginary communities,” ie., small nations, always seek to preserve their national specificity and culture. If they hadn’t, they would probably have ceased to exist, i.e., they would have soon assimilated. It is the golden mean between the protection of one’s culture and its exaggeration that is always the most difficult to establish. In many of the small cultures “nation” never had clear economical or political connotations (never signified real power vis-à-vis large nation states), but rather referred primarily to culture, with language being its most outstanding part. While literature as the paramount cultural vehicle of a nation could build upon the human condition and experience in a certain environment that was then or later designated as “national,” philosophy was, contrariwise, always a part of a much broader environment, related in Europe to broad entities such as “civilization” (the European, the Central European, the Slavic, the Christian, or the Catholic culture, tradition, etc.)—and the main European cultures (French, German, English). In smaller cultures philosophy was incomparably less relevant for the existence of a nation than literature or, of course, language without which, at least in Europe, a “nation” would not even exist. If a nation cannot establish and affirm itself through economic or political power, it attempts to assert itself through culture, philosophy included. To attain this aim it also attempts to symbolically appropriate authors, works, trends, events and ideas that are or were somehow related either to its language or territory. When at least an appearance of legitimacy is possible, this may also include plundering names and authors from other cultures. (As when, for example, a certain person, otherwise a foreigner, spent some time in a certain country, province or city.) Since larger nations have sufficient cultural capital in the form of a cultural heritage they neither need to carry out such actions

13

A good example is the influence of various kinds of French philosophy and the humanities in the former French colonies where they are almost the only existing brands. Such an observation in no way implies a denigration of their relevance.

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nor do they need to defend their language—or so it seemed, for today not even English is exempt from needing, in the view of some people, such a defense.14 It is also for these reasons that I find it appropriate to refer to “German” philosophy, for example, but not to “Slovak” or “Slovenian.” As implied, the causes are the size of a culture, its development and, more directly, the past existence or non-existence of a powerful bourgeoisie or aristocracy of a certain nation. The crucial step in the development of a “national” philosophy had to be taken by the respective bourgeoisies and sometimes the aristocracies which also supported and strengthened the role of the national language as the carrier of a “national” philosophy. The nation-state is a product of the bourgeoisie and its need for a homogenous market, legislative system and the like, and those nations that did not possess a native bourgeoisie often lack their own philosophy as well. It is obvious that the field of cultural production in a small national community is very limited, this being true also of publishing, promotion, and the distribution of ideas. The case of Austria shows the extent to which political power and economic wealth are important. The country showed tremendous intellectual potential especially in the decades around the turn of the century, while recently it has had to satisfy itself mostly with retaining (but not enhancing) this legacy. I believe this is a predominantly objective feature, for it certainly is not due to any deficiencies on the part of current Austrian philosophers. Or, it might be claimed, philosophy in Austria has simply lost its “Austrian” character and become more international. As far as I am aware, there has not been any singularly viable “national” philosophy, but always various philosophies within a certain culture that, after a long process, began to represent a “national” (“French,” “German,” “Anglo-American”) tradition of philosophy. In most cases these traditions developed from and are still dependent upon a certain language and its expressive means, which they have helped to advance. What, contrarily, emerges in smaller cultures or countries is usually a philosophy which is under the strong and direct influence of a philosophy originating in a much larger country or culture (or both). This is true of many smaller European countries, which were not only small, but were also never indigenously centralized and therefore lacked appropriate state apparatuses. Moreover, they were rarely nationally homogenous. For this reason too it seems therefore meaningless (or worse) to speak of “­Slovak,” “Croatian” or “Slovenian” philosophy. What we can refer to is

14

I am referring to the initiatives to make English the official language in the United States.

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philosophy in Slovakia, in Croatia or in Slovenia. What does emerge from time to time is a “school,” such as the “Prague Linguistic Circle.”15 To refer to a “national” philosophy simply because philosophy in the form of foreign influences existed in a certain environment would seem erroneous. Such a judgment doesn’t imply a denigration of philosophy or philosophers in a certain country or culture: it simply emphasizes the fact that they have not developed their own distinctive national philosophy while their philosophy, as carried out by them as individuals, may be highly relevant. For example, Roman Ingarden is a philosopher whose significance is more than that of an individual thinker with a strong international influence, for he established a whole school of phenomenological research that is still being carried out in directions as varied as aesthetics and theology. Another of many possible examples would be the Croatian, Rudjer Boskovic, whose Theoria philosophiae naturalis (Vienna 1758, Venice 1763) represents one of the lesser known neoclassicist natural philosophies. A similar observation applies to a series of more recent authors, ranging from the previously mentioned France Veber to the Czech structuralist Jan Mukařovský, the paramount figure of the Prague School, who has only recently received a wider acclaim in the United States.16 Mukařovský attempted to bring together formalist aesthetics and structuralism, offering elaborate and highly original viewpoints concerning aesthetic and artistic values, norms, and the ideological and aesthetic functions of artworks. 3

The Genesis of National Thought

Emil Niederhauser notes about the rise of nationality in Eastern Europe: Language is only an instrument of communication for members of a given nation. It is thus the necessary condition for the awakening of a common nationhood. But this condition is not enough. More was needed for the “awakening” of the people. It had to be discussed, heard, read about, visually recognized if the doctrine was to take root. In other words, 15 16

In Slovenia a contemporary case is that of “theoretical psychoanalysis,” its central author being Slavoj Žizek. This theory has been referred to internationally as the “Slovenian Lacanian School.” “Only within the last twenty years has the work of the Prague School become more widely known in the Anglophone world.” Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 223. Interestingly, the broad interest generated in France in the sixties and early seventies by the works of the Russian formalists and Roman Jakobson completely bypassed Mukařovský.

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once the language existed, essays, articles, literature had to be written in it and plays performed, even though there were not many who could read at all, and even fewer who were in the habit of doing so. Even where they existed, they read more easily in foreign languages.17 Niederhauser, who writes here about various Eastern European nations, points out that the usual procedure by which foreign authors, philosophers included, were appropriated was initially through originals, then through translations that were often followed by adaptations and then by indigenous literature and theoretical writings. These observations apply equally to nations as varied as the Polish, the Czech and the Albanian, the last achieving its orthography only at the beginning of this century. Another crucial feature of the previous epoch was the omnipresent knowledge of Latin: even as late as the early nineteenth century Latin was still a language of which anybody who attended a university had knowledge. Such historical facts have to be noted for they show the “natural” way in which the appropriation not only of classical philosophy but of the Enlightenment and the more recent authors progressed. Moreover, this process commenced in a situation in which the intellectuals were scarce; the intellectual and therefore possible philosophical topics were limited to such a small number of people that it would appear today almost inconsequential. It is this last feature, the enormous change concerning education and knowledge, that separates the age of the historical emergence of nations in the previous centuries and the more recent attempts to establish national cultures (and especially nation states to which cultures are subordinated) in such a way as to not only distinguish but to separate them from others. New nations are no longer being born, only new nation-states. It seems therefore unrealistic to expect the emergence of new “national” philosophies arising from them. There is at present nothing a nation can do about its lack of founders or supporters of national philosophy. Such a desire basically represents a peculiar regression and does a disservice to philosophy in country, for it forces its philosophers to search for the imaginary and imagined predecessors or founders of a “national” philosophy. Some philosophers in the newly founded European nation-states feel that can help their countries by joining in similar attempts by historians and nationalist politicians to reconstruct (or invent) their individual national pasts. What intellectuals and philosophers who wish to establish or strengthen “national” philosophy therefore do is search for, or 17

Emil Niederhauser, The Rise of Nationality in Eastern Europe (Budapest: Korvina 1981), 53.

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re-evaluate, philosophers and ancient philosophical ideas. They attempt to carry out a different reading of the past. Since this often necessitates determining the national lineage of philosophical ideas in an environment which typically throughout its existence often nationally mixed, as an area of migrations or under various rulers of different ancestries, such an undertaking is an uncertain and sometimes unpersuasive business indeed.18 Moreover, and this is the veritable issue, it is not the “national” philosophy, be it big or small, but the variety of philosophical traditions and philosophy within the international framework which extends beyond national or cultural borders that is most productive. Philosophical research is in this respect essentially no different from scientific research which also, because of natural and historical reasons, varies in different countries. If therefore national philosophers concentrate their energy especially upon erecting a national philosophy this may possibly add something to the national cultural heritage, may serve the history of philosophy of a respective country and its self-esteem, but it is basically a short-sighted endeavor. Philosophy within a nation or country will attain international and national significance only through its contemporary interpretation, which is a process that only a contemporary philosopher, raised in and living in the present and within contemporary philosophy (which is often international), can undertake. 4

Philosophy, National Contexts, and Schools

Two reasons why some of the borders among the previous “philosophical empires,” to use Richard Shusterman’s term,19 have simultaneously diminished and a plethora of various philosophical worlds emerged, are the new participation of people or cultures that had been previously passive receivers of ideas developed elsewhere, and increased communication. The first point could be 18

19

The same authors are thus often presented by different cultures under different national labels so as to symbolically appropriate them into their proper tradition and heritage. This undertaking is of course an ideological procedure. Similarly, in the times of socialism it was a common practice to proclaim an author a “Marxist,” and thence politically appropriate, even if he just passingly mentioned or quoted Marx. That he may also be an “existentialist,” a “phenomenologist,” etc., was hardly ever noted and if so, then only as a subordinate trait of his philosophy. “[A] philosophical empire embraces more than one nation state, and its participant nations and cultures can be sorted into centers and peripheries, fatherlands and colonies.”—Richard Shusterman, “Aesthetics Between Nationalism and Internationalism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51/2 (1993): 161.

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illustrated by the development described by Niederhauser: at the beginning, the intellectuals from culturally “colonized” nations simply appropriated foreign ideas or applied them to their own circumstances. If they succeeded in developing original ideas and winning recognition for them, this almost always meant their inclusion (and assimilation) into an existing cultural and philosophical empire. The second point probably does not need proof, but I would nevertheless like to offer an historical illustration: at the turn of the century and practically up until the 1960s Serbian, Montenegrin, Bulgarian, or Romanian intellectuals would study in Paris, while Croatian or Slovenian would mostly pursue their studies in Vienna or in Italy. Those belonging to the latter two nations were subjects of the Habsburg monarchy and knew German well, while Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria or Romania had traditional strong political and cultural ties with France. It goes without saying that French culture dominated the second group of countries and German and Austrian the first. It was probably structuralism and the events of the late 1960s that changed this situation. Quite suddenly Slovenian students started going to Paris and they returned with intimate knowledge of thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, Foucault and Lacan. A conflict between them and somewhat older Slovenian followers of Heidegger or the young Marx emerged and has not been resolved yet. Similar events occurred elsewhere. Structuralism also caused a truly stupendous (and seemingly unending) restructuring of the humanities. This process was and is countered by the attempts to retain the old schemas and distinctions, the consequence being that philosophy also is often perceived as a purely academic (and hence less relevant) discipline, while “critical theory” or “poststructuralism” appears to be taking over previously less theoretically-oriented areas such as language and literature departments, etc. In this respect the Ljubljana University differs from the University of California, Berkeley, for example, only in the extent to which such a process has progressed. For most of what I have written so far I claim only a relative value, since it is highly dependent upon my experiences in my own country, Slovenia, and elsewhere. By this I do not want to imply that I consider my statements limited to certain environments only and therefore not universally relevant. Instead, the point I am trying to make is that, obviously, a small culture determines one’s views in a different way than a large one and that this may apply to philosophy too, and not only to art and literature. Philosophers from larger cultures often tend to take their views not only as generally applicable but also as almost universally valid, a luxury that we others can hardly afford. At the same time each of us, of course, fits into and lives in various worlds, many of which have nothing to do with national origins and issues.

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To illustrate some of the opinions I expressed above and back them up, I shall present a few examples. These will not be from “general” philosophy, but from one of its “disciplines”: aesthetics. In 1972 Revue d’esthétique distributed a questionnaire on the state of aesthetics. The questionnaire, sent to forty-six countries from Albania, and which drew twenty-nine responses. The editors noted that Valéry’s observation—­ aesthetics inhabits a wing of the palace called philosophy—had ceased to be the case. “The definition of aesthetics became more flexible,” they wrote, allowing aesthetics to establish ties with the “sciences” of the arts. They observed that almost everywhere research on the arts is carried out without reference to either philosophy or to science. “For example, in the departments of literature or art, courses are given on the structural theory of narrative, on the plural reading of texts, on semiology of the cinema or music, on the immanent analysis of the painting, on architectural functionalism or on the discourse of a city.”20 I suggested before that the structuralism of the early 1960s was at the root of the “disintegration” of certain realms of the humanities that followed in the next decades. Structuralism rapidly loosened not only the grip philosophy held on aesthetics which relegated it to a wing of philosophical palace, but also enabled an exchange of ideas and inquiries among formerly disparate areas. By applying the structural method, realms as varied as music, architecture or literature, and even tribal or culinary customs appeared thenceforth as practices tied by a formerly invisible thread into an acceptable bundle which, although devoid of a common name, nevertheless could be perceived as having previously unseen common features. It was probably Michel Foucault with his book The Order of Things (1966) who “discovered” or even “caused” the demise of the modern philosophical belief in a continuous and hence linear development of knowledge. His own theory was a part and parcel of the same altered taxonomy to which it implicitly pointed under a veil of rather obscure historical events. It may be that such events caused the situation to which the French editors of the Revue d’esthetique referred in 1972. In this same publication Milan Damjanović from Belgrade commented upon one aesthetician from Slovenia,21 Dušan Pirjevec, who was actually a professor at the Department of Comparative Literature. Although aesthetics was also taught in the Philosophy Department of the Ljubljana University, it was of a strictly academic kind. It followed the mostly psychologically oriented philosophy of the aforementioned Franc Veber, wherein art was 20 “Avant-propos,” Revue d’esthétique 1–2 (1972): 3. 21 Ibid., 237.

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practically absent as a topic of interest. Such an aesthetics was complemented by its Marxist equivalent: an aesthetics composed of generalizations concerning art and beauty but devoid of any direct link with artistic events. Since those of us who were at that time finishing our studies found such an aesthetics virtually irrelevant to the study of art, and since it was highly improbable that we would in any way be able change the situation at the university, we founded in 1983 the Society for Aesthetics, whose principal aim was to bring together research in the arts and philosophical aesthetics. In the next decade our annual international conferences were devoted to subjects as diverse as avantgarde art, metaphor, the status of the subject in its relationship to postmodernism, formalism, form, violence and aesthetics, copying, etc. Since Slovenian culture takes place within an environment of two million people, we have, by our publications, conferences and their placement within international context, in some ways partially changed the very standing of aesthetics in Slovenia. Henceforth aesthetics was no longer perceived primarily as a purely academic discipline, but rather as various theoretical approaches to and analyses of art and culture. In a larger culture the equivalent of one aesthetician in Slovenia of a certain orientation would be a whole department or a group. Thus our “world” is a world not of numerous schools but of individuals. It is influenced by traditions ranging from the analytical one to art history of the Vienna School and is thus mainly a meeting place of various traditions and orientations, brought together by common points of interest. Since we do not belong to a single tradition, we perceive all of them as relative. In this respect ours is no different from that of numerous other small cultures. The use of the Slovenian language is combined with that of English, French, or German. While we are aware that few foreigners speak Slovenian, it is understood at our conferences that while we need a lingua franca such as English or some other, each of us also possesses his own mother tongue. This is sometimes difficult to understand, especially for the British, the Americans or the French who perceive such a linguistic plethora as an excess and waste of effort that could be more productively used for other means. One could think of this as a negative remnant of the empire mentality, while it is perhaps to a larger extent due to insufficient knowledge of the nature of the national language and culture, in our case, Slovenian. If a foreigner is unaware that the first book in Slovenian was published 500 years ago, that Slovenian schools existed more than two centuries ago, and that it was the language that was vehicle of national culture and not the state, this is not only his fault but the fault of Slovenians as well. A similar situation as concerns the relation to the national, regional and international philosophical environment as in Slovenia can, in my view, also be seen in Scandinavia. Aesthetics as an academic discipline emerged there

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almost two centuries ago. Towards the end of the previous century this aesthetics became increasingly speculative and lost its academic role. It experienced a revival in the second half of our century, when it not only regained its status in the universities, but when national aesthetic societies were founded eventually, and, in 1983, the Nordic Society for Aesthetics.22 As in the Slovenian case (and in other smaller countries or cultures in Europe) the Scandinavian publications, too, changeably appear in Swedish, Finnish, Danish or Norwegian and in English. Since Slovenia is less English-oriented, we also use German, French, or even Italian. The common feature of both environments—and the same applies to Dutch, Polish, Hungarian or even Austrian philosophers and aestheticians—is the simultaneous or interchangeable use of the national language and another language, the latter more and more frequently being English. In this way a linguistic balance is retained between the national and the international, with the latter being not so much a monolingual and therefore monocultural space, but preferably multifarious. Philosophy, like literature, is strongly dependent upon its particular language and its inbuilt properties or features.23 These features strongly determine the nature of the philosophy that is developed and carried out. Although after a prolonged period of intense communication and exchange even very disparate languages and terminologies may converge, important differences persist. In a sense language is the “house of being” not only of the individual but also of various smaller or larger communities. One does not have to ascribe to a language a mystical value, but in certain respects it is, as Hjelmslev has shown, untranslatable into another language. It is, in my view, the simultaneous existence in the national and the broader or international philosophical environment that enables a more productive philosophical existence for those of us who come from smaller cultural and linguistic spaces and don’t want simply to leave them behind and melt away into the larger cultural and linguistic environments. A viable option appears to be that offered by Richard Shusterman: I have suggested that one model of internationalism functions in terms of the world dominance of specific cultural tradition or master language, while another is more pluralistic and multi-cultural. If the first tries to ignore or overcome difference by concentrating on the power of a singular master-tradition, the other tries to accept and bridge differences so as 22 23

See Goran Sörbom, “The Role of Aesthetics in the Academic Community: A Scandinavian Tradition,” in Le grandi correnti dell’estetica novecentesca, ed. Grazia Marchiand, (Miiano: Edizioni Angelo Guerini, 1991), 289–306. There are of course many analytic philosophers who would claim that this is irrelevant.

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to achieve an international synthesis or collaborative dialogue where the integrity of the different traditions will be preserved in the whole. But there is also a third model of philosophical internationalism where national and cultural differences need neither be overcome nor mutually adjusted and respected. They can be simply dismissed as altogether irrelevant to what really matters in philosophy. For if we see philosophy as the pure exercise of reason in the search for universal features and truths of human experience, then all good philosophy should be international even when it and its subject matter seem deeply rooted in specific cultural traditions.24 Now, while I find myself very sympathetic to the third view described, I would still combine it with the second, for I encounter difficulties when applying it to the variety of philosophies in existence. How is it possible to philosophically bridge the gap between Adorno and Heidegger, or analytic philosophy and Lacanian theory, etc.? In a way, it is almost like trying to bridge the gap between Shakespeare and Molière, or Mozart and John Cage. Also, I doubt that philosophy is the “pure exercise of reason”—but, as we can see, here we are already in the midst of a philosophical discussion. In short, my doubt concerning Shusterman’s third model arises from observing that, in a way, he is already speaking from a particular philosophical position, as I do likewise. All this is, of course, philosophically legitimate and is actually one of the main features of philosophy. Also, as I suggested above, it is sometimes possible, after time or with the help of a creative person, to bring various traditions together. Nevertheless, this is more an exception than a rule since such processes usually require long periods of intense cultural communication and exchange. The notion of so-called “philosophical empires” may be helpful in clarifying a related set of problems. When introducing the term, Shusterman refers to “Anglo-American Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Soviet Philosophy … and the philosophies of the Far East.”25 From a global perspective such a description is valid, although it seems simultaneously to eliminate local perspectives such as those often offered by philosophical schools. Moreover, the notion of philosophical empires suggests a world divided up in its entirety (or about to become such), and since I do not see my culture (or others, for that matter) in such a way, I would rather claim that from the position of one of the “centers” of the empires the world may appear to be as it is described by Shusterman. It also appears more stable. To me Lyotard’s application of the Kantian notion of the “aesthetic 24 Schusterman, 159–160. 25 Ibid., 161.

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community” seems closer to the situations occurring in my geographical and cultural proximity. Such a community is “always remaining in statu nascendi or moriendi, always keeping open the issue of whether or not it actually exists. This kind of consensus is definitely nothing but a cloud of community.”26 My views obviously arise from a much less stable social, political and cultural framework than that existing in some of the centers philosophical or otherwise. It may well happen that when Europe, Central and Eastern parts included, attains general stability and becomes more internationalized, such an opinion will no longer reflect our historical and cultural situation and will thus be changed. In some of the countries under discussion, Slovenia included, such a process is already way. It appears to me that for a philosophy, or any similar theoretical or artistic activity, it is practically obligatory to work and exist simultaneously in the national and the international space. This is certainly necessary within a small culture, since such a combination also provides a critical feedback that the smaller national framework often lacks, because of the limited number of active members in a certain field. Such limitations obviously are not features of the larger national or the broader international framework. Each of us has to decide, within these various frameworks, where to draw the line between them. A philosophy used for nationalist aims only, on the other hand, in the long term signifies a regression: it turns philosophy into some form of ideology, leading to its professional insignificance.27 The forced or fashionable internationalization that we encounter in many Second and Third World cultures or nations is also problematic, for it eclectically and uncritically transplants theories arising from and existing in a different social and cultural milieu.28 There is of course no need to prevent such influences; what is needed, instead, is their philosophical assessment and explanation of the problems they deal with and the responses to them.29 The case of philosophical schools may provide a good 26 27

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Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 38. A visible symptom of such a regression is a frequent restoration of obsolete or very traditional philosophies, with main references being national authors or those dead for at least half a century, with no mention of contemporary thinkers. In aesthetics and related areas, for example, this would entail reversion to a state previous to that which had been described in 1972 by Revue d’esthétique. In this case the situation is the reverse of that described in the previous note: only very recent authors are quoted or mentioned. The most recent example of such a fashionable topic was that of postmodernity/­postmodernism which often eradicated and made obsolete much of the previous more academic philosophy in various Eastern European countries and elsewhere, thus proving that the market of symbolic goods strikingly resembles that of other commodities.

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example of what a contemporary productive combination of the national and the international in smaller cultures could be: one arising from the national and existing and competing simultaneously in the international framework. It was on the basis of “schools” that philosophy in the past often developed and gained recognition. In smaller cultures that was, and is, the stage usually attained: either dispersed individual philosophers or a “school.” In larger cultures individuals or schools either achieved hegemony and became the exclusive philosophy or coalesced into a cloud of philosophical communities which simultaneously or later achieved the status of a philosophical “empire.” Due to the contemporary globalization of culture and its simultaneously local character I would venture the prediction that the emergence of philosophical schools (no matter of what origin) will again become a more and more frequent philosophical occurrence.

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Global Aesthetics and the IAA/AIE (2002) I am very grateful to my friend and colleague Professor Lars-Olof Ahlberg for giving me this opportunity to speak here and have. a chance to sketch some issues relating to contemporary aesthetics. Since I am currently the President of the International Association for Aesthetics I thought offering some views on this issue from the perspective of this organization may not be inappropriate.1 My first direct encounter with the International Association for Aesthetics began twenty years ago when I took part in the IXth International Congress for Aesthetics in Dubrovnik in 1980.2 It was my first opportunity to meet and listen to a series of philosophers and aestheticians whose works I had read or whom I knew by reputation. The congress itself was somewhat hectic and for me its main import was to meet personally a number of aestheticians from around the world, many of whom I have remained in regular contact with over the following two decades. Since then, international congresses for aesthetics have taken place in Montreal, Nottingham, Madrid, Lahti and Ljubljana, with each of them being different, dependent upon the local organisers, their cultural setting and tradition, and the aestheticians, philosophers and others they viewed .as important and relevant for their own aesthetic tradition. Viewed from the perspective of these four-year and, later, three-year intervals, it appeared as if aesthetics almost reinvented itself each time. Each of these gatherings had a very strong local flavor; often, also, the majority of participants at one congress would never be seen at another, this being sometimes true also of some of its main organisers. This last feature is usually not encountered in other academic disciplines, which tend to be more uniform, and whose active members tend to partake in most of the events of their international associations. There are many reasons why this is different in the case of aesthetics. The first is that the International Association for Aesthetics certainly is not the only international organization devoted to aesthetics. There is an International Association for Empirical Aesthetics, which brings together 1 This lecture was delivered on 30 May 2000 in the Department of ALM, Aesthetics and ­Cultural Studies at Uppsala University. 2 The locations of the Congresses of the International Association for Aesthetics, from 1913 to the present, can be found on the IAA’s website: https://iaaesthetics.org/previous-congresses -of-the-iaa/. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_022

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psychologists and other professionals interested in more empirical research into art and aesthetic phenomena. “While the IAA/AIE tends to be oriented mainly towards philosophical aesthetics, in the organization devoted to empirical aesthetics a philosophical perspective on aesthetics and its subject-matter isn’t the main issue of discussion, nor are philosophy, philosophical aesthetics and the arts and literature the main academic background of its members. These are mostly psychology, education and sociology instead, with these disciplines determining the more empirical, experimental, and quantitative, even laboratory research goals and hence the interests of its members. Another international organization is one that has a very similar name, i.e. International Society for Aesthetics. There also exists a series of other international organizations and associations, the orientation and interests of which depend upon local, regional or personal interests. Such are organizations devoted to semiotics, poetics, etc., and last but not least, philosophy proper, which in the past considered aesthetics as an integral part of philosophy. The second cause for the ever-changing aesthetics landscape, when viewed from the vantage point of international congresses, is its strong dependency upon local cultural circumstances. Since art is its predominant subject, in some parts of the world this implies a strong link of aesthetics with local culture and related phenomena. In Central and Eastern Europe art and culture tended to be strongly associated with national issues, so culture designated mainly national culture, and was linked to national political issues. The introduction of socialism in this area resulted in previously inexistent connections and similarities or, in other cases, in the dissolution of such connections. Take, for example, cultural and academic links and exchanges between Hungary and Cuba which would, in any other circumstances, probably not be thought of: the severing of such links between East and West Germany, or the influence of Chinese political ideas on Albanian culture and philosophers (with this influence in the sixties and seventies existing of course also in other places, in Paris, for example). In the former Soviet bloc countries aesthetics tended to be regarded as “science,” the reason for this being, on the one hand, to delimit it from possible or real ideological connotations and, on the other, the continuation of the Central and East European tradition of treating the humanities— under the strong influence and in accordance with the broad German notion of Wissenschaft—as equals of natural sciences. At such congresses and other similar reunions a “diplomatic immunity” was granted to representatives of various philosophies and hence aesthetic theories, whether their differences were based on theoretical or political considerations. Aesthetics in the eighties still seemed a very academic discipline, i.e. one that was concerned with notions of beauty or the essence of art and that

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was, generally speaking, poorly informed about contemporary art. Too often an aesthetician knew much about aesthetics and its history, yet far less about art and its history or its present. Until the eighties aesthetics successfully avoided poking its nose into issues raised by the ongoing debates about postmodernism, Critical Theory, poststructuralism, deconstruction, or psychoanalysis. It was only when it became completely impossible to avoid these themes and when other disciplines of the humanities, such as comparative literature, language departments, sociology, the newly-born cultural and gender studies and even art history (which was another rather traditional area of the humanities), etc; entered this academic arena, that aesthetics began to change. Before, it used to be a discipline devoted mainly to historical issues of its own self or of its subject-matter, which meant either natural or artistic beauty, this mostly meaning traditional or classical art and the renderings of nature it offered. Within the German cultural space the interaction between philosophy, aesthetic ideas and art was facilitated by the tradition going back to the romantics, Hegel, Nietzsche and by philosophers such as Theodor Adorno or Ernst Bloch, for example, who undisputedly were philosophers, although the latter two mostly avoided the notion and the term “aesthetics” for it denoted for them a philosophical discipline and hence a part of a philosophical system which both wished to avoid. It was thus all right to use the adjective, as in “aesthetic theory,” but inappropriate to use the notion of aesthetics except when relating to the artists’ theory, as when relating to “surrealist aesthetics,” for example. I shall speak a little later briefly of two concrete cases, those of Critical Theory and postmodernism and their relation to aesthetics, as presented in some of the international congresses. In France aesthetics turned from a central realm of philosophical discussion in the forties and fifties into an increasingly isolated endeavor, with the few exceptions being the legacy, in the sixties and seventies, of Maurice ­Merleau-Ponty (his untimely death occurred in 1961), and the work of an active member of the IAA/AIE, Mikel Dufrenne. In addition, perhaps, there was the work of Olivier Revault d’Allonnes and a few others. In recent years some authors, such as Luc Ferry and Gérard Genette have resuscitated aesthetics, while much other research under the name of aesthetics falls under “special aesthetics,” and is devoted to theater, music, and other artistic genres. In France, as in much of Germany, it was structuralism and its critique of phenomenology and traditional philosophy and its systems that criticised and finally, with the aid of post-structuralism, almost delegitimised aesthetics, and notions such as the artwork, art, and creativity. A special segment of activities related to aesthetics is so-called “la poïétique,” initiated in the seventies by

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René Passeron and devoted to the study of creativity, with art representing the exemplary case thereof. In my opinion aesthetics in the Anglo-American cultural space is being transformed from a previously almost exclusively analytical one into a plethora of trends, the most distinct ones—beside the traditional analytical one— probably being pragmatist and environmentalist aesthetics. It is nonetheless true that so far as I can judge, aesthetics, especially in the United States, is increasingly turning into the usual global mixture of different theoretical discourses which are devoted to issues as varied as Kant, on the one hand, and soap operas, on the other. Similar observations apply to the rest of the world, with issues being raised there being dependent mostly upon cultural influences that are exerted by the great cultural and philosophical traditions and by local circumstances and their requirements and possibilities. An interesting feature of contemporary philosophy and aesthetics is the very frequent coexistence of disparate orientations within a small cultural space such as that of Latin American countries, Australian, Canadian, Central European countries or some northern European ones. Where a few decades ago an exclusive orientation reigned, we find today a plenitude of theories, philosophical orientations and interests, each of them pursuing a dialogue with similar individuals large distances away, while at the same time not being interested in or ignorant of academic activities taking place much closer under the name of the same or a very similar academic discipline or activity. Such a situation is not, as it would seem at first glance, dependent upon intellectual ignorance or short-sightedness. More probably the reason for it lies in the rapid transfiguration of the humanities, aesthetics and philosophy included, wherein a disciplinary designation by itself tells little of its actual content. A tendency which is probably unique to the present moment of the history of aesthetics and may be regarded as a parallel to the influx of non-­philosophic or non-traditional theories into aesthetics, is the way in which many cultures which previously tended to accept and assimilate European and perhaps American philosophical and aesthetic theories, have in the last decade or so begun to dissociate themselves from them and started to develop their own indigenous ones, these being devoted either to those related to the former or completely different and dissociated from them. This is especially true of Japanese, African and even Russian aesthetics. In the last case this is predominantly due to political changes occurring after 1989 and the subsequent discrediting of Marxist theories which were then replaced with the other Russian tradition, i.e. that of the pre-October period, with a special emphasis being put on Russian pre-twentieth century religious philosophy, mysticism, etc.

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In the other two aforementioned cases—I could mention some others, the Korean or the Chinese, for example—what is being developed is theory which accentuates its indigenous cultural specifics, and does so. at the expense of the previous predominance of Western philosophy and aesthetics. An example of an African step in this direction was the paper presented by Yacouba Conate from the Ivory Coast at the International Congress of Aesthetics in Ljubljana (1998). Conate noted two features of the Western approach to African art, the first being ignorance of the names of the artists (at the expense of their works which are thereby treated as ethnological and not artistic artifacts) and, secondly, the belittling view Hegel (one could mention Kant in this context as well) had of Africa and its cultural possibilities.3 A different and more elaborate argument concerning the same issue is offered by the Japanese aesthetician Sasaki Ken-ichi. He thus begins his 1998 book by writing: “I lived through a real critical change in my philosophical life in Maastricht.” (In the nineties Sasaki used to teach occasionally in the Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.) I awoke to myself. If it is exaggerated to speak of “awaking to myself,’’ I at least noticed my cultural background. This awareness brought me to a radical turn in my aesthetics concerning its orientation and methodology. Most Western people do not know that philosophical study in Japan is almost completely oriented towards Western philosophy. It is in this climate that I have long been engaging in an investigation of Western aesthetics, just like most of my colleagues. The remarkable thing is that we Japanese do not study Western philosophy as a hetero-culture but as a universal culture, a conviction which itself comes from Western philosophy. Even under this orientation, our cultural identity is not completely silenced: it pronounces itself in the choice of certain topics, in stressing special notions, in giving a particular kind of interpretation, and so on. However, this characteristic voice remains unnoticed in most cases, because we believe profoundly in the universality of the philosophy we are doing.4

3 Cf. Yacouba Conate, “Art, Philosophie et Modernité: L’Afrique en Effet,” Filozofski vestnik 20/2 (1999): 37–47. 4 Sasaki Ken-ichi, Aesthetics on Non-Western Principles: Version 0.5 (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Akademie, 1998), 3.

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Sasaki then approaches topics specific to or typical of Japanese culture and environment: anti-urban culture in Japan, nature, townscape and landscape, or the unique features of visuality in Japanese culture. Let me now return to the International Association for Aesthetics and its distinguishing characteristics. As I mentioned earlier, I would like to discuss a concrete analysis I made some time ago in which I tried to discern the role played in aesthetics by Critical Theory and postmodernism, i.e. two notions fairly established in the humanities and social sciences since the late seventies. I have taken them into consideration only a decade and a half, basing my analysis on the papers presented in the International Congresses for Aesthetics from Dubrovnik (1980) to Lahti (1995). The Ljubljana congress (1998) occurred when the notion of postmodernism had already lost much of its significance or become very generally accepted, so it didn’t seem to me to warrant a discussion here. The period of fifteen years may not seem to be a very long one, but it nonetheless allows certain generalizations concerning the topics and issues raised at such gatherings. All the usual suspicions in regard to such an endeavor are as valid as ever: as already noted, at such congresses a random group of people gathers, the organizers have different criteria for including or excluding certain papers, the venue of the congress influences its cultural framework and the national or regional character of participants, and so on. But, then, cannot we argue just as justifiably that similar, if not equal limitations, apply to many other events on various symbolic markets, such as publishing, university curricula, etc.? They perhaps apply to a lesser extent, but the difference is, I hope, not substantial enough to make an endeavor such as the one intended completely meaningless. On the other hand, I think that a sketch of the aforementioned changes concerning the presence and the influence of Critical Theory on aesthetics may be illuminating and may also reveal some broader features relevant to aesthetics and its present and future status. It is rather obvious that aesthetics, as presented at these international congresses, was, on the one hand, dependent upon the history of the IAA/AIE (the English and French of its official title themselves pointing to the historical frame of this organization) and, on the other, on the intrinsic developments of art and, especially, philosophy.5 It is especially this latter aspect that is of 5 Some illuminating information about the history of the IAA/AIE may be found in older issues of Revue d’esthétique, The British Journal of Aesthetics, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Especially useful are Revue d’esthétique 1–2 (1972); Richard Shusterman’s article “Aesthetics between Nationalism and Internationalism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51/2 (1993); Le grandi correnti dell’estetica novecentesca, ed. Grazia Marchiano,

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interest to me, for it reflects better than the former a more global and more objective situation concerning the issues aestheticians over the world have found relevant or at least of interest. One striking feature of world aesthetics as presented through the aforementioned congresses and concurrent publications is the slow dissolution of national traditions and of traditions of the “philosophical empires.”6 The extant mixture, intertwining and interdependence are so much more noticeable since they only became discernible about a decade ago. Since the IAA/ AIE has been, to a certain extent, dominated by the analytical tradition, which is far removed from the critical one, this is perhaps not so striking after all. There is an underlying reason for this preponderance of analytical aesthetics: it is mainly this tradition which retains the belief that works of art as well as (other) aesthetic phenomena are to be analyzed and theorized per se and not dissolved within society, intertextuality, discourse, and so on, a consequence of this being that it is only within this tradition that the main object of discussion is the notion of “art.” These two strongly interrelated specific features predestine analytical aesthetics to be, to a certain measure even today, the hegemonic aesthetic position. Analytical aesthetics is one of the few contemporary traditions that still subscribe to many of the prerogatives of traditional aesthetics. A series of topics that arose in recent years have caused a reorientation in the interests of many aestheticians. Modernity, postmodernism, and politicized avantgarde are just a few issues which have necessitated a less rigorous and less specialized approach of contemporary aesthetics. It may have been the emergence of structuralism in the sixties that commenced the slow disintegration of traditional philosophy and its various “disciplines.” The challenge initially offered by structuralism appeared not to concern aesthetics to any significant extent: instead of attacking it, it bypassed or ignored it, leaving it seemingly unscathed and unperturbed. It was hence the emergence of poststructuralism and especially of what has been loosely called “Critical Theory” which effected (and also revealed) a more substantial change within aesthetics. In this respect aesthetics shared the destiny of academic philosophy. Of this, aesthetics was a “branch,” “discipline,” a “part” or, in Paul Valéry’s memorable words, it inhabited “a wing of the palace called philosophy.” It was probably postmodernism which played the role of the catalyst for the more recent revaluation and reorientation of aesthetics. Postmodernism, from its inception in the writings of Charles Jencks since 1975 to those of Lyotard and Habermas’s (Milano: Guerini 1991), a series of similar recent publications in the U.K., U.S. and elsewhere and, finally, the IAA/AIE Newsletter. 6 Schusterman, 161.

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critique from 1980 on of the historical reality this term denoted and the ensuing polarization between those “for” and “against” postmodernism, conflated two important topics which resisted a pure and simple disciplinary distinction into general philosophy on the one hand, and aesthetics, on the other. The first topic, that of modernity and postmodernity or the postmodern, could have been deemed to be predominantly a philosophical one, with the other, that of postmodernism and modernism, being seemingly mostly of concern to aesthetics. Nonetheless this patently was not so, for both issues really formed an almost inseparable whole. A similar observation was of course already explicitly made by the authors of the Frankfurt School and even thinkers such as Heidegger. The reconsideration of modernity emerged in its most striking form from a reconsideration of art (avantgarde art included) and then spread not only into general artistic practice where it resulted in the postmodern detachment, but also into what would previously have been called ontology, general philosophy, epistemology, gnoseology, and so on. It also denigrated the division and the hierarchy of disciplines inherent to academic philosophy. There is no need to mention that the beginnings of such a procedure are to be found not only in Jacques Derrida’s early works, but already in Marx. It is not this history which is my concern here. I wish only to point out that at least in continental Europe, and elsewhere where an influence of the continental tradition can be encountered, this whole line of thought, starting inconspicuously with structuralism, continuing overtly with poststructuralism of the seventies. (which already showed a visible influence on aesthetics by, at least, preventing it to continue as if nothing had happened with its emergence) continues with contemporary postmodernism and Critical Theory. These exercise considerable influence on what has formerly been a series of separate traditional aesthetic traditions (the German, the French and the Anglo-Saxon, for example). It is not my aim to define either poststructuralism (basically an English name for theory arising from France) or Critical Theory (basically a mixture of various approaches and theories concentrating upon issues of class, gender and race and historically arising from the Frankfurt School).7 What I am interested in is the influence of authors as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault who today continue to exert an unprecedented authority upon traditional philosophical disciplines, aesthetics included. One of the consequences of the current reconfiguration of the realm of philosophy (and this reconfiguration is certainly not limited to philosophy alone, as witnessed by the case of history, art history, anthropology or cultural studies) is the elimination of 7 Max Horkheimer was the first to use the term in 1937 in his essay “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie.”

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the previous distinct hierarchy among various “branches” of philosophy, with aesthetics being one of these. The critique aimed at master narratives effected also a greater equality and tolerance amongst various theoretical and philosophical discourses, an aim and a practice well illustrated by the incredible amount of interest and commentary generated by Benjamin’s works and his way of presenting issues, many of which could hardly ever have become a topic for philosophical or aesthetic discussion in the recent past. Much of this, of course, may have to do with fleeting fashion. Nonetheless, ideas and methods developed and employed by authors of the Frankfurt School, as well as ideas from more recent theorists who concentrate not on aesthetics but on aesthetic issues, have gained not only recognition but broad influence within the aestheticians’ community worldwide. This observation applies to a different extent in different countries and has by no means a universal value, yet in the last decade and a half at the IAA/AIE congresses, the presence of the Critical Theory has rapidly grown, a phenomenon which may be worthy of further consideration. At the Dubrovnik congress in 1980 nobody wrote about modernity, postmodernism, or issues such as the aesthetic effect or feminist theory, in spite of some of these topics already becoming common currency elsewhere.8 An interesting question was put forward by Stefan Morawski in his intimations on the “end of aesthetics.”9 In it he referred to Herbert Marcuse and Adorno and, although defending aesthetics against its critics who proclaimed its death, ended his paper with a cryptic admission that art and aesthetics may be losing their struggle against a complete loss of meaning. Most of the papers which questioned aesthetics, Morawski’s included, did so within the framework of what I would call the “Duchamp effect,” that is, within the boundaries set up by Duchamp’s readymades and the challenges they offered to traditional artworks, bringing us hence to the issues raised by Arthur Danto in regard to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes,10 in other words, to the issues which concern mostly neo-avantgarde art and its attack upon the institution of art. In 1984, at the Xth International Congress for Aesthetics in Montreal, Kant emerged as one of the more frequent points of reference. (This trend then continued at the next congresses.) Adorno, Benjamin and Habermas were also topics of various papers, but mostly within the context of historical scholarly studies, or appropriated into a different cultural tradition. Marc Jimenez 8 9

I am relying here on the published proceedings of the congresses. Stefan Morawski, “Razmisljanja o ‘kraju estetike,’” in Stvaralastvo I ljudski svet: ­Physis-Techne-Poiesis, ed. Milan Damjanović (Belgrade: Rad, 1983), 38–44. 10 Cf. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard ­University Press, 1981), esp. vii–viii and 208.

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spoke of Adorno’s “negative aesthetics” and rightfully conceded that “Adorno’s aesthetic theory … records one of the most characteristic tendencies of contemporary aesthetic discourse: the tendency of its dissolution as an element of a closed theory, as an appendice to a developed global system or as its extension.”11 If in Montreal Joseph Margolis criticized deconstruction (and was one of the few to say anything about concurrent philosophical and theoretical developments outside of the narrow sphere of aesthetics), then in 1988 at the Xlth International Congress for Aesthetics in Nottingham postmodernism became a topic of various papers. In practically all cases (and the same was true of its evaluation at the next congress in Madrid) postmodernism was received favorably. It is not impossible that in this way aestheticians also implicitly showed some of their frequent uncritical acceptance of everything proclaimed to be “art,” a feature common to much of recent traditional aesthetics which practically abandoned normativity and settled for a purely descriptive approach (such as that of the institutional theory of art). Needless to say, Benjamin remained not only a frequent reference, but also the topic of various papers. Adorno was defended against Peter Bürger’s critique and was the other main figure from the Frankfurt School to warrant a separate presentation.12 It was this process, the development of tendencies as described by Jimenez in Montreal in 1984, which characterized the next congress in Madrid in 1992. This comes as no surprise since the topic of the congress itself had to do with modernity. Quite a few papers were devoted to postmodernism, and again to Adorno, Benjamin, and avantgarde art. Another feature of the Madrid congress was the abundance of papers devoted to the visual arts and architecture and hence to less general topics, something that distinguished this congress from the previous three. It is also in this respect that the presence of a “critical” approach was strongly felt, an impression strengthened by the plenary papers by Norman Bryson and Hal Foster. At the Lahti congress in 1995, it was mainly the topics of the symposia, devoted to cultural identity, the body and to feminist aesthetics, which witnessed to the consciousness that such issues have become increasingly relevant for contemporary aesthetics. They pushed aesthetics further away from

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Marc Jimenez, “L’esthétique negative,” in The Reasons of Art/L’Art a ses raisons, ed. Peter McCormick (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1985), 167. See Lambert Zuidervaart, “Normative Aesthetics and Contemporary Art: Burger’s Critique of Adorno,” in XIth International Congress in Aesthetics. Proceedings, ed. Richard Woodfield (Nottingham: Nottingham Polytechnic Press, 1990), 242–245.

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the recently dominant traditional (and what appeared to be almost eternal) aesthetic issues towards new questions and onto less trodden paths. Aesthetics as presented and practiced at various congresses has needed a surprisingly long time to accept as relevant the issues raised by poststructuralism, Critical Theory, and postmodern theory. As Jimenez observed in 1984 in connection with Adamo’s theory, the latter’s approach was becoming increasingly common within contemporary aesthetics. It appears that in this respect aesthetics was hesitantly sharing the destiny of other disciplines of the academic philosophy. As far as one can judge from the present perspective, although this tendency may have caused it in recent years to lose some of its analytical rigor, it has also effected a greater respect for contemporary art and a less generalizing discourse which is, within the contemporary cultural framework, becoming increasingly obsolete in the eyes of many. A feature of Critical Theory, be it Adorno’s or Terry Eagleton’s, is first of all to oppose aesthetics “as an element of a closed theory, as an appendice to a developed global system or as its extension,” to use Marc Jimenez’s words. Although this feature of Critical Theory is bound to be opposed by traditional aesthetics, it is perhaps not its only essential characteristic. This would equally be the concept of mediation, the Hegelian notion that every phenomenon is historically and socially mediated, a view also causing natural beauty to be supplanted by art as the point of reference for any aesthetic theory. Aesthetics hence not only ceases to be a “branch” of philosophy but also becomes the activity of philosophizing on art, instead of being a transparent meta-discourse applied equally validly on natural and artistic beauty. The consequences of integrating Critical Theory into aesthetics in its traditional sense, whether that of systematic philosophy or that of the analytical kind related to the concurrent art history of the Vienna School, may today appear less questionable than a decade ago, although the two arise from opposing philosophical frameworks. Where they differ is the value attributed to what is often called “metaphysics,” but could just as well be designated as traditional philosophy; where they probably agree is that philosophy is a continuous activity and hence a form of practice (although such an admission in itself would perhaps witness to a certain anti-traditionalism). It is this latter feature that has until now made possible what already in Lahti became a productive interaction between the two, for it enabled aesthetics to rejuvenate itself instead of persisting within the increasingly narrow areas of certain arts, losing sight of broader issues or degenerating into generalising totalizations, the validity of which is spread as thin as these are broad. If this has been a short overview of some of the issues relevant for aesthetics as an increasingly global phenomenon but concerned with its past, what can

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be said of its future? Our next two congresses will be in Tokyo (in 2001) and Rio (in 2004), respectively. At first sight this would seem to denote a further “de-Europeanization” of aesthetics, although most probably changes will not be swift or very pronounced. First of all, because especially in Latin America the European continental tradition is almost as influential as in Europe itself and, secondly, because the relation between various Asian or Eastern philosophical and aesthetic theories and the European or Western ones is still that of coexistence and only rarely that of fusion. When a synthesis of the two occurs, then we shall witness real and profound changes extending from culture to aesthetics. And finally, it is difficult to see how aesthetics, despite its numerous, and sometimes contradictory or, at least, disparate historical designations, can cease being a typically European endeavor. It is the Western conceptual framework that, so far, has determined the contours of any aesthetics, and other conceptual frameworks had to adapt themselves to it. A profound change will be necessary to change this, for it can only be done—as far as I can foresee—by drastically changing the extant meanings of aesthetics or, the second option, discovering, rediscovering or reinterpreting the legacy and the ongoing theoretical activities of non-Western aesthetic ideas and theories in ways vastly different from the past or present ones.

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Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition (c. 2003) 1

Historical Avantgardes and Postmodernism

One of the fundamental artistic categories of the twentieth century was avantgarde art. Although it was not necessarily linked to the political avantgardes (and social theories, philosophies of history, and ideologies on which they relied) it shared with them its belief and orientation towards the future. In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard launched the thesis of the end of master narratives.1 This observation applies well to all the major ideologies of the previous century, be they of political or other kinds. It is generally agreed that the postmodern or the postindustrial age, or the epoch of multinational capital, to follow Ernst Mandel and Fredric Jameson,2 is also an age of pluralism. Numerous authors in the 1980s, ranging from Zygmunt Bauman3 to Wolfgang Welsch4 have praised the historic potentials of this new age, on the verge of which at least we stand today. The historical or classical artistic avantgardes aimed at the social totality and as a matter of principle attempted to transcend the realm of pure art they viewed as academic, bourgeois, and passéist activity, to use an expression favored by the Italian futurists. The same observation applies to essential segments of the so-called “Russian experiment in art,” especially to constructivism, suprematism and productivism. The desire to bridge the abyss between art and “life” caused new artistic forms to emerge, forms which appear today no less authoritarian and dogmatic than those carried out in the name of political revolutionary aims.5 It was exactly this revolutionary fervor, this desire for exclusiveness, that made the historical artistic avantgardes what they were 1 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff ­Bennington and Brian Massuni (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). On Jameson’s use of Mandel’s theory see especially 35–6. 3 Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). 4 See Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne (Weinheim: UCH Acta humaniora, 1987); and Welsch, “Modernité et postmodernité,” Les Cahiers de Philosophie 6 (1988): 21–31. 5 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, trans. C. Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_023

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and what they remained: an original, creative and unconditional art form, which often late, but no less thoroughly, determined or influenced much of the twentieth century art and culture. In this respect the artistic avantgardes of the First World War period fully belonged to, and shared, the principles and norms of the master narratives of that century: they were equally exclusive, adamant and uncompromising in their self-promotion. Even some of the neo-­ avantgarde activities from the sixties and early seventies fit into this scenario. The performances of the Austrian “actionist” artist Hermann Nitsch for example, or those of his fellow performance artist Günter Brus, revealed not only extreme violence but a similar uncompromising fervor as well. Lyotard diagnosed well a segment of the massive social and historical upheaval represented by the emergence of postmodernity and postmodernism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the end of the global political polarization, the visible ending of which was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Was it, under such conditions, still possible to carry out “total” artistic activities which would promote and implement the same rigorous and uncompromising standards as did the historical avantgardes and perhaps some of the neo-avantgardes after the Second World War? I wish to argue that although such ideas were present (also possibly because the previous artistic avantgardes represented a familiar and acceptable ideal) and although their authors promoted a similar uncompromising rigor, they neither were nor could they be implemented. What I shall discuss is art of the transitional period from socialism (especially its late stage) into postsocialism in various European and other countries, i.e. countries which were in the past designated as communist, be they in Europe, America or Asia. From the early seventies on, in some of these countries a specific art emerged, which often followed the traditions of the historical avantgardes (and often explicitly referred to, or quoted from them) and which, like its “Western” counterpart, furthermore fulfilled most of the preconditions which the Polish aesthetician Stefan Morawski, for example, lists as those typical for historical (or what he calls “classical”) avantgardes: The first: … The principle of mimesis is toppled, categories and kinds of art [are] mixed, the category of beauty [is] rejected … The second: official outlooks are questioned … […] The fourth: there is no avantgarde without intentional underscored self-reflection, without theoretical statements … The fifth: the avantgarde operates in a group fashion …

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The sixth: the avantgarde is marked with a style of life filled with blasphemy and scandal which extends its real attitudes and contestation drives into the domain of manners.6 From among the six essential distinguishing traits of the classical avantgardes there is but one which contemporary “avantgarde” art lacks. It is the third on Morawski’s list, which I omitted from the quotation above: the rejection of “artistic and non-artistic tradition,” or “fascination with the present and orientation on the future.”7 It is exactly the lack of this trait that distinguishes the art discussed here from all previous artistic avantgardes of the 20th century. This art is no longer oriented toward the future nor is it fascinated with the present: it gazes toward the past instead, borrows and appropriates, quotes and alludes to. It comments upon, not sanctions, nor does it attempt to assist in changing the world (which, I should add, does not prevent it occasionally to assist in changing it nonetheless). Moreover, while in most cases possessing all five distinguishing characteristics noted above, it “does not require and does not strive to attain exclusivity. Even more: the very desire to attain such a status would make such avantgarde art obsolete.”8 While many authors called such contemporary art simply “postmodern,” surprisingly few attempted to be more precise and to point out the distinguishing characteristics of these contemporary similes of the traditional avantgardes. Art critics who were attentive to these differences have included such art within the “trans-avantgarde”9 and “post-avantgarde”10 art, although such designations point mainly to the transgressive character of this type of postmodern art and not to the art possessing accentuated politicized features which for the most part distinguish this socialist variant from its Western counterparts. In my view such specific art occurred in various socialist countries between 6

Stefan Morawski, “On the Avantgarde, Neo-avantgarde and the Case of Postmodernism,” Literary Studies in Poland 21 (1989): 85–7. 7 Ibid., 85. 8 Aleš Erjavec, “Postmodernism and the Artistic Avantgardes,” in La modernidad como estetica. XII congreso internacional de estética (Madrid: Instituto de estetica y teoría de las artes, 1993), 166. 9 Achille Bonito Oliva, The International Trans-Avantgarde (Milano: Giancarlo Politi, 1982). 10 “All the avantgardes of the past believed that humanity was going somewhere, and it was their joy andduty to discover the new land and see that people arrived there on time; the Post-Avantgarde believes that humanity is going in several directions at once.” — Charles Jencks, “The Post-Avantgarde,” Art and Design. The Post-Avantgarde; Profile 4 (London: Academy Editions, 1987), 20.

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1972 and the beginning of the nineties and hence represents a distinct form of postmodernism. I shall call such art postsocialist art.11 2

Postsocialism and Postmodernism

In his analysis of recent and contemporary Russian culture Mikhail Epstein observes that the “‘communist future” has become a thing of the past, while the feudal and bourgeois “past” approaches us from the direction where we had expected to meet the future.”12 Such an understanding of the past and present strongly separates the cultural ambiance of twentieth-century Russia from that of other “communist” countries: in Europe the majority of them experienced the Enlightenment and predominantly perceived themselves as a part of the West, accepting its belief in historical progress and the possibility of infinite development often identified with modernity: “In the vision of modernity, only the starting-point was more or less firmly fixed. The rest, precisely because of its undetermined character, appeared as a field of design, action and struggle.”13 Postmodernism, although today already somewhat out of fashion, is a key term in my discussion of specific art forms and trends in postsocialist countries. In practically all instances postmodernism in postsocialist countries was apprehended as a positive phenomenon. It was met with some hesitancy in the case of Cuba for it was identified with the culture of the United States; in China too, postmodernism carried a somewhat ambiguous meaning, because of its complicated relation to modernism and modernity. Postsocialism, in the sense in which I employ the term, is the equivalent of the “first transition, away from communism,”14 of the period defined more by a 11

12 13 14

See Aleš Erjavec, “Post-modernism and the Post-socialist Condition,” in Cultural Dilemmas of Post-Communist Societies, eds. Aldona Jawowska and Marian Kempny (Warsaw: IFiS Publishers, 1994), 101–104; “Avantgarde and the Retro-Garde,” Issues in Contemporary Culture, 1 (Maastricht, April 1995): 21–8; “Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition,” M’ARS, 8/ 1–2 (L1996), 52–8; “El Postmodernismo y la Condicion Postsocialista,” Estética e Historia del Arte (Santiago: Facultad de Artes, Universidad de Chile, 1999), 41–73; “Postsocialism in Art and Culture: The Visual Arts,” Proceedings of the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, Pacific Division (Pacific Grove, California: ASA, 1999), 85–98; Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Mikhail N. Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism & Contemporary Russian Culture, trans. Anesa Miller Pogacar (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), xi. Bauman, 116. Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 63.

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lack of description than by a firm conceptual designation. This postsocialism is highly reminiscent of the notion of postmodernity as suggested by the Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: “[T]he only solid and indubitable accomplishment of the post-modernist debate has been thus far the proclamation of the end of modernism … What has happened in recent years could be articulated as the appearance of a vantage point which allows the view of modernity itself as an enclosed object, an essentially complete product, an episode of history, with an end as much as a beginning.”15 What happened in European socialist countries was a slow and initially almost imperceptible crack in their social and political fabric. In the huge, vast and centrally controlled Soviet Union it began in the early seventies and continued in the eighties under Gorbachev. It ended in the late eighties when social changes were not only experienced in everyday life, but also officially and politically sanctioned. Such a process, although much accelerated, occurred in the eighties in countries ranging from Czechoslovakia and Poland, to Hungary and Bulgaria, with the few still existing exceptions relevant for the topic of this lecture (Cuba, the remnant of the former Yugoslavia and, with reservations, China) tackling the problem of “leaving socialism behind without really leaving it behind.” I am mentioning these well-known facts and issues to highlight that countries such as the Soviet Union, the former Soviet bloc countries of Europe, Yugoslavia, and even Cuba and China, in spite of existing on three different continents, possessing different histories, cultures, and mutual relations (or, rather, in the period of late socialism an increasing lack thereof), nonetheless possessed certain common features, one of them often also being the art that emerged at the time of the disintegration of their previous political and social systems. This art strongly resembled that of traditional twentieth century avantgardes and was frequently also designated by that name. If in the recent years many of these countries shared very similar problems such as a crisis of values, a loss of identity, commercialization, nationalistic ideas and a resurgence of sympathy for the former political system, it may also be valid to claim something else: since at that historical point which in these countries marks the beginning of their “transition” into capitalism these countries also possessed a similar cultural and ideological legacy, from it emerged similar kinds of post-utopian artistic endeavors that were not limited to socialist realism which until then in most of them was the official artistic doctrine. During the late socialist period such endeavors emanated spontaneously and often 15

Bauman, 125, 117.

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with no visible mutual connection. During this relatively short period, which in some countries was limited to a decade and more, in others to a few years, artists and their works, a little like at the time of the October Revolution, Paris of 1968, or the late sixties in the United States, sometimes played a crucial and visible social and political role. There were, of course, exceptions: in East Germany the only artists who developed postmodern art were those who emigrated to West Germany, starting there the “Neue Wilde” movement. In Poland the political and economic crisis in the eighties was so severe that postmodernism was only a vague idea, more potent among philosophers and writers than among visual artists. The result was that there the legacy of the non-politicized conceptual art from the sixties remained almost intact well into the late eighties and even into the early nineties. In Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring of 1968 the regime was so oppressive that very few visual artists dared to invest their works with overt political views. The Czech artist Milan Knízák was jailed almost three hundred times, while the other prime Czech exception, Milan Kunc, has lived in the West since 1969. It was instead up to the writers, such as Milan Kundera, and playwrights, such as Václav Havel, to criticize old political ideas and promote new ones. As Slavoj Žižek writes: The most sublime image that emerged in the political upheavals of the last years—and the term “sublime” is to be conceived here in the strictest Kantian sense—was undoubtedly the unique picture from the time of the violent overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania: the rebels waving the national flag with the red star, the communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organizing principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole in its center. It is difficult to imagine a more salient index of the “open” character of a historical situation “in its becoming,” as Kierkegaard would have put it, of that intermediate phase when the former Master-Signifier, although it has already lost its hegemonic power, has not yet been replaced by the new one … [T]he masses who poured into the streets of Bucharest “experienced” the situation as “open” … they participated in the unique intermediate state of passage from one discourse (social link) to another, when, for a brief, passing moment, the hole in the big Other, the symbolic order, became visible. The enthusiasm which carried them was literally the enthusiasm over this hole, not yet hegemonized by any positive ideological ­project; all ideological appropriations (from the nationalistic to

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the ­liberal-­democratic) entered the stage afterwards and endeavored to “­kidnap” the process which originally was not their own.16 This is an essential part of the “postsocialist condition”: the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the subsequent fall of the regimes of various European state socialist countries and their communist parties—all being caused by an ideological, political and social vacuity of the ruling utopian political doctrine, a doctrine which exceeded plain political ideology, for it held in its grasp the whole of the social field. When the “state” or “actually existing” socialism finally expired, an openness characterized mostly by an indeterminacy set in, marking “the unique intermediate state of passage from one discourse (social link) to another,” as Žižek defines this break from the previous symbolic order into a new one. This intermediate period, what the same author calls, borrowing the term from Fredric Jameson, the “vanishing mediator,” enables the change from one political system into another to take place, but is itself lost, transmogrified and marginalized in this very same dialectical process. Such a fate was destined for the majority of artists under discussion and also for much of the art they created during this intermediate period: whether we are talking of Apt-Art of the 1982– 84 period in the Soviet Union, the works from 1980–82 by the Slovenian music group Laibach, or the conceptual and politicized work from the early sixties by Knížák in Czechoslovakia, none was ever capable of reinstituting the aura of its original appearance of a unique “event” in Lyotard’s sense of the word. 3

Postsocialist Art

The five main features of the art under discussion are: (a) conceptualism; (b) use of postmodernist techniques and procedures; (c) profuse use of socialist and communist imagery; (d) use of national heritage and of folk, traditional and mass culture; and (e) frequent use of what I designate as the “binary” artistic approach. This list is neither exhaustive, nor do we find all the listed features manifested in all the art under consideration. It is worth adding that in many cases, such as the NSK organization in Slovenia, the Sots-Art in Russia, the subREAL group in Romania, the Generation of the Eighties in Cuba and so on, we witness organized activities somewhat resembling those of classical avantgardes. 16

Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993), 1–2.

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From the further examples it will become clear that most of the art discussed herein pertains to the visual arts in the broadest sense of the word (painting, installations, photography, design and video). Yet it can also be found in other modes and media: in Russia in poetry, fiction and music (the group Pop Mekhanika), in Slovenia in the music of the group Laibach which forms the core of the Neue Slowenische Kunst organization, segments of which also work in theater and the cinema, or in Hungary in the music of the BP. Service group. In most cases different genres are combined; in the case of painting very often the image is supplemented by words, a combination that supports the designation of much of this art as conceptual art. I will now discuss each of these defining features at greater length. 4 Conceptualism Historically speaking, the majority of artists under consideration started as conceptual artists and many have remained that until today: Sándor Pinczehelyi from Pécs in Hungary (born 1939) or Mladen Stilinović (born 1947) from Zagreb (Croatia), for example. Others, such as the Slovenian group Irwin or the Romanian group subREAL have exhibited works and carried out performances which could legitimately be called conceptual. The same holds true of post-1979 Chinese artists. Much of the Russian art under consideration has also often been called conceptual especially in the eighties.17 This art is practically the only one that has so far been extensively theoretically analyzed and grouped under a relatively uniform designation. A perceptive argument for the designation of the art that I discuss here as conceptual, illuminating at the same time the reasons for ascribing such a weight to this notion and difficulties when attempting to delimit it, is offered by Mikhail Epstein: Conceptualists readily elaborate such general themes as “the communist conquers his inner hesitations and boldly leads his comrades to increased labor productivity.” Since no self-respecting Soviet writer would limit himself or herself to such truisms, he or she would try very hard to describe this communist and his comrades as real people, with 17

Numerous authors use this notion interchangeably. One of the more important exhibitions of Soviet art also bore this title. —See the publication by the same title: Between Spring and Summer. Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism, ed. David A. Ross (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990).

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many plausible details, including their foibles and personal weaknesses. Nevertheless, this character essentially remains only a vehicle for some predetermined idea or ideological tenet. Conceptualists grasped and unmasked the artificial nature, not only of Soviet literature, but of Soviet reality itself. Their works cannot be reduced to concepts, only because they are willfully and fundamentally deduced from them … They create excellent works of bad art that purposely and often masterfully imitate the typical Soviet range of ideas.18 What is typical for most of these groups, individuals and works is precisely the feature described above by Epstein: the literal use of socialist imagery and of its ideological discourse. These artists and authors do not utilize the common “dissident” procedure of poetically or metaphorically criticizing the extant social and ideological reality, nor do they utilize “Aesopian” language to express in a veiled form their personal views, political opinions and criticisms that cannot be enunciated in the political realm, since therein such an articulation is prohibited or heavily sanctioned by the state. The conceptualist author whose work is described by Epstein uses a completely different artistic device, and it is in this respect that he differs from previous Russian authors and artists, be they from pre-Soviet or Soviet times. Curiously enough we find the very same procedure used in many different late socialist countries, ranging from Hungary, Romania and Slovenia to Cuba, with these authors or artists often having little or no knowledge of the works of the others.19 A good and early example of an artist employing the procedure of articulating a secondary discourse on the basis of the primary ideological discourse—but in the realm of painting—is the Hungarian artist Sándor Pinczehelyi. In a simple black and white photograph “the artist keeps real objects, a real hammer and a real sickle in his hands, and strains the known political symbols to his body. His two hands are strictly crossed in front of his chest like in Egyptian representations; his face is framed by the sickle and the hammer … Pinczehelyi abolishes the symbol—by means of tautology—as he makes the abstract concept a concrete object.”20 Tautology completes the process of defetishization: the sickle is nothing else than an ordinary sickle, the hammer is nothing else than an ordinary 18 19 20

Epstein, 202. The paramount exception in this regard is China, where “Political Pop” occurred only in 1989, at a time when similar art from the Soviet Union was already well-known. Lóránd Hegyi, “Sándor Pinczehelyi’s Emblematic Art,” in Imre Bukta, Sándor Pinczehelyi, Géza Samu, Ungheria (Venezia: XLIII La Biennale di Venezia, 1988), unpaginated.

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hammer.”21 In other words, what the Hungarian artist here carries out is to “show the object itself,” to reveal the meaningless materiality of the object which in the seventies representationally still functioned only in its symbolical emanation. By doing this Pinczehelyi engendered one of the early postmodern works, for postmodernism “consists not in demonstrating that the game works without an object, that the play is set in motion by a central absence, but rather in displaying the object directly, allowing it to make visible its own indifferent and arbitrary character. The same object can function successively as a disgusting reject and as a sublime, charismatic apparition: the difference, strictly structural, does not pertain to the ‘effective properties’ of the object, but only to its place in the symbolic order.”22 Exactly the same procedure is used by Dmitri Prigov, who in his Signature-Can presents a metal can covered with signatures with a little sign on top reading, “A can of signatures for the complete and unconditional disarmament of America.” It is again a political gesture which is being revealed in its materiality: a can of signatures is but a harmless and pitiful can which in its artistic emanation reveals its total ideological finality. With his “can” Prigov carries out the procedure described above in two ways. First, the can desymbolizes the otherwise potentially political signification of such an object by exhibiting it in its materiality and by showing its arbitrary character. In this respect the artistic procedure is just the opposite of that theoretically elaborated six decades earlier by the Russian formalists: their intent (and that of the Russian futurists) then being to show the poetic nature of everyday words, sounds and objects, to make us conscious of the originary poetic nature of words. In the case of postmodern art under discussion the procedure is just the reverse: contrary to Victor Shklovsky and other Russian formalists the postmodern conceptual artists reveal the sheer material nature of objects devoured by ideological symbolization. A procedure very similar to that of Pinczehelyi can be discerned in the paintings of Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas (born 1962), who belongs to the “Second” or postmodern generation of Cuban artists. In his work To Build the Sky we see exactly what its title denotes: a wall of blue bricks, rising above the green rolling hills, thus visually depicting an ideological phrase or slogan. We are confronted with a materialization of the enunciated words. The metaphor is here, as in the case of Pinczehelyi’s hammer and sickle, taken seriously—­literally. As Gerardo Mosquera observes, the artist “concentrates on appropriating the 21 Ibid. 22 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991), 143.

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stereotyped slogans that inundate Cuban life, and placing them in new semantic settings by means of a process of ironic deconstruction.”23 Another feature of conceptual art from socialist countries is its preoccupation with words, captions and slogans. Words become real material objects in the paintings of Erik Bulatov, Aleksandr Kosolapov, Ilya Kabakov or Komar & Melamid, in accordance with the political slogan that ideas are a material force. In this respect too this postmodern or post-utopian art differs from its modernist and avantgarde predecessors: “In the formal respect, the Soviet post-utopian art of the 1970s is characterized above all by a renewed narrativity that runs counter to the avantgarde rejection of literariness and instead continues the narrativity of socialist realism.”24 In Bulatov’s case slogans intrude upon the inner subjective reality which is, in the artist’s view, the authentic reality. They represent the unavoidable reality of political ideology which permeates all socialist existence. As when Lenin claims in his essay “What Is To Be Done?” that there is no space without ideology, i.e. ideology is either socialist or bourgeois, similarly Kabakov’s paintings, those of Wang Guangyi such as Great Castigation Series: Coca Cola (1993), or Milan Kunc’s Consumerists of the World, Unite! (1978), imply that the symbolic universes of capitalism and socialism function according to a similar economy of the sign. 5

Use of Postmodernist Procedures

Most easily recognizable in late socialist countries is a simple transposition and appropriation of Western or First World postmodernism. Postmodernism, furthermore, also existed in its more local or specific form—and it is this which is my main concern here. What we therefore unquestionably encounter in socialist countries is the profuse use of postmodernist techniques and procedures; quite often artists or critics explicitly designate art which results from them by the name of postmodernism as well. One of the features typical of postmodernism is the use of intertextuality and remake. Although the first term is mostly applied to fiction, it is also useful in the realm of visual arts and other artistic genres. In the major part of the art under discussion works from various periods are profusely employed and in certain cases whole works are remade. The latter is true of the Belgrade artist 23 24

Gerardo Mosquera, in The Nearest Edge of the World. Art and Cuba Now (Brookline, ­ assachusetts: Polarities, 1990), 44. M Groys, 94.

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Goran Djordjević who copied not only individual works, but a whole series of them or whole exhibitions. Djordjević was also an artist who strongly influenced the Slovenian group Irwin and the music group Laibach, which was in a habit of adapting not only songs by other musicians, but whole albums, Let It Be by the Beatles, for example.25 The Slovenian group of painters Irwin (which was founded in 1984) practiced this procedure as well. Irwin not only used works by Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, or Slovenian artists and copied their works or introduced them as motifs within their own paintings and installations, it also consciously revealed the problematic relationship between the original and the copy and between art and its broader political context or background. The group of designers New Collectivism, another member group of the Neue Slowenische Kunst organization, made remakes of posters, the best known among them being the one to honor the 1987 Youth Festival in Belgrade: when it had already been selected by the federal jury as the official poster of this all-Yugoslav celebration of the birthday of the Yugoslav president Tito, a member of the jury discovered that the chosen work was a Yugoslavian “socialistic” repurposing of a Nazi work from 1937 by Richard Klein entitled “The Third Reich.” Yet another series of postmodern remakes are some of Milan Kunc’s works from the period of 1974–79 which he calls “Embarrassing” or “Painful” Realism in which he employs everything from the old masters to Pop Art and communist imagery. 6

Use of Socialist Imagery

The most obvious feature of art under discussion is the exuberant use of communist and socialist imagery. In modernism, culture and art in the European socialist countries were divided into the official ones and those called the unofficial, dissident, critical, etc. Within this modernist framework the ideological symbols or slogans, for example, would either occur only in a satirical context or their presence would be perceived as proof that the artist who employed them in his work himself succumbed to political propaganda. As the well-known Hungarian modernist painter Imre Bak said to me in 1995, “art, if it is to remain art, should never have a political function.” The art I am discussing here carries out a different agenda: it uses political slogans and statements, the visual depiction thereof included, official portraits, symbols and icons in an infinite number of ways, and eclectically mixes 25 Laibach, Let It Be (London: Mute Records, 1988).

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them. Aleksandr Kosolapov for example in his painting A Malevich Page (1986), creates a copy of the well-known socialist realist picture Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin (1938) by Aleksandr Gerasimov, with the word “Malevich” executed in the manner of the Marlboro logotype, superimposed on the three-­ dimensional painting. The same device is employed in numerous Chinese works from the early nineties on, or in those of the group Irwin, in its 1987 painting The Red Districts, for example: the work is a remake of one of the few Slovenian works of socialist realism which was, although made by the Irwin group, afterwards signed by its original author, the painter Janez Knez. What is at stake in the Red Districts painting is just as much a relation to the past as the issue of the original and the copy. In the paintings and installations by Kosolapov, in many works by Komar & Melamid, in certain works by Sándor Pinczehelyi, those of Cuban artists such as Flavio Garciandía or René Francisco, or in Chinese Political Pop and Rouge Cynicism, the aim is more playful. Russian Sots Art especially, inaugurated by Komar & Melamid in 1972 and overtly related to Soviet socialist realism and American Pop Art, aims at amusing, not spiritually heightening our awareness as is the case with Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov or Oleg Vasilev. The hammer and sickle are to be found in the works of the various artists already mentioned. To be more exact, in most of these instances the hammer and the sickle are the works themselves. Further such cases are those of Leonid Sokov who in 1988 created his own pair made out of fur, of Milan Kunc who in 1979 made loaves of bread in their shape (and titled them “The Food of Tomorrow”), or Andrei Filippov who in 1989 exhibited them on a table as eating utensils. Innumerable Lenins, Stalins, and red stars employed in installations, paintings or sculptures are applied in the same manner as the Pop Art icons and objects of mass consumption in the West. In the socialist countries Pop Art presented a huge creative impetus for it introduced simultaneously the critical and the un-authoritarian treatment of political ideology. The abundance of works with these motifs can also be explained by commercial aspirations and expectations, although this predominantly applies to art of the two biggest countries under discussion: the Soviet Union (or, to be more precise, Russia) and later China. 7

National and Folk Elements

In 1981 Sándor Pinczehelyi painted three chilies (for which Hungary is famous in Europe) red, white and green—in the Hungarian national colors. Two years

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later he did the same with three sickles, exhibiting them on a floor covered with straw, then painted three chicken eggs in a straw nest and then even the grass and the trees, naming these works consecutively Sickles from the Great RWG Farm, A Nest with RWG Eggs and The Trees of the Great RWG Farm. The “RWG” stood for “red, white and green,” the artist imposing over them, by the act of painting the Hungarian tricolor on all these objects, a symbolic national ownership. The gesture was, of course, ironical, but it nonetheless expressed the perceptive observation that the national components of the lived world were becoming increasingly important and were replacing the previous universal and transnational symbols of the hammer and sickle which, in Pinczehelyi’s photograph from 1973, were devoid of any national resonance. Similar gestures are those of Russian or Chinese artists using their national alphabets, appropriating in such a narrative manner the motifs and at the same time exhibiting their “Russian” or “Chinese” nationality. An idea similar to Pinczehelyi’s is evident from the work of Flavio Garciandía in which “the phallic anthropologization of the hammer and sickle, aside from being an allusion to perestroika as a revitalization of the USSR, also represents a “third world” appropriation of a communist emblem.”26 A similar, albeit less playful gesture, was that of the members of the Laibach group who in 1989, in a video clip for their music album, displayed themselves in front of the Aljaz Tower, a metal shelter on top of Mt. Triglav, the highest mountain in Slovenia and its national symbol.27 The Aljaz Tower was shown wrapped in a black flag with a cogwheel and Malevich’s cross in the middle— the trademark of the Laibach group. In this manner the group symbolically appropriated the Slovenian national icon. 8

The Binary Effect

In the spring of 1968 Jean-François Lyotard held at Nanterre a seminar devoted to political posters. On June 26 he thus discussed a work which is of seminal importance for the interpretation of some of the art discussed here. Lyotard was especially interested in a poster by the Russian avantgarde artist El Lissitzky, the Street Poster (1919–20) which reads: “Beat the Whites with the Red

26 27

Gerardo Mosquera, “The 14 Sons of William Tell,” in No Man is an Island (Pori, Finland: Pori Art Museum Publications, 1990), 47. See also the discussion below in Chapter 26, “Photography: Of Nations and Mountains.”

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Wedge.”28 The work itself, which was intended for political propaganda (the Red Wedge being the Red Army and the Whites the counter-revolutionaries), was also one of El Lissitzky’s first abstract works. The poster represents a paramount example of the juxtaposition of the textual and the figurative, with each element retaining its individual significance as in a binary opposition. The poster as a whole, beside being a work of political propaganda, also exhibits an overt aesthetic function. Lyotard acutely notices that there is a plastic paradox in Lissitzky’s poster, for “the written becomes form, the figure appears to become the text of forms. There is a deconstruction of letters and words, on one side, which bears not only upon the signified (‘beat with the wedge’), but upon the graphism as well, dealt with in a plastic relation with the space: it is therefore a figural work.”29 It may be that one of the reasons for Lyotard’s preoccupation with political posters lay in the historical circumstances of his seminar, which could bear slightly upon my own topic, for in all these cases—Paris of 1968, late and postsocialism, as well as Lissitzky’s own time—some form of avantgarde art was significantly involved in social and political events. But why is it possible that El Lissitzky’s poster still carries such an impact? Why is it that its simple graphisms convey an excess of signification and why does this work allow us to view it as a pure ideological statement, on the one hand, and as a pure aesthetic object, on the other, with the two never meeting in a single space, for this would destroy the perception and reception of each of them? The effect produced by the poster resembles visual paradoxes where, by changing our inner perceptual vantage point, we see the same object in a different way or as a different one. In the case of the poster (and many other works by the same artist or by Malevich, for example) the aesthetic effect engendered by pure geometric forms augments the ideological effect of the written statement and vice versa. The image and the narrative exist in two distinct spaces, in the mentioned poster, for example, they intersect only, producing in our perception not a unified, but a double or parallel effect. It is this effect which strongly resembles that achieved by numerous late socialist artists. Isn’t the procedure actually very similar to Erik Bulatov’s juxtaposition of a three-dimensional perspectival space of the picture and a two-dimensional political slogan superimposed on it, in Glory to the USSR (1975), or, in a somewhat different manner, to that employed by conceptualism as described by Epstein and enacted not only in fiction but in the visual artworks 28 29

See above: Fig. 2: El Lissitzky, The Street Poster, 1919–20, in Chapter 14, “Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge.” Jean-François Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: U.G.E., 1973), 302.

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of Pinczehelyi, Garciandía or the subREAL group in Romania? In March 1990 (a few months after the fall of the Ceausescu dictatorship) subREAL exhibited in Bucharest portraits of the newly elected President Iliescu which “raised a controversial scandal and a dispute between those who suspected a new adulatory attitude and those who condemned the irreverent gesture. As usual, subREAL was misunderstood by everybody, and that was paradoxically satisfactory for this group.”30 With this exhibition subREAL purposefuly attained a paradoxical reception: one side (the official one) accused the group of mocking President Iliescu (the immediate successor to Ceausescu), implying hence a modernist critical or typically dissident stance, while the other, the “dissident” side, comprehended the gesture as an accolade to the regime. Both interpretations, as long they strive to attain exclusiveness, are erroneous, of course; simultaneously they cannot be conceptually grasped as a whole, for they are incompatible. It is this effect at which also the subREAL group aims, i.e. to achieve an aesthetico-artistic/political effect by employing such a “binary” approach. Just as in Fichtean dialectics, where thesis and anti-thesis never reach a synthesis, here too both interpretations exist side by side: never coexisting in a conceptual sublimation, never attaining a unity, creating by this very gesture an abyss between the visual and the conceptual, an unrepresentable whole. “[T]he impotence of the imagination attests a contrario to an imagination striving to figure even that which cannot be figured, and that imagination thus aims to harmonize its object with that of reason—and that furthermore the inadequacy of the images is a negative sign of the immense power of the ideas. This dislocation of the faculties among themselves gives rise to the extreme tension (Kant calls it agitation) that characterizes the pathos of the sublime, as opposed to the calm feeling of beauty.”31 Perhaps the ceaseless fascination with suprematism and constructivism that we find in many socialist postmodernist artists and their simultaneous use of purely aesthetic and purely symbolic or politically symbolic forms stems from the employment of a similar procedure, of what Lyotard called the “plastic paradox,” or what Margarita Tupitsyn designated as “the visualization of verbal concepts,”32 finding its first applications in the works of the Russian classical avantgarde and then in postsocialist conceptual art.

30 31 32

Clin Dan, “Art + Politics = No Art / No Politics,” in New Observations 91 (1992): 7. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avantgarde,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 203–4. Margarita Tupitsyn, “On some sources of Soviet Conceptualism,” in Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience, 1956–1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 304.

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Related phenomena are the performances and statements of music groups: in the eighties the St. Petersburg group Pop Mekhanika, for example, staged its concerts dressed as a military band, often persuading the audience that they in fact were an official Soviet orchestra. The Laibach group from Slovenia, purportedly “one of the cleverest cultural manipulations since the Trojan horse,”33 by incessantly repeating ideological statements and reenacting totalitarian ritual at its extreme surpassed the ideological effects of the political populism of the late period of self-management socialism in Yugoslavia. By presenting itself since its inception in 1980 as an excessive simulacrum of political ideology it created a paradox similar to that of subREAL. Consider the following statements by Laibach: “Every art is an object of political manipulation except that which speaks the language of that manipulation itself” (1984); “Politics is the highest and an all-embracing art and we, who create contemporary Slovenian art, consider ourselves to be politicians” (1985); “Our freedom is the freedom of those who think alike” (1985); “We believe in God, but unlike Americans we don’t trust him” (1987). Laibach at the same time collapsed socialist, fascist and national socialist ideologies, the result being music which in Great Britain, for example, was equally well received—because of its ostensible political message—by the political left and by the nationalist far-right National Front. 9

Ideological Pop Art

One of the better-known tenets of Marxism was the belief that capitalism produces commodity fetishism. The aim of socialism was just the opposite: not the consumerism with which Western capitalism purportedly “bought” the worker, persuading him that ever new cars, refrigerators, washing machines and TV sets were “better value” than world revolution, but the classless society instead, devoid of alienation, reified intersubjective relations, social insecurity, etc. The way in which socialism attempted to persuade its people to accept such a view was ideology, but ideology understood as class consciousness, a notion already developed by Lenin in his essay “What Is To Be Done?” from 1902. Therein Lenin distinguished between bourgeois and socialist ideology. In his view, “[t]he working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism, but the more widespread (and continuously revived in the most diverse forms) bourgeois ideology nevertheless spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class still more.”34 33 34

Performance Magasine, quoted on the cover of the Laibach LP, Opus dei (London: Mute Records, 1987). V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973), 51.

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In the decades to follow socialist ideology became omnipresent. Only in late socialism did it become interesting for non-propagandistic artistic endeavors with these, by this very choice, being political endeavors as well. The Western art that opened the artistic door for the representation of this ideology was Pop Art with its irreverent treatment of American consumerism—with Andy Warhol’s serialized portraits, cans of Campbell’s soup and Brillo boxes. In its early phase in the sixties Pop Art carried a critical and anti-authoritarian potential and it was also for this reason that it became so influential in so many parts of the world. In early and late works of many of the artists under discussion its influence is obvious: in the Russian Sots Art, in Sándor Pinczehelyi’s works from the seventies and eighties and in Milan Kunc’s East Pop art, the “Ost-Pop.” It is immediately recognizable in the Chinese “Political Pop,” which started with Yu Youhan’s “Mao” series in 1989, and became most widely known with Wang Guangyi’s series “Great Castigation” which the latter began in 1990. In it, like in Aleksandr Kosolapov’s, Milan Kunc’s or Komar & Melamid’s works capitalist and communist imagery are placed side by side or, rather, one upon the other: Marlboro, Cadbury’s and Kodak signs are superimposed on political propaganda images from the times of the Cultural Revolution, creating a two-dimensional space wherein two symbolic realities meet: the East, represented by petrified and desubjectivized figures of socialist workers depicted in the style of revolutionary realism, and the West, “where the taste of CocaCola and McDonald’s was nearly unknown [and where] such signs assumed a purely abstract ideological role as signs of the West.”35 The parallel between the ideological universe of the socialist world and the consumerist universe of the capitalist one was most forcibly developed in the Soviet Union: “The most banal language in the Soviet Union is the ideological one. In the West there are the commercials, television, the giant flood of images. Therein too it is a question of a language of banalities. This language of the western truisms can describe the social space equally well as the language of ideology in the Soviet Union.”36 Today practically all of the art I just discussed is a past phenomenon. This does not signify that the artists are no longer there or that they have ceased to make art. On the contrary, but the art they produce now is of a very different nature than it was in the seventies, eighties or perhaps the first few years of the nineties. It is more international or, if it remains “national,” it often exploits its 35 36

Boris Groys, “Milan Kunc: Cheerful Post-Modernism,” in Milan Kunc, ed. Pavel Liska (Köln: Edition Cantz, 1992), 25. Erik Bulatov, “Ich bin überzeugt, daß der Raum der Kunst und der Raum unseres Lebens zwei verschiedene Räume sind. Ein Gespräch mit Heinz Schütz,” Kunstforum 106 (1990): 258.

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own socialist past. What I have therefore presented is an episode in the career of some artists, or, in some cases, their whole career. It is also a presentation of the rather unique art and culture of a certain period of recent history, created within the confines of the postsocialist condition. The art that I have discussed has frequently been written about and exhibited, but so far there has been little attempt to search for a possible common denominator of the art that I am presenting here. In the Russian case such art was often referred to as “post-utopian”—which is a term introduced by the Russian philosopher Boris Groys. While this term has many merits, it covers much more than just the art that I discussed in this lecture for it also applies to art that is still emerging today. My basic argument, on the contrary is, that the specific variant of postmodern art discussed in this talk is limited to the period of the disintegration of socialism, that is, to the period between the demise of socialism and the change of that political order into parliamentary democracy. In other words, this art, like that of the classical avantgardes and even modernism as such, is today a past, historical phenomenon, albeit still relatively recent. It thrives under conditions of increased ideological and political pressure and only under such circumstances was it possible that such art and the artists creating it could attain politically such an important social position as they did in the periods of late socialism and postsocialism. To explain this we have to take into account political philosophy, especially Claude Lefort’s analysis of totalitarian society.37 Let me limit myself here to the observation that in a totalitarian society the locus of the single political party is simultaneously the locus of all the power within that society. Since culture and art are considered special social realms where freedom is allowed (Claude Lévi-Strauss once called culture a “natural reserve”) in a totalitarian society culture and art become a privileged social realm in which ideas which in a democratic society are enunciated in the parliament, the media, etc., are here enunciated in art and literature which thus become immensely significant. Once society becomes, so to say, “normal,” art and culture lose their special role and hence their privileged political position. This, then, is the reason why this type of art is no longer with us (while the post-utopian is) for it exists neither when there is no freedom of expression nor when there is a lot of it. In the first case we get no or very little art—except the official one—while in the second we get contemporary neoconceptual depoliticized art shaped by the big galleries and their curators. 37

See Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1986).

Chapter 23

Locations, Relocations, and Reinterpretations (2006) 1

Five Stories1

Let me begin with the stories. The first story: During research on Bali, anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead asked the Batuan painters to bring them artworks representative of “the ethnography of Balian imagination” for them to use them in their research. “Bateson and Mead were not supportive of imitation and repetition and openly approved authenticity.”2 As it later turned out, their asking the natives to create “authentic”—that is, “original”—artworks unintentionally changed the local habit of artists creating repetitive copies. That was the beginning of the Balian tourist art or craft, which is being created at that tourist destination to this day. The second story: Two years ago, an Indian acquaintance of mine, who was preparing an international conference in Mumbai, asked me to suggest to him an individual or a group of artists from Slovenia to invite to the event. I suggested the group Irwin because I believe them to be good artists who are also famous worldwide and are good at articulating their artistic starting points and their cultural, artistic, and social points of view. After viewing the Neue Slowenische Kunst website (and therefore the group Irwin’s website too), the Indian acquaintance replied: “I had a look at the group Irwin’s website and to be honest, I didn’t know what to think about NSK. The name sounded like some sort of a religious cult, but I’m sure it was merely my poor understanding. I find all this talk of good and evil very strange. In the beginning it wasn’t clear to me if all of this was an attempt to make fun of history, but later it seemed to me as though everything was meant completely seriously.”3 The third story: “When the Brazilian critic Paulo Emilio Sales Gómez was examining the rush of cosmopolitan tendencies among Brazilian artists, 1 The editor wishes to thank Ernest Ženko for his translation of this essay from the original Slovenian. 2 Patrick D. Flores, “Razstavitev Evrope v jugovzhodni Aziji: konteksti nove sodobnosti,” ­Filozofski vestnik 24/3 (2003): 100. 3 P. J. Parikh, 30th December 2004 (electronic correspondence with Aleš Erjavec). © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_024

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focusing on the mainstream and despondent about popular culture, he said that fortunately for them, they are bad at imitation because useful is that which personalises them in the international language of speaking with a strong accent … This ‘mistake’ allowed them artistic collaboration in the postminimalistic-conceptual ‘international’ direction.”4 They were therefore lucky that they were so bad at imitating European and American art and were thus creating artworks with a strong local accent, which is precisely why they were interesting to the foreign public. Even more, this accent, this failure at imitating foreign artworks well caused their local artworks to seem original in the eyes of the Europeans. Bad and misunderstood imitation began seeming original and a “Brazilian” artistic specialty. The fourth story: “In the November of 1907, Ishikawo Kinichra (1871–1945) was sent [from Japan] to Taiwan as a translation officer, where he was also invited to occasionally teach painting at Taipei’s general school, where he encouraged painting outdoors. In this period, he began adding Taiwanese scenes to his painting and thus introduced the “tropical” island Taiwan into the Japanese society. In 1924, Ishikawa became a fully employed teacher of painting at the Taiwanese general school. Many of his Taiwanese students went to Japan to continue their studies and later exhibit their paintings at both Japanese and Taiwanese official exhibitions. Ishikawa’s style later became a special genre of Taiwanese landscape painting.”5 The fifth story: In the chapter about Hungary in the book Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, Péter György writes: “For the Easterners [this is Eastern Europeans], abstract expressionists used to represent an undamaged freedom of art and right to self-expression but in the Soviet world nobody was aware of the origin of the great success of the New York school, of the local context of their fight against the market, or of the local importance of Clement Greenberg’s and Harold Rosenberg’s leftist theoretic beliefs. Nobody behind the Berlin wall had any idea about the local context of society based on the market. They were only informed about independent, decontextualised artworks and symbols of what they believed to be ‘freedom.’”6 We could name and describe many other cases of relocations, misapprehensions and misunderstandings of art and culture and their meanings, however 4 Gerardo Mosquera, “O umetnosti, globalizaciji in kulturni razliki,” Filozofski vestnik, 24/3 (2003): 61. 5 Liao, Hsin-tien, “Naturalistic and Distorted Natures,” 7–8 (manuscript). 6 Péter György, “Hungarian Marginal Art in the Late Period of Socialism,” in Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of ­California Press, 2003), 177.

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the five above will suffice. What I wanted to show were a few unambiguous examples of obvious reinterpretations and relocations of art, which emerged from cultural reasons and especially the loss of the connection, which would enable reasonably authentic understanding of the original meaning. The examples I have named allow different reinterpretations and relocations. In the first example, the case of Bali, the desire for art in the Western point of view prevents creativity, which was not based on originality, and ends in mass production, which stops being art in the Western meaning as well. In the second example, the case of my Indian colleague’s interpretation of the group Irwin, his experience with religious cults, whether it be in the U.S.A or Asia, relocate that, which is for us in Slovenia a completely unthreatening and undisruptive form of parody, the imitation or mimicry of the totalitarian discourse and allegorization, with an additional aftertaste lent by the context of Slovenian Catholic tradition. In the third example, the case of the Brazilian artists who wanted to imitate modernist artworks of their European and American colleagues, it turned out that their failure at achieving their goal caused their biggest success and gave them recognition in the international art community. The conservation of the local colours and taste, both of which contained the sufficient quantum of internationalism, cosmopolitanism, universalism, and similarities with the work of European and American artists, enabled the latter to observe the Brazilian painters’ works with excited misunderstanding. In the fourth example, we can see how the lands of the East perceived in the West as exotic, such as Japan, possess exotic lands of their own: in this case, Taiwan. The unexpected fact is (though many such examples can be found, and we shall return to that in the conclusion of this essay) that the Japanese painter was the one who created the Taiwanese exotic, which later blossomed in both Japan and Taiwan and the interest for which persists. In the fifth example, Péter György shows how the artists behind the Iron Curtain completely misunderstood the political position (not to mention the economic one) and status of the Western modernistic artists and saw in them depoliticized, absent and abstract people, living in a social and political vacuum. This impression was so strong that many Eastern European artists began conceptual projects, which avoided completely any relationship with their social and historical context, thus creating an artistic space “beyond the painting,” which was, as the Russian artist Erik Bulatov cleverly figured out more real and objective than reality itself and “real existence.”7 Only later, in 7 Erik Bulatov, cited in “Interview with Erik Bulatov and Ilya Kabakov,” Erik Bulatov: Moscow (London: Parkett Publishers and ICA, 1989), 42.

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the 1980s, the Russian artists began advocating the point of view that there exists an equal sign between the symbolic universes of the East and the West, since both of them are based upon a form of ideology: the Soviet one based on political ideology, the Western one (especially American) based on the ideology of the market. 2

Context and Displacement

Such mistaken explanations are, of course, nothing new and are certainly not limited to art. They refer to cultural customs and traditions, like the example of the chrysanthemum, which is a symbol of death in our land, while in many other places—for example in Montenegro, Japan or in China—it has a happy and even culinary meaning. Our life is full of decontextualised and once again recontextualised products; what matters for their correct understanding is conserving the connection, connecting the new context with the old one, which enables them a reasonably authentic meaning. This is quite simple with objects and occurrences we all encounter. Some of them are represented by cultural products (not necessarily artistic ones), and this is largely characteristic for language too, despite it including some of the most complicated semiotic structures. But let me return to art or products. The urinal has a cultural meaning in some context and none or very little in others. Even in Mr. R. Mutt’s creation (Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain),8 the initial shock of his notorious readymade was based on surprise, integrated into the relocation, or it was based on decontextualization and recontextualization. Relocation then turned out to be the main condition for a large part of the 20th-century art, namely that which falls into the category of conceptual art. What was needed for Duchamp’s work to function as artwork was the conservation of its original meaning and the change of its perception, where this connection was established with the context of the showroom, which gave the banal object from public bathrooms the aura of an artwork. Let me add that the other characteristic of this work is the form of its existence, as a photograph, a document, since the original object is no longer available, exhibited. Other such mythical objects were the works from Malevich and his collaborators in futurist exhibitions around the year 1915 or, to offer a more local example, Černigoj’s exhibition of constructivist artworks in the year 1924. In 8 Marcel Duchamp had signed his pissoir with the name “R. Mutt.”

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all these examples, just like in many other, newer ones, that mostly belong to conceptualist and environmental art, their only remainder is their documentation, photographic or filmic. These works therefore function as myths, as second-order realities, where the document not only points at the work but replaces it, and as such enables its infinite reproducibility. In this reproduced form, such a work functions as its very own simulacrum, as it supplants the original work which no longer exists. Infinite reproduction eliminates the question of the aura because the question of the original and a copy doesn’t make sense—but of course the lack of sense is not caused by the question of context and relocation. The proof of this is, for example, the exhibition of Duchamp’s works, which are photos, copies, or reproductions of Fountain and other readymades that can be found in the Stockholm’s Modern Art Museum and that were created and placed there by Marcel Duchamp himself, but they cannot possibly renew or establish the aura of their gone originals. It appears that in some cases like Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International”9 (also exhibited in Stockholm) or Lajos Kassák’s “picture-architecture” works, the desire to remain within the bounds of the imagination has beaten the need for the actual creation of these works. In most cases, the reproductions of such works are followed by theoretical, descriptive, or critical writings, which more or less successfully establish the frame of meaning. Such works stop being the subjects of disinterested intuition or aesthetic recognition and become a subject of theoretical analysis, consideration, and contextualization in wider frames, with which these reproductions become an extension of the theoretic or critical discourse and not vice versa as it happened in the past. What remains relevant in the cases of such works (conceptual, for example), enables a poetic effect, even if it exists only in a minimalistic extent or measure. Let’s take the pissoir: the element of poetic action in Duchamp’s action is found in his naming of this object Fountain, instead of simply naming it “the pissoir” or leaving it unnamed. This linguistic supplement establishes the origin of artistry, which reaches past the simple and rectilinear setting of such an object into an artistic space. If such an object was left in a gallery or a museum without a title, or if offered just a descriptive title “pissoir,” we can doubt that the visitors would notice it and perceive it as “art.” But with the caption Fountain, Duchamp achieved a poetic effect and enabled an infinitesimally small step, which moved the pissoir from a public bathroom to a gallery 9 It is a nine meters tall model, while the actual building was supposed to be three times taller than the Empire State Building.

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space (which is indeed a significant transportation) and moved it from a simple porcelain object to an artistic object (which is a transportation of spiritual dimensions). Schematically taken, we could say that if an object were to be simply named pissoir, it would exist as a simple identity a = a. Because of its title, it started existing as a = b, or as an identity between a utilitarian object and an artistic object. Conceptual art since its beginning was marked with the poetic element, even if it was no more substantial than the universal poetic elements discovered by Roman Jakobson in the successions of words. Moreover, the acquisition or achievement of such a poetic element (usually in the form of the title) is a key ingredient, which allowed such works to be separated from their non-artistic counterpart and which caused us to treat them as artworks. In the case of Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, the mechanism or the artistic process (if I here ignore the potentially critical thematization of consumerism in this work) that allowed those “boxes” to be treated as artworks was also the fact that they were created from plywood and then painted, instead of simply being cardboard boxes of the Brillo detergent that Warhol bought in a store. Had the artist merely purchased industrially manufactured cardboard boxes of the detergent and brought them into Stable Gallery, they almost certainly would not have experienced such a reaction, which put them onto the map of the history of modern art. In that case, it would simply have been the simple identity of box = box. We are bearing witness to two opposite processes, both of which relocate the original meaning and also use the classical process of defamiliarization, observing “for the first time,” which is therefore typical for the effect caused or encouraged by most artworks. It is quite obvious that Duchamp used this process consciously: for example, in his ready-made titled “In Advance of a Broken Arm” or the figure Rrose Sélavy (the case of a changed identity). It is obvious that the works like Bicycle Wheel or Bottle Rack both used the change of the meaning of Fountain, which legitimised the use of readymades and placed them into the string called art. The cases of relocations like the ones named here can be found all throughout history and in very different cultures. This finding is not limited to artworks, but for most of the products of culture, where the link connecting various cultural frames is most surprising. What is nowadays often encountered in a large part of the world (with the possible exception of our domestic Slovenian environment) is what Arjun Appadurai described as moving pictures which meet deterritorialized observants. “These create diasporic public spheres, phenomena,” he writes, “that confuse theories dependent on the

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continuous importance of national states as a key decider of important social changes.”10 This flexible and unforeseen relation between events “forwarded with mass media and moving publics, determines the core of the connecting links between globalization and modernity.”11 Whether we agree with Homi Bhabha that there exists a postcolonial “postmodernity”12 is a question that exceeds the scope of this article. We can find many similarities to modern art. Is not the relocation of a distant culture or cultural products—for example music or fashion etc.—into a different social and cultural context, akin to that which we so often meet in modern art, relocation as an element or procedure of the artistic process. Such works retain “traces of their past histories, despite being listed and melted into new context as a part of the complex coating of conventions.”13 The examples I have presented thus far belong in different historical periods and different cultural frames. What connects them is the similar logic of relocation in both the symbolic and material meanings. At the same time, it is clear that some of them pertain to the “question of identity.” Let’s take the case of the Congolese poet Théophile Obenga, who in the early 1960s in his song “Tu parleras”—“You will speak” – wrote: “les mots sont leurs mots / mais le chant est nôtre”—“the words are their words / but the song is ours.”14 Obenga undoubtedly feels that there exists an identity he wishes to catch or catch again, even if he has to tear it out of the homogeneity of the song he is singing in French; that which is truly his are the rhythm and chant of the song. This is of course the point we can also find in the case of the American blues, for which African Americans also claim that it is a good example of their African legacy. But afterwards we go to Brazil or Cuba or somewhere else in Latin America and whilst we feel something similar in the music of all these lands—the “Black” rhythm, for example—it is also true that we find in them few other similarities of note. The question is, what is actually “African”? Is that North African, African south of the Sahara Desert, Nmbele or Xhosa, Nigerian or Dinka etc.? What is key here is our ability to understand these different products and creations. Although we do not always understand the direction a work is supposed to pull us toward, the social and historical context can often help us identify the work’s artistic or cultural character and empathise with it. Let me mention the Chinese opera as an example. It had always appeared to me as a 10 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4. 11 Ibid. 12 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 8. 13 Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2005), 14. 14 “The words are their words / but the chant is ours.” Quoted in Mosquera, 60.

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form of art a Westerner would hardly be able to grasp, understand and enjoy. However, a few years ago, I realized that this was completely mistaken. But to realize this, I had to experience the Chinese opera in its specific environment. We were driving through the Henan province. It was a Sunday and on the main square of a small town or big village, there was a large crowd of people, practically all the inhabitants. A provisional stage was set up and musicians were hidden behind cardboards. There was no artificial lighting or sound enhancement, and the opera was taking place on the square in the middle of the day. Children were playing around, and elders brought chairs with them or sat on carriages. There were ten actors/singers and a further ten musicians performing in the opera, which was a simple story of love and betrayal. The public clapped and related to the events on the stage – and was all the while maintaining a slim line between fiction, the play, and their actual reality. Of course, there exists an aristocratic or high form of the Chinese Opera and the difference is similar to the difference between the music of Bela Bartók or Bedřich Smetana and Hungarian and Czech folk songs and music. In many contexts, the cultural barriers are very thin and fairly irrelevant, but the experience of their place of origin, event or whatever we name this, is important. Perhaps this would be of importance in the case of certain conceptual artworks as well, especially land art, but since those works no longer exist or are no longer available in galleries and museums, their documentation gives us a false sense of verism. What I am trying to say is that we should realise that the correct way of experiencing artworks and evaluating their cultural communicability is to experience the actual artworks and not exclusively their reproductions or media records, which is common practice in these times. In the just-mentioned case of the Chinese opera we clearly have to do with a cultural product, which, despite having a “national” character and local specifics, exists at the same time within the Chinese national frame and as such does not need national definition. In other words, because the Chinese opera only functions in the local Chinese context, there are no questions about its “Chinese nature.” This, of course, isn’t the case with the Congolese poet Obenga: he is aware of his roots and wishes to establish his own subjective identity as a work of the collective identity. However, all he can do is articulate his wish using some imaginary location somewhere on the imaginary African continent. These days we talk a great deal about national identity. Despite Wolfgang Welsch’s claims that the dominant form of culture these days is ­transculturality,15 I personally do not share this view. National culture, as conceptualised by 15

Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality: The Changing Forms of Culture Today,” Filozofski Vestnik, 22/2 (2001): 59–86.

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Johann Gottfried Herder at the end of the 18th century, is these days, at least in Europe, still the dominant form of culture. Separation from other cultures is typical for it. The somewhat surprising move of such national culture is that it is often built on contrasts, and the Taiwanese painting I had mentioned in the beginning, is a good example of that. That was the case of a Japanese painter arriving to the occupied (colonialised) Taiwan in order to establish the Taiwanese genre of painting, which came to be known as typically Taiwanese among both the Taiwanese and the Japanese. Similar cases are mentioned by Mladen Dolar who is discovering that the Slovenian national identity was built through its differences. Thus all Slovenian cultural icons, such as France Prešeren, Ivan Cankar or the slightly earlier Anton Tomaž Linhart, were accused in their time of not being “national” artists and that they did not belong to that which we today call the Slovenian national identity. They were considered people who were poisoning the nation, its ideals and values, with ideas foreign to Sloveneity. But despite that, a few years, decades, or generations later, they came to be viewed as pillars of Sloveneness and the foundations of its national identity. Perhaps the most paradoxical case is that of Linhart, who plagiarized Beaumarchais’ “The Marriage of Figaro” in order to create the theater play “Ta veseli dan ali Matiček se ženi,” which is considered to be the “first” Slovenian drama. As Dolar claims, originating from Hegel, “any identity is based on difference, it contains it as its internal moment and produces it as its own truth, and the difference, if taken seriously, becomes an opposite and in the end, a contradiction.”16 As I asserted above, this is the difference that allows us to empathize with other cultures, but only if those are built on common human, thus anthropologic denominators, which are, despite being contingent, still key. The difference is also that which enables the artistic and aesthetic effect and that creates the poetic effect I mentioned in the case of Duchamp’s works. There must always exist a lack of pure equivalence, as only that enables the work to have the effect of a work of art or culture. But the non-equivalence must not be total. In that case, the semantic chain vanishes and there appears a gap between the previous and the new context. In such a case, the artwork or product is not recontextualised, but rather lost (or perhaps metamorphosed into something completely different). This recontextualization is especially problematic with modern artworks, as they circulate in different geographical, cultural, and national environments. In an abundance of such cases, the reproduction of artworks and their circulation in mass media, as well as the extreme 16

Mladen Dolar, “Slovenska nacionalna identiteta in kultura—navodila na uporabo,” in Nacionalna identiteta in kultura (Ljubljana: Inštitut za civilizacijo in kulturo, 2003), 29.

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and abundant mixture of products from diverse global cultural contexts, blur the line between art and non-art and lead to art being apparently taken over by mass culture. Relocations of art and culture are a global occurrence. One of the consequences is the current abundance of such de- and re-contextualizing processes and the apparent lack of normative coordinates that could allow a division between more and less relevant works. Nor does art criticism serve this purpose today either. As such, it would perhaps make sense to claim that we should rely on more anthropological common denominators when determining the importance of singular artworks. It may also be helpful to remember that the experience of art is not a matter of media as much as it is the individual and subjective experience. Of course, in all of these cases, the artwork is a cultural or an artistic fact only on the basis of context and meaning, and is established through it. These meanings are often advanced through contingent, though no less repetitive processes and occurrences, which affect what and when we consider an artwork worthy of our aesthetic attention and admiration.

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Eastern Europe, Art, and the Politics of Representation (2014) 1

“Eastern Europe”?

The focus of this essay will be on some of the ways in which the people of Eastern Europe—especially Eastern European artists—carry out subjectivization, represent and “see” themselves, and relate to the ways in which others perceive them and their region. A politics of representation is thus exercised by those involved in determining, creating, modifying, strengthening, or weakening the dominant forms of representation of and in this part of Europe. At issue is the “recognition” and self-recognition of the region and its inhabitants: the former by the “outside world” and its spectators, and the latter by its population and its—important but often unstable or weakly delimited—national and other communities and identities. Is it possible today, in this instance, to speak of a “general crisis of representation”?1 In the case of Eastern Europe, the answer remains affirmative. Through much of its history, this region possessed an uncertain and transient identity, a feature that complemented its frequently negative image. It consisted of a plethora of cultures in a territory with unstable borders and numerous ethnic groups that often retained a silent existence vis-à-vis their neighbors or Western European brethren. Often isolated or ignored, with referential cultural centers often halfway across the continent, Eastern European artists, writers, and philosophers resembled similar figures halfway across the globe in the colonies. I intend to single out two specific features of the region. The first is an absence of a common point of identification among its inhabitants; the second is a related split between the views from the “world” and those from within the region. Outsiders expect from insiders a sense of belonging to the region— perceiving such sentiment to be a proper and adequate form of subjectivization, attuned to regional forms of representation—while the latter perceive such expectations as superfluous and but another instance of misrecognition. This is because “the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ as it has been understood in 1 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 9. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_025

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the past several decades … is neither geographic nor social: it is economic and political. A product of the Yalta Conference of 1945, it was created with the intention of outlining zones of influence in Europe. Subsequently the territory between Germany and Russia fell under the influence of the Soviet Union and soon became isolated from the rest of the world, and, in the eyes of the world, politically homogenized.”2 It is only around 1989 that a common internal sense of regional identity came into existence for a brief moment, during which the citizens of the former Soviet bloc countries and even of Yugoslavia were happy to proclaim themselves to be “Eastern Europeans” and to belong to the “new” Eastern Europe—thereby temporarily transforming the otherwise vague and usually redundant interpellation into a politically effective self-representation.3 The explanation for this perplexed situation is that, for the people of Eastern Europe, being an “Eastern European” usually did not signify a self-designation in any important way. As Terry Smith notes in his survey of contemporary world art, “During the twentieth century, artists did not identify themselves as ‘Eastern’ or ‘Central’ European, except for purposes of irony or parody.”4 Two other authors explain the ensuing situation in practical terms: “While ‘Western Europe’ has been a recognized designation for that part of the world for a long time, there is no such comparable designation for Eastern Europe, at least not in the region itself. Interviewing passersby in the streets of Ljubljana, Sofia, or Riga reveals that most people identify with their city or nation, but that the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ sounds like a foreign and antiquated term.”5 A real issue related to self-representation within the region, but diminishing since many of these countries have joined the European Union, concerns the region not as a single entity but as separate and individual constitutive 2 Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl, “Introduction,” in Primary Documents: A Source-book for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, eds. Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 9. 3 Except when quoting other authors, I shall employ Eastern Europe as a geographic designation and East Europe for naming the “East bloc” countries. 4 Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King, 2011), 84. 5 Hoptman and Pospiszyl, ”Introduction,” 9. In spite of well-argued judgments regarding the seeming unimportance of the broader Eastern European designation, there existed a historical situation in which the region was regarded by Western Europeans if not as inferior, then certainly as an object of irony and parody: “As the Eastern European countries gained independence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they … all became, to a greater or lesser extent, somewhat amusing imitators of Western Europe, and the object of mockery for this in the West.” See Daniel Chirot, “Causes and Consequences,” in The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Daniel Chirot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 11.

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parts—as countries forming the fragile “constellation” called “Eastern Europe.” This issue can be regarded from a viewpoint famously elaborated in 1988 by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and consisting of the question, “Can the subaltern speak?”6 Spivak’s response, arising from a discussion of Indian women, comes at the end of her essay: “The subaltern cannot speak.”7 It is speech— the possession and the practicing of an articulated voice—that preconditions subjectivization. The capacity to speak allows the subject to “voice” his or her concerns. This is achieved in ways similar to those of other forms of political representation: by raising one’s voice or by taking it over from someone else. In specific historical moments, this may occur spontaneously, as a consequence of “blind history,” making the voice of a former hegemonic power—such as the Habsburg monarchy, the Ottoman Empire, and later the Soviet Union—fade away, to be replaced by the voice of the subjects who then join the cacophony of voices speaking in and of the region or its constitutive parts. As Jacques Rancière reminds us, for Aristotle, man “is political because he possesses speech, a capacity to place the just and the unjust in common, whereas all the animal has is a voice to signal pleasure and pain. But the whole question, then, is to know who possesses speech and who merely possesses voice.”8 If, then, individuals and communities in Eastern Europe are successful in making their voice heard—this voice stretching as speech from the sociopolitical realm to the artistic and cultural ones—then they have taken a political stance and have effected action toward others, themselves, and their place in the world as subjects. “Politics begins when those who were destined to remain in the domestic and invisible territory of work and reproduction, and prevented from doing ‘anything else,’ take the time that they ‘have not’ in order to affirm that they belong to a common world.”9 Rancière’s claim here concerns French workers from the nineteenth century, but it can be equally applied to the postcolony and to constitutive parts of Eastern Europe. While other issues of postcolonialism (Orientalism, nation, identity, hybridity) also find resonance when applied to Eastern Europe, issues of “voice” and “speech” overdetermine them all.

6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 284. 7 Ibid., 308. 8 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Polity, 2009), 24. 9 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (­London: Continuum, 2010), 139.

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Finally, one other question remains to be resolved: May we equate “speaking” with “making visible”? Apparently, although only to the extent that images, persuasive as they are, do not thwart understanding. The phrase making visible can thus be regarded as an index of a specific instance of speech and therefore as an articulation carried out via pictorial representation. It may also denote unintended and passive forms of visibility, something that does not apply to speech. One of the aims of this article is to show how art and artists, often regarded within the region under discussion as socially and politically marginal and useless, have at some points of historical unfolding also contributed to the identification (and the obvious and visible consubstantiality) of art, artworks, and their creators with national and political entities in the region. In this sense, art functioned as a form of speech, voicing national specificities across the former European political divide that stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic, with this speech revealing their potentially reemergent common and shared historical denominator, which existed before the construction of this divide. To illuminate the historical interval during which the previous lived world of “East Europe” has been transformed into the lived world—its art included—of the loose entity called “Eastern Europe,” to elucidate, then, this transient historical moment sequestered by the historical “not anymore” and the “not yet,” constitutes the other focus of this essay. 2

Four Provisional Periods

For the purposes of this essay, the history of Eastern Europe will be schematically divided into four periods. The first consists of the historically spontaneous and semantically vacuous epoch in which this region existed without self-reflection, its blend of contradictory representations resembling a historical tableau. The region was already distinguished from Western Europe by its backwardness: “Eastern Europe,” argues Daniel Chirot, “was already backward in the Middle Ages and remained so in the twentieth century.”10 Its social order of serfdom and the clan or tribal system “characterized Eastern Europe in general from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century or even longer, and in some areas of the Balkans remained even to the beginning of the twentieth century.”11 This period also includes the nineteenth-century revolutionary attempts at national subjectivization, which were driven by the desire to turn 10 11

Chirot, 4. Emil Niederhauser, The Rise of Nationality in Eastern Europe (Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 1981), 14.

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the bourgeois “voice” into speech and were articulated in national ideologies and aspirations for national independence. The second period is the time between the two world wars. Its beginning coincides with the “Great War,” which tore apart what appeared to have been united for centuries. In its aftermath, the new national states that were created successfully implemented their first efforts at identity building. In the decade following the war, not only Italy and Germany but also Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia experienced the rise of authoritarian regimes. In this period, Eastern Europe represented a somewhat distant part of the continent, with the Balkan countries in their turn being regarded as different from the rest of Eastern Europe: “The Balkan experience stands apart from the rest of Eastern Europe’s … in its early juxtaposition to two successive colossi, the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.”12 According to another opinion, the Balkans represented the “third time zone of Europe.”13 I would, however, side with Maria Todorova, who draws a rather thin line of demarcation between Eastern Europe and the Balkans. After 1989—the fourth period in my schema and also the central temporal frame of this essay—this line has become even thinner, so that the Balkan countries may be regarded today as an increasingly integrated part of Europe, representing one extreme of the social and political spectrum, with Central European (“Middle European”) countries representing the other extreme. In the words of Milan Kundera, after 1989, these Central European countries lay geographically in the center of Europe, culturally in the West, and politically in the East. It is widely agreed that Eastern Europe possessed its highest level of recognizability after World War II, and that it was only during the Cold War that Eastern Europe factually existed as a single region—whether viewed from the inside or from the hegemonic Western (“world”) perspective. For many scholars, the very “concept of Eastern Europe is not something eternal, but designates the historical experience of the period of the Cold War.”14 This period of the highest level of recognizability of Eastern Europe as a whole—the third period according to my schema—also represents the period of its reduced subjectivization and its frequent voicelessness vis-à-vis the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

12 13 14

John R. Lampe, “Imperial Borderlands or Capitalist Periphery? Redefining Balkan Backwardness, 1520–1914,” in The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe, 179. Ernest Gellner, quoted in Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 157. Maria Todorova, “Balkanizem in postkolonializem: o lepoti pogleda z letala,” Zgodovinski časopis 61 (2007), 1–2 (135): 152.

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It was thus the Cold War that produced the dominant twentieth-century Western image of the European political East as an opaque human space, a “their” place, permeated by ideology, its primary characteristic to the Western eye seemingly being the subjugation of “freedom.” Between the late 1940s and the 1990s, Eastern Europe thus represented a well- defined but little-known chunk of Europe, with its specific political position, its lived worlds, its specific character vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and Western Europe, on the other, often forming non-reflected ideological images of itself and of its Western adversary, producing on this historical path misconceptions and misrecognitions that went in both directions. Even as, to some in the West, Eastern European and Soviet “people’s democracies” exposed the “lie” of parliamentary democracy, the eighties also revealed the extent and intensity of the decline in their ideological persuasiveness. This was exacerbated by the economic performance of the countries belonging to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon, 1949–91). Misconceptions abounded in the realm of art, too: In the Soviet art world, nobody knew enough about the West, and in the West, nobody wanted to know much about the contemporary Soviet art world. This lack of information caused Easterners to entertain mistaken ideas about the decontextualized pieces of Western art and to underestimate themselves while admiring everything that came from the “other side” of the world. The members of the Soviet art world wanted to learn everything about Western art history.15 The Western art world mostly ignored the East, while the East entertained ideas about the socially privileged and artistically trendsetting Western artists. The fourth period, which will be the main focus of this essay, begins around 1989 and stretches to our present. In terms of perception and also subjectivization, this period partakes in the “cultural turn,” and there is awareness of the fact that art and culture carry the potential of becoming an important and sometimes even the central expressive means of recognition, appreciation, and distinction. The former East Europeans have discovered that in the prosperous West, art can achieve what politics often cannot, an existential identification and a cultural congeniality. This shift has also been noticeable in the disappearance of the dominant Cold War form of popular propaganda—namely, 15

Péter György, “Hungarian Marginal Art in the Late Period of State Socialism,” in Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 177.

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sports—which was at the same time national and regional, and included the promotion of the political system of Realsozialismus. Sporting events (especially when they became available not only on the radio but on television) were aimed at both domestic and foreign audiences, and represented an arena in which the East successfully competed with the West, with champions immediately becoming both political and pop stars and appearing on the politburo floor and on stamps. Even before 1989, the arena of sports was beginning to be replaced by that of art. Despite the earlier, Cold War misconceptions, then, art becomes one of the paramount forms of self-representation of the region in this fourth period. This was, undoubtedly, aided by the work of a number of outstanding Eastern European intellectuals, some dissidents at home and others émigrés to the West, who had struggled to present to the West the complex reality of the Soviet satellite countries and their quotidian existence. It was “the East European dissidents and other scholars … whose writing spurred [intellectuals in the West] to seek an understanding of socialism different from that offered by Cold War categories.”16 3

Discourses on Eastern Europe: Which and When?

Some have argued that Eastern Europe emerged as a “discursive construct … in the Enlightenment,” representing the “West’s intermediary ‘Other,’ neither fully civilized nor fully savage.”17 Jill Owczarzak furthermore notes that “as the European Union expands eastward [it] casts Eastern Europeans as uncultured, economically underdeveloped, politically unsavvy, and therefore in need of assistance to bring them up to European standards.”18 Such characterizations of Eastern Europe, inspired by the Oriental Other, reflect not only its historically dominant image but also the possible motivations “behind Western interest in Eastern European culture.”19 There exist opposite sentiments, too, those of Eastern superiority. Russian futurists, for example, regarded themselves as battling the decadent West, while Lubomir Micić, from Belgrade—whose

16

Don Kalb, “Afterword: Globalism and Postsocialist Prospects,” in Postsocialism: Ideals, I­ deologies and Practices in Eurasia, ed. C. M. Hann (London: Routledge, 2002), 20. 17 See Jill Owczarzak, “Introduction: Postcolonial Studies and Postsocialism in Eastern Europe,” Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 53 (Spring 2009): 6. The quotation is from Larry Wolff. 18 Ibid. 19 Hoptman and Pospiszyl, “Introduction,” 10.

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“Zenitism” Marinetti characterizes as literary Yugoslav barbarian anti-­European futurism—strove to “rejuvenate Madame Europe.” In the post-1989 period and through the broadening of the European Union with some of the countries of the former Soviet bloc, this apparently uniform piece of Europe began to diversify and also disintegrate in new ways: Europe had its East, but with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the ensuing political and economic changes the European East has been symbolically annihilated, with this geographic place being now designated primarily as the former socialist countries or the new member states of the European Union, with the European East moving further east, to countries such as Romania and Bulgaria. In other words, after this region has been designated for decades politically and for centuries geographically as Eastern Europe, the Soviet bloc countries plus Yugoslavia, or Central Europe and the Balkans, it is nowadays called the new states of the European Union plus Russia and South Eastern Europe. Thus the East of Eastern Europe has now been moved … promising one day to disappear, once again, as the European East—with this imaginary East then moving further east.20 In the last two decades, not only has the notion of the East changed but some features that previously seemed to be shared by the postcolonial world and the former Soviet one have also diminished in import: the USSR could have been regarded as an imperial power following in the steps of Czarist Russia and colonizing its Eastern European neighbors, but with the demise of Soviet Realsozialismus, the enlargement of the European Union, and the current economic and social crisis affecting Europe as a whole, and the European Union in particular, the “desovietization” process in these countries was relatively swift and thorough compared to that of colonialism and postcolonialism. While postcolonialism remains a fact of life in numerous former colonies of Western empires, this is hardly the case in the neoliberal former Soviet bloc countries, where the current economic and social processes accelerate the disappearance of the visible and the invisible traits of the former Soviet system. Let me return to the politics of representation in the present and its means of formation in the symbolic, cultural, and geographical space of Eastern Europe. The warning issued by Erving Goffman regarding the question of voice still 20

Aleš Erjavec, “The East and the West of Art: Creators, Institutions, Public, Works,” in Global Circuits: The Geography of Art and the New Configurations of Critical Thought, ed. Pilar Parcerisas and Joaquin Barriendos (Barcelona: ACCA, 2010), 112.

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holds: “Representation can hardly come from those who give no attention to their stigma, or who are relatively unlettered.”21 There must exist a basic desire to “speak” and to partake in politics; otherwise, people remain speechless and detached from the space wherein the common takes place. It is not that they, like Spivak’s subaltern, “cannot speak” but that they do not attempt to do so. It is for this reason that the “speech” of Eastern intellectuals, even if they were few, carried not only the weight of persuasion but also the weight of being indispensable for effectively articulating a political position around 1989. In Eastern Europe, the dominant political issues in the eighties and nineties were not only how to determine one’s own identity and representation under changed political and social circumstances but also how to join Western Europe, which was perceived by the inhabitants of the region as a phantasmatic repository of positive values that were to complement (and not replace) socialist values. This naïve view has been documented in culture: in the ironic lyric composition “Democracy” (1989), for example, by the Romanian Balanescu Quartet, we hear an obsessive and almost conjuring refrain, “We want to be democratic,”22 just as we hear the Bosnian Huso, a character in the Slovenian film Rams and Mammoths (1985), exclaim, “Aren’t we Europe? Who is then? Who killed Ferdinand in Sarajevo?”23 In recent decades, the appropriate theoretical tools for the reflexive identification and articulation of Eastern Europe were thought to be anthropology, transitology, as well as postcolonial, postsocialist, and post-Cold War studies,24 with each of these approaches possessing certain merits but at the same time also suffering from deficiencies related to the varied character and history of the region and, especially, of its constitutive parts. I would agree with Maria Todorova when she distances herself from attempts to apply the postcolonial paradigm to the former Soviet Union, its satellites, or even to Yugoslavia and Albania.25 The postcolonial situation essentially differs from that of the former socialist countries, which even in the most extreme times retained a large 21 22 23

24 25

Quoted in Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 38. Balanescu Quartet, Luminitza (London: Mute Records, 1994). See Aleš Erjavec and Marina Gržinić, Ljubljana, Ljubljana: The Eighties in Slovene Art and Culture (Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1991), 31. A related sentiment existed across the former socialist bloc. Thus, in 1996, the Russian artist Oleg Kulik created a performance in Berlin titled “I Love Europe but Europe Doesn’t Love Me Back.” See, for example, Smith, Contemporary Art, 91. Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery, “Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, ­Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51/1 (2009): 23. Todorova, “Balkanizem in postkolonializem: o lepoti pogleda z letala,” 145.

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measure of independence. In Todorova’s opinion, “post-colonial studies are a critique of post-colonialism, that is to say, of a condition in those parts of the world that were once colonies … I do not think that the relation between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe … can be treated in this way. (The Soviet relation to Central Asia or the Caucasus is a completely different thing, a case of colonial empire par excellence.)”26 The introduction of postcolonial studies as a theoretical discourse potentially applicable to Eastern Europe was an attempt to make it the hegemonic discourse because the recently theoretically dispossessed and disenfranchised countries of Eastern Europe27 searched for a master narrative that could replace the previous socialist one and serve as a “new metanarrative.”28 For a limited time, it thus appeared that postcolonial studies would become the hegemonic body of theory in Eastern Europe.29 In the last decade, however, such trends have decreased, in part because “colonialism” and “postcolonialism” often served “to index a political position more than they function[ed] as analytic terms that clarify distinctions.”30 Who speaks today in the name of Eastern Europe? Hardly anyone, for once more no one identifies with the whole of this ethnically, historically, economically, culturally, politically, and geographically diverse region. This fact is also demonstrated by the marginal importance ascribed to the infrequent attempts to establish political bonds among the countries of the region—such as the formation of the phantasmatic “Visegrad group,” encompassing Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland. Nonetheless, one kind of representation is formed by the media and public opinion, and another one—interrelated with the former—by scholarly narratives created by experts. Immediately after the political changes of the late eighties and early nineties, Eastern Europe as a whole construed or appropriated the future-oriented image of the region as a redefined part of Europe. This lasted a short while—only as long as the initial open-ended enthusiasm over “Europe” had not yet started to transmogrify into 26 Ibid. 27 A similar situation occurs today in China where British “cultural studies” is becoming a strong and influential presence. 28 Todorova, “Balkanizem in postkolonializem: o lepoti pogleda z letala,” 144. 29 For such an attempt, see, for example, Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed.s Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002). 30 Stephen Collier, “Empire, Union, Center, Satellite: A Questionnaire,” in “Empire, ­Union, Center, Satellite: The Place of Post-colonial Theory in Slavic/Central and Eastern European/(Post- )Soviet Studies,” ed. Jonathan Brooks Platt, special issue, Ulbandus: The Slavic Review of Columbia University 7 (2003): 6.

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the actual, tiresome, and conflictual process of institutional integration into the European Union. In what ways is Eastern Europe in the post-1989 period represented by “native” experts—namely, scholars and researchers from the countries in question—and by those from the Western world? This is a much more relevant issue because it is indeed “time to liberate the Cold War from the ghetto of Soviet area studies … [an orientation that] would give voice to the ‘natives’ as analysts of their own condition.”31 Yet it must be noted that the distinction is relative: native scholars frequently turn into expatriate “outsiders,” often becoming the best representatives and the most eloquent and sensitive voices of their native countries and cultures in the global West. As Edward Said observes in relation to himself, they usually also retain “some organic connection with the place from which [they] originally came.”32 Often this is all that is needed to overcome the gap that separates an insider from an outsider. In the eyes of a foreigner, such a gap and its overcoming are of limited relevance or are barely noticeable, while in the eyes of the population in question, the cultural debris filling such gaps is of utmost importance, for it forms the “lived” cement (of the Althusserian ideology) that holds together its imagined community. This, then, is not only an issue of factography but also of the immediacy of an individual “culture” and the ways in which its people organize their enjoyment. As in numerous similar cases across the globe, it is the native experts who are responsible for bridging the abyss of cultural difference, in our case that between the West and the East of Europe. Moreover, the foreign academic interlocutor is usually not a West European but an American, a person not burdened by European (Herderian) national, cultural, and other historical intricacies. Such a person is often an anthropologist, namely, an expert in a field not yet firmly developed or well established in continental Europe, especially in its Eastern part. It also makes a difference whether the “natives” in question are experts sharing the academic universe on equal footing or “at best native informants for first-world intellectuals interested in the voice of the Other.”33 “Even though Western scholars have demonstrated a commitment to East/ West dialogue, this trend [toward the former] is in its infancy, and the omission of Eastern European scholars as contributors to the anthropology of their region is particularly glaring.”34

31 32 33 34

Kalb, “Afterword,” 20. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 336. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 284. Owczarzak, “Introduction,” 5.

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Such an omission is but another instance of the lack of voice resulting in the inability to speak. Here, some specific cultural features of Eastern Europe, such as the replacement of one cultural hegemony by another, account for the apparent deficiencies of its intellectuals, too. Among these, the most visible is weak methodology, which often arises from the shift from formerly belonging to the periphery of one dominant continental intellectual milieu or “empire”—usually the German or the French—to becoming, especially after 1989, an uncertain part of the American (or Anglo-American) empire. 4

Culture after 1989

It was culture and art that best represented the “new” Eastern Europe in the period immediately after 1989. By saying this, I am not claiming that history, political gestures, or industrial and other products did not aid in the recognition of a certain country or culture of the region or helped construe its identity, but that such products from Eastern Europe are recognizable with difficulty and are increasingly rare under current global conditions. The only Eastern European product that still springs immediately to mind is the Czech automobile Škoda—but even this is a joint venture today with Volkswagen. The recognizable national items are thus those that can sometimes be found in specialized sections of European supermarkets: Czech Pilsner beer, Zwack (the Hungarian bitter), Tokaji wine from Hungary, or Żubrówka, the Polish vodka. Instead of industrial or electronic inventions, it is agricultural products for which Eastern Europe is renowned in the post-1989 era. The same is true of cultural products, especially the works of “classics”— composers, writers—from various countries of the region and, to a lesser but still substantial extent, of visual art, especially of the twentieth century. Eastern Europe is recognizable by its art because it has remained a matter of existential need and not of a career, although such a viewpoint is disappearing in the region today. Eastern Europe also underwent the “visual turn” in culture and art. In some countries in the late eighties and in others a decade later, visual art mostly replaced the written word as the main artistic means of expression. This is also witnessed by the fact that the main events related to the dissemination of art from post-1989 Eastern Europe concerned visual art. Before 1989 and contrary to other areas of life, art in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe shared artistic preoccupations and approaches. It began with the politicized work of artists who established their names while their countries were still socialist, such as Komar and Melamid, from Russia, who created “Sots Art” in 1972; the IRWIN group from Slovenia; or the Czech artist

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Milan Kunc (the creator of “Ost Pop”).35 They all employed elements of a similar ideological heritage, developed an ironic approach to their past and present lived world, and found themselves in a similar excluded position with regard to their art in their home countries—while being appreciated in the West for their political daring. For the most part, these artists were no traditional “dissidents”: they possessed a nuanced view of both socialism and capitalism, and were not happy with either. While this art in various ways criticized or opposed the ruling ideology and its symbols, its creators often also sincerely hoped for the eradication of “anomalies” within individual brands of socialism. At about the same time—in the eighties—artists in Cuba and China found themselves in a similar situation: in Cuba, the creators of “new” art, such as Flavio Garciandiá, Osvaldo Yero, Tomás Esson, Tonel, Glexis Novoa, and Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, chose to remain in Cuba instead of moving to the anti-Castro Florida. Like their Russian and Eastern European colleagues but with no causal links to them, they discovered a treasure trove of obsolete communist symbols in the ideological attic of the decomposing socialist states and used them as building blocks of their novel avantgarde poetics. Similarly, Chinese artists of the eighties, such as Wang Guanyi, Wu Shanzhuan, Xu Bing, and the group the Concept of the Twenty-First Century, found congenial publics in Hong Kong and Germany but not in Beijing or Shanghai. In those parts of the globe where various brands of socialism reigned, artists in the eighties found themselves not only under comparable conditions of politically weakened (and therefore more permissive) socialism but also with similar or equivalent symbols of socialism at their disposal: red stars, hammers and sickles, Lenins, Stalins, and so on. Just before global socialism collapsed, artists from its member states created one final “international” socialist project: not a political Communist International but an artistic patchwork consisting of similar colors, threads, and motifs, all arising from similar conditions of possibility. In some Eastern European countries and in Russia, the artistic production around 1989 was enormous. For that which did not follow the precepts of the newly born politicized art, the most appropriate designation would remain what the Serbian art critic Ješa Denegri called “socialist modernism”;36 and 35

36

See Erjavec, “Neue Slowenische Kunst—New Slovenian Art: Slovenia, Yugoslavia, Self-Management, and the 1980s,” in Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, esp. 100–106. The practice of irony and cynicism toward the system and the state was spread globally: a segment of recent Chinese art was known as “cynical realism.” See, for example, Ješa Denegri, “Inside or Outside ‘Socialist Modernism’?” in Impossible Histories: Historical Avantgardes, Neo-avantgardes, and Post-avantgardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991, ed. Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), 170–208.

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that which did follow them increasingly resembled postmodernism and its procedures (quotation, double-coding, pastiche) and would hence be better designated as socialist or postsocialist postmodernism. It was the latter that played a role in the political representation of Eastern European countries and their populations two decades ago. Of course, at the same time, substantial differences in the presence and import of art existed: while Poland of the eighties, with its Jaruzelski dictatorship, found little use for art, Hungary in the seventies and eighties possessed numerous outstanding fine artists, not to mention Yugoslavia, with its huge artistic production stretching from the period between the two world wars into the nineties, and ranging from literature, experimental cinema, and performance art to traditional fine arts. Contrary to Western contemporary art, which soon after being created often started to circulate within the borders of the “Free World,” “a large percentage of the most important Eastern European art forms remain virtually unknown outside of their own milieu—never translated, never staged abroad, rarely exhibited.”37 Since the “visual turn” effected a transformation in the hierarchy of the arts in Eastern Europe as well, visual culture and art circulated much more than literature and theater. For this reason, they may no longer be “virtually unknown outside of their own milieu,” but it does not mean that either the former “West” or the immediate neighboring countries have often been given the chance to experience such art and culture firsthand. 5

Eastern European Art: Obscure, Forgotten, Ignored?

Between the two world wars, major parts of Eastern Europe were firmly a part of Europe, and their culture and art prove this point best. “The creativity that had taken place and was flourishing on the eastern periphery of Europe more than three-quarters of a century ago was appreciated by forward-­looking artists, critics, and cultural commentators in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in the West.”38 Artistic achievements spread not only from Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, but also from Budapest, Bucharest, Belgrade, Prague, Łodz, Riga, and Pécs. Artists such as František Kupka, S. I. Witkiewicz, Avgust Černigoj, Ljubomir Micić, Lajos Tihanyi, and Konrad Mägi, or theorists such as Karel Teige and Jan Mukařovský were part of the all-European 37 38

Hoptman and Pospiszyl, “Introduction,” 9–10. S. A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1.

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i­ntelligentsia. They remained in their respective countries, while others, such as Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, Arthur Segal, Wilhelm Albert Włodimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki (better known as Guillaume Apollinaire), and László Moholy-Nagy, emigrated to Paris, Zurich, Berlin, or New York. Those who emigrated became world famous, while those who remained have been resurrected from oblivion only in recent decades. It is not only Eastern European art from between the two world wars that remains little known; the same is true of nineteenth-century art, with literature escaping such a characterization to some extent. The complete cultural and artistic heritage of the region needs to be integrated into the common European patrimony. With the emergence of the Cold War, not only were cultural links between Eastern and Western Europe severed but the avantgarde art that the “Easterners” created also fell into political disrepute in their home countries. For some decades, art of the early avantgarde was off-limits and consigned to obscurity, with its former proponents often becoming oblivious or even ashamed of their avantgarde past. “Why is it that today these avantgarde figures and movements, which earlier in the century overcame their peripheral location to assume a critical and formative role in the genesis of advanced art, are almost totally forgotten and overlooked? … The retreat into relative historical obscurity was not the result of a Western program of willful ignorance or of cultural chauvinism. Rather, it was, in large measure, the consequence of political, social, and even cultural developments in each of the respective nations of this vast expanse of eastern Europe.”39 With nonexistent art markets, undeveloped art criticism, and isolation within the region, art (excepting the official one) under socialism was a rare and marginal commodity of little value to outsiders. One of the features of “really existing socialism” of the Soviet bloc countries was the utter emptiness of its philosophy and related academic discourses and disciplines. In Eastern Europe as a whole, the only strong, influential, and critical philosophy was often linked to anthropological Marxism: works by Adam Schaff (A Philosophy of Man, 1968), Stefan Morawski, the Praxis circle, Karel Kosík (Dialectics of the Concrete, 1963), and Robert Kalivoda (Modern Spiritual Reality and Marxism, 1968) were devoted to issues of freedom, alienation, human nature, and to the idea of art as the highest form of creativity, but then lost much of their significance in the seventies, due to Louis Althusser’s critique of humanism and its ideological nature. Meanwhile, in Yugoslavia, after 39

Mansbach, 1.

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the break with the Soviet Union, the Tito regime searched for alternative theoretical models that would allow the country to remain in some way within the framework of Marxist theory and ideology, on the one hand, and in some kind of modernism in art, on the other hand. In this way, Yugoslavia attempted to distance itself both from Soviet-type socialism (and its legacy of socialist realism) and from Western capitalist ideology. Its leadership found a solution in “socialist modernism” and, in theory, in the ideas and theories of Marxist dissidents. Thus, the Slovenian painter Milan Butina exclaimed in an interview in 1994 that in the sixties “he considered it ‘patriotic’ to employ the cubist painterly style.”40 In the realm of critical traditions, a selection of Walter Benjamin’s works was published in Belgrade in 1960, while in the United States only in 1968 and in France as late as 1974. Theodor Adorno was already obligatory reading in philosophical courses in Yugoslavian universities in the early 1970s. The same went for the young Georg Lukács, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Korsch, along with anti-colonial thought such as that of Franz Fanon, which also had influence in Yugoslavia due to its key role in the Non-Aligned Movement. During the ethnic wars of the nineties, the legacy of the Frankfurt school diminished in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia when the social sciences and the humanities fell victim to the oppressive regimes of Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tudjman. Former Soviet bloc countries fared no better, for there the previous scholastic Marxist “theory” of “actually existing socialism” was discarded, while traditional culture, pre-Soviet theory, and the scant remnants of structuralism (Jan Mukařovský) were the only remaining legitimate cultural heritage. In the eighties, one approach that conquered the consciousness as well as the fantasy of Eastern Europeans engaged in the social sciences and the humanities was postmodernism. The other was Richard Rorty’s pragmatism,41 which was often regarded as a philosophical extension of the first. Both allowed for a liberating relativism; they were attentive to contemporary situations and promoted a novel form of individualism. Postmodernism’s defense of eclecticism fit well with the nature of culture and art in these countries on the margin of Europe as well. Suddenly their proverbial lagging behind and their continuous tendency to eclectically appropriate or assimilate artistic phenomena originating in “big” and central Western countries and capitals became legitimate and desirable. 40 41

Erjavec, “Neue Slowenische Kunst—New Slovenian Art,” 137. See, for example, Marek Kwiek, Rorty’s Elective Affinities: The New Pragmatism and Postmodern Thought (Poznan: WN IF UAM, 1996).

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It is easier, however, to appropriate artistic ideas than to assimilate theory. If, between the two world wars, the Frankfurt school emerged and to some extent developed (until 1933) in a cultural ambience very similar to that of Eastern Europe, then after 1989, theoretical bodies developed further and in different directions, evading the existence and specifics of former Soviet countries. It was therefore natural that at least to some extent postcolonial theory stepped in and temporarily complemented the already mentioned mix of the emergent postsocialist studies, transitology, and post-Cold War studies. An additional advantage of the postcolonial theoretical apparatus was that it was uncontaminated by the Adornian tradition, which was averse to popular and mass culture. This same culture, deprived of its historical setting, was regarded in Eastern Europe as a liberating form of entertainment, joining Michael Jackson and Frédéric Chopin, and high art and kitsch. 6

The Postsocialist Condition

A few years prior to and following 1989—this is where the fourth period of my historical schema begins—the so-called Second World, namely, the former socialist countries of Europe, stood out as a territory where historic events were taking place. In this dynamic time, political ideas, culture, and art flourished (with art being among the first to detect and announce change), voicing this new historical turn and causing many in the West to anticipate a new cultural paradigm to emerge from the East, expressing new possibilities for Europe. Its artistic and cultural impact was expected to resemble that from the time of the October Revolution, when the Russian avantgarde influenced Western art through its ideas and via artists who emigrated from the Soviet Union. This was surely too much to expect: while early postsocialist art (mostly from the eighties) held a promise of further unique developments, the actual impact of early or more recent art from the former East Europe on West European and American art was meager or nonexistent. This was due to two reasons: (1) the competition of works and trends from elsewhere in the world, especially Asia (China, for example) and Latin America, which also vied for attention in the most developed Western countries and art markets; and (2) the rapid dissolution of early postsocialist art of Eastern Europe, whose influence was limited to the second-generation postsocialist art of the region but did not extend further. In this second generation, similarities in art between the postsocialist and the postcolonial worlds—issues of immigration, of being regarded as s­ econd-class citizens by the developed West, rootlessness—were visible, thereby proving

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that today the world, that of art included, is one: capitalist, global, universal, “on the move,” hybrid, and English speaking.42 This changed nature of the more recent art from Eastern Europe accounts for the following statements: “In 1995, Hungarian curator László Beke reported on a widespread mood: ‘the artists, critics, curators, and art historians of East Central Europe are in a transitional (or acute) identity crisis. We don’t really know why we do what we do, what the dominant characteristic of our art is, what the rest of the world expects of us, or what art’s purpose is anyway.’”43 Another Hungarian curator captured well another dominant sentiment of the time: “According to my experience, I would say that for the ‘Central European’ artists of my generation or younger, the identification point is by no means Western Europe but much rather North America, as well as the context we have referred to here as global art, in which the most diverse cultures take their place on equal terms.”44 The same statement could be extended to artists and art curators from the Balkans and from the rest of Eastern Europe: with the passage of time, American cultural and artistic influence, supplemented by the postcolonial one or that from the Third World in general, increasingly resonated with or influenced art and culture of Eastern Europe. Some artists of the older generation have retained historical memory, such as, for example, the Bulgarian Luchezar Boyadjiev, who did not try “to build up barriers between the historical past and the self-awareness which has grown since the time of political change. For him the ‘life before’ is not just a latent condition that has to be thrown overboard from the new ship of ‘Utopia.’ On the contrary, the process of self-identification now is inseparably linked to the ‘life before.’ Orientation in the new space necessarily requires an historical perspective.”45 As in the postcolonial world, so in Eastern Europe: the older generation of artists 42

In 1992, the Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović succinctly captured this global prevalence of English by creating an installation in the form of a statement, entitled “An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist.” The same went for other spheres of life, including theory, art criticism, and cultural institutions: it was also for this reason that some Eastern European intellectuals found anthropology and postcolonial studies so suitable, for they appeared to allow them to discard Hegel’s historical approach, start from a clean slate, and not be burdened by European linguistic and cultural intricacies. It was, as Fredric Jameson proclaimed in 1984, the first time in history (whether we call it postmodern or not) that the logic (in the sense of a cultural paradigm) of American culture conquered the world. 43 Smith, 113. 44 Ibid. 45 Maria Vassileva, “Boyadjiev Luchezar,” in After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, ed. Bojana Pejić and David Elliott (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), 2: 17.

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remained oriented to the colonial or the socialist past, respectively, while the younger generation often strove to position its art within the dehistoricized world of global capitalism. During the period preceding and immediately following the fall of “actually existing socialism”—encompassing approximately a decade—art and culture in Eastern Europe blossomed. They often served as the vehicle and voice of political representation and articulation of identity-building within the newly existing or politically reformed Eastern European states, on the one hand, and of their recognition by outsiders, on the other hand. Art often not only served as an existential expressive means but also constituted a political gesture, which complemented that of ordinary political speech. Art expressed and, in its own way, articulated traumas, expectations, reservations, and hopes of the emergent future, aiding ordinary political gestures and speech to put individual countries on the map of Europe: countries that Western Europeans and other “foreigners” were expected to look at and discern in them signs of nascent human and national entities that wanted to partake in the “common” with the outside world. Speech, too, found new forms: thus, the singing protests between 1987 and 1991 led to the political transformation in Estonia that materialized in the “Singing Revolution” (which then spread also to the other two Baltic countries), with writers (such as Václav Havel in Prague, the former Hungarian president Árpád Göncz, or the first foreign minister of Slovenia, Dimitrij Rupel) and philosophers (the prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjić, for example) becoming national and international political figures. While Polish, Hungarian, and Slovenian art flourished in the nineties, art from most of the Balkan countries became internationally visible only a decade later, when the economic and political circumstances made its production and global proliferation possible. Like the recent Chinese art of Wang Guangyi or Xu Bing, art from Eastern Europe mirrored the dynamism of the “wild East” and the ensuing economic and political consolidation of these countries. One consequence of the transition was the temporarily increased artistic production that, at least in the beginning, was a continuation of artistic trends from the eighties. Another consequence was the theoretical and critical apprehension of the specificity of such art and the consciousness of its irreducibility to possible models in the West or elsewhere. This situation lasted for a decade at most, after which art from the former East Europe and Soviet Union started increasingly to reorient itself away from its Eastern European home base toward Western (American and Western European) art worlds. In the early nineties, Western critics and curators discovered the art of Eastern Europe and the related one from Russia. A series of art exhibitions occurred

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across Europe and the United States,46 with such events soon to be followed by some important publications covering the same kind of artworks.47 At the beginning, the curators of such exhibitions and the authors of such publications came from the West and were aided by Eastern Europeans. It was at that stage that local scholars, critics, and curators began to complement the work of their Western colleagues partly in tandem and partly alone. As in the case of anthropology, in that of contemporary art from Eastern Europe, too, it was the locals or natives who started to publish scholarly and comprehensive works about Eastern Europe even as they wrote in the Anglo-American style and idiom. Authors such as Piotr Piotrowski,48 Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković,49 Zdenka Badovinac,50 Igor Zabel, Branka Stipančić, Inke Arns, and many others functioned as cultural intermediaries between the West and Eastern Europe. This also means that scholars, critics, curators, and artists shared the same concerns and had the same desire to put the art of their countries on the world map. Due to a geographic and historical coincidence on which their shared regional identity was based, these cultural activists and enthusiasts embarked on the project of “catching up” with the West, at the same time also responding to the question of “how the East sees the East.”51 Terry Smith draws our attention to the IRWIN group from Slovenia that initiated East Art Map,52 a book “compiled with the assistance of a team of art historians, artists, critics, and curators active in Eastern and Central Europe” who felt the need “to counteract the Western view [of Eastern Europe] as a terra incognita.”53 Its aim was to set up a framework within which art from the East would exist on an equal footing with its Western counterpart, recalling the old dream of joining together Western and Eastern modernism. This 46

See, for example, After the Wall; and Lóránd Hegyi, Dunja Blazevic, and Bojana Pejić, Aspects/Positions: 50 Years of Art in Central Europe, 1949–1999 (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, 1999). 47 See, for example, Hoptman and Pospiszyl, Primary Documents. 48 See, for example, Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant- Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion, 2010). 49 Erjavec and Gržinić, Ljubljana, Ljubljana; Art from Poland, 1945–1996, ed. Jolanta Chrzanowska- Pieńkos et al. (Warsaw: Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej Zachęta, 1997); Djurić and Šuvaković, Impossible Histories; and Erjavec, “Neue Slowenische Kunst—New Slovenian Art,” 135–74. 50 Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present, eds. Zdenka Badovinac and Mika Briški, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999). 51 See, NSK Embassy Moscow: How the East Sees the East, ed. Eda Čufer (Koper: Gallery Loža, 1993), 1. 52 East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, ed. IRWIN (London: Afterall, 2006). 53 Smith, 85.

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2006 book was presented with the following words: “In recent decades Eastern Europe has undergone rapid changes in its political and economic dogmas and it is now among the most significant areas for the production of contemporary culture.”54 The multi-authored volume covered art from all the Eastern European countries, as well as Russia and Moldova. It was a book mainly (but not exclusively) by “natives,” or “insiders,” intended for non-natives. It spoke with a native voice but in an idiom that was to form a bridge between the object of discourse—particular art—and the global West. The authors and editors pursued a politics of representation that was to be carried out by putting the art of Eastern Europe “on the map.” For this reason, the IRWIN group “decided to ask experts from both East and West to provide … texts that deal with concrete comparisons between the art of the two regions or lay the groundwork for such comparisons.”55 In this case, the subaltern started to speak and used speech to identify and promote little-known or unknown art from Eastern Europe, setting up a map that located and pictured the position of each artist. Through art, venues to other instances of speech emerging from the region opened or were strengthened. Since Eastern European countries are relatively small, developed to different degrees, with their cultures being principally the national ones, they resemble a random collection of countries that by accident occupy the same region. What continues to hold them together is their shared recent belonging to the Soviet system, a characteristic not dissimilar to their current position within, outside, or in-between the European Union and “the rest” of Europe. In the nineties and at the beginning of the new millennium, the period of “the state of exception” was coming to an end in the Second World. This period’s art expressed and voiced its transitional specifics in a visual idiom that combined early twentieth-century avantgarde art, socialist and social realism, and local visual references, all viewed from a particular postmodern distance. Such art visibly diverged from that created by the artists of Western Europe, before it became assimilated into the all-European and global art worlds. Within this later cosmopolitan artistic mixture, art from the former socialist countries became almost indistinguishable from that created by non-­European émigré artists. In their artistic approaches, if not always also themes, artists such as Nedko Solakov, Zbigniew Libera, and Lia Perjovschi started to visibly exhibit closeness with global art. The historical transformations were happening quickly, discarding art, memories, and past reality as they went. Artists had to 54 55

East Art Map, back flap. East Art Map, 14.

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look into the future, and, for many from Eastern Europe, the future definitely appeared global. Hanging onto the past just would not do. New social, economic, and political circumstances conditioned the emergent art of a connected (if not also united) Europe. Eastern European art, reflecting the ongoing social and political processes, thus started to resemble art from Western Europe as well as that of the global art world. In this process, it lost some of its specificity and started increasingly to look like its First and Third World contemporaries, especially since many “Western” creators were in fact permanent or temporary émigrés from non-European countries. 7

The Slipping Position of Art in Eastern Europe

Let me draw some conclusions. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the representation of Eastern Europe ceased being homogeneous. This change was also visible in art, where national particularities were often elaborated, articulated, retained, and made public in front of the whole Europe where they were presented—and where they and their creators could speak—as legitimate and desired specifics of the various countries within the region. In 1932, the Slovenian literary critic Josip Vidmar suggested that since Slovenia was so small, it could leave a mark in Europe only in the arena of culture and art and not in politics or economy. The capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana, was thus to become another Athens or Florence, “renowned for its culture, making a mark in the world in this way.”56 Vidmar’s proposal was not original; a century and a half earlier, similar ideas were developed and proliferated by Friedrich Schiller in Weimar, which also was a small community, a duchy of some ten thousand inhabitants, where Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe preceded Schiller as court intellectuals, and where Schiller developed his idea of an “aesthetic state.” In direct reference to this tradition, in 1991 the Slovenian group IRWIN organized an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, entitled “Slovenian Athens,” thereby reenacting Vidmar’s idea from before World War II and transforming a political utopian project into an artistic one.57 A year later, the group started the project “State in Time,” which recalled Schiller’s precepts. Vidmar was correct and not only in regard to Slovenia: in recent decades, Eastern Europe has in fact made its mark in Europe and globally, often with 56 57

Quoted in Erjavec, “Neue Slowenische Kunst—New Slovenian Art,” 135. Marina Gržinić, Slovenske Atene 1991–1907 = Slovenian Athens 1991–1907 (Ljubljana: ­Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, 1991).

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and through art, and it has carried this out at the same time as a part of the (political) former Soviet Second World and as a part of the (geographic) region of Eastern Europe. In its early period, the political aspect often determined the region’s imagery and artistic expression, while the geographic dimension expressed its national and historical specificities, voicing a shared existential and historical position in the world. Since, by the outside “world” and by foreigners, the region was often recognized primarily by its art (beside history and language as crucial vehicles of nationality), we could almost say that Vidmar’s idea that small cultures and nations can only make a mark in the world through culture has for some of them proved true—at least for a limited period after 1989. Unfortunately, this would be the appreciative viewpoint of the European or some other inhabitant of the global West, where art had been recognized as an index of the general development, presence, and articulation of the voice, not only of the artist but also of the national community. Regarded from within the region, matters appeared differently. Even though art and culture were, in the eyes of many, considered a valued spiritual and national entity, the petit bourgeois often also regarded art as a useless luxury that the common people could neither afford nor wish to possess, for they did not understand it, except in the case of ethnic or popular art or kitsch.58 As a popular saying went, art was “a carnation in the button hole”; its only use was to make life a little more pleasant for a short moment. Life was toil, replete with obligations and suffering; “work” made sense only if its result could be something tangible and useful. Art and the artist, of course, were neither. Art had also become suspect, because it contravened the ruling social norms. It is thus no wonder that in one of his plays, satirically titled For the Benefit of the Nation (1899), the best-known Slovenian writer, Ivan Cankar, calls the main character (who comes to vitiate the people of a small town, who turn out to be morally more corrupt than the devil himself) “an artist and a brigand,” for in the eyes of the conformist town folk the two designations were perceived as identical. The region also has a long history of conflating popular and socially-involved art (usually also designated “realist”), bypassing or opposing the urban and the cosmopolitan avantgarde. Let us give the word to Karel Teige, the avantgarde artist, writer, editor, and member of the 1920s avantgarde movement Devĕtsil: “All regimes are inclined toward making realism into the official art, even though in the form of populism and ruralism … Whenever the political guide of the ship, be it leftist or rightist, from the edged and strong current 58

Czech artists, especially, have sometimes made a career out of kitschy art. See the works by Milan Knížák or Milan Kunc, for example, in Postmodernism and the Post-socialist Condition, 97–107.

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of social events and struggle for power, reaches the shore of art—he always lands on the right shore.”59 The long-standing image of artists as useless and marginal was unexpectedly transformed around 1989, when artists (and intellectuals in general) were often the ones who articulated new national and political agendas, proving that they could indeed be useful if the occasion arose. What complicated the situation in the nineties was that art had to be made simultaneously for the domestic and for the foreign public, each of which existed in very different lived worlds. “Much of the art produced in the region was obliged to face both ways.”60 Thus, the domestic response may have differed from that abroad, with the two audiences possessing divergent or contradictory expectations, with the consequence of divergent or contradictory evaluations and interpretations of the same artworks being produced. In what follows, the Russian curator and critic Ekaterina Degot speaks of art and artists from Russia, but something similar—even if to a lesser extent—applies to those from the rest of Eastern Europe: The Russian artist perpetually finds himself or herself between the Scylla and Charybdis of two representational mechanisms, which are switched on automatically and ruthlessly. In Russia, where twentieth-century art with its ideology of individualism and unrestrained freedom is still a foreign phenomenon of invested dreams, being a “contemporary artist” means to represent Western culture … as shown by mass-media shows in order to appear “up to date,” more Western-like. In the West, on the other hand, a Russian artist must inevitably represent Russia.61 The importance ascribed to art in Eastern Europe lasted for a decade or two around 1989 and aided in the formation of the global image of the region as cultured and ripe with new ideas.62 A decade after 1989, the initial enthusiasm over the political changes began to diminish, and art started to lose the special place and task it was assigned by the emergent parliamentary democracies of Eastern Europe, namely, to aid in the recognition of the region and its constituent countries, and to demonstrate their artistic excellence. After this initial 59 60 61 62

Karel Teige, Vašar umetnosti (Belgrade: NIP Mladost, 1977), 323. Smith, 113. Ekaterina Degot, “The Revenge of the Background,” in Primary Documents, 340. In this respect, countries such as Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Baltic countries, and Poland stood out, while art from Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania never attained an equally strong presence and position.

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period, artists started to lose their previous importance. When they aspired to turn from political amateurs and ethical enthusiasts into professional public and political figures, they were often greeted by the call “Artists go home!” and enjoined to leave politics to professionals. Artists, on the contrary, often thought that their temporary role in the political changes around 1989 qualified them for political professions. Art may not have ceased to voice Eastern Europe’s transformation and its existential expressions, but—devoid of previous attention—it started either to disappear or to lose much of its previous “civic” relevance. The “heroic” period was coming to its end. Art still possessed speech, with which it articulated its position and aspirations, but it no longer carried the same political impact. Artists’ previous risk taking could not be equaled by experiences in quotidian postsocialist reality, wherein world attention and public expressions of appreciation for their art were replaced by “art as usual.” Consequently, its speech became fragmented and marginalized. Some artists soon started to be satisfied with the mere possession of a voice with which they could signal pleasure. In this respect, the development of art paralleled larger processes in Eastern Europe as a whole, where the pleasures associated with capitalism in its “wild East” variety were quickly replacing the earlier political pursuits, and where politics was transformed into the pragmatic management of society. Today, two decades after the “heroic” period around 1989, art in Eastern Europe has further lost its previous existential, representational, and political importance; in this respect, it resembles the art of much of Western Europe.63 Due to its strong institutional collaboration with the state and its apparatuses, art and artists in Europe as a whole are hardly in a position to criticize, subvert, and oppose the state and its practices, or pursue a politics of subjectivization that would be of similar intensity and effectiveness as two decades ago. But then, in the future, the politics of representation of Eastern Europe will probably not matter in the same way as in the past: “From a long-term perspective, Eastern Europe is slowly vanishing. In the next ten, twenty, fifty, or one hundred years, it will probably become a part of the European institutional apparatus,”64 and thus quite unlike its predecessor from 1989. Still, it has been an enormous privilege to live in those times. 63

64

See Aleš Erjavec, “Die neue Vorzeichen der Kunst: Eine Fallstudie zu Mittel- und Ost-­ europa,” in Zurück aus der Zukunft: Osteuropäische Kulturen im Zeitalter des Postkommunismus, eds. Boris Groys, Anne von der Heiden, and Peter Weibel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 508–33. Todorova, “Balkanizem in postkolonializem: o lepoti pogleda z letala,” 152.

Chapter 25

Zhuyi: From Absence to Bustle? (Comments on Wang Jianjiang’s Article “The Bustle and the Absence of Zhuyi”) (2017) “Zhuyi in this essay is equivalent to the great -isms that have exerted a great impact on humans such as Marxism, existentialism, naturalism, etc.; it also includes those -isms that have strongly influenced Chinese aesthetics, such as modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, deconstruction, etc. —Wang Jianjiang, “The Bustle and the Absence of Zhuyi”1

∵ 1 Introduction In this essay, I shall present some observations related to issues raised by the article “The Bustle and the Absence of Zhuyi. The Example of Chinese Aesthetics” written by Professor Wang Jianjiang I will claim that some recent events and processes in the West to some extent resemble those in China. Dialogues such as this one should aid us to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings or stray practices that concern the coexistence, the comparative importance, and the novelty of ideas that are circulating in international academic circles. Professor Wang Jianjiang, while criticizing the frequently subordinate position of Chinese academics vis-á-vis the positions and practices of their Western colleagues, is at the same time well aware of China’s need to communicate, cooperate, and share knowledge with the West. Such position is of course a necessary precondition for any kind of equality and mutual understanding. In the past academics often built bridges within the “republic of letters”;2 there is 1 Wang Jianjiang, “The Bustle and the Absence of Zhuyi: The Example of Chinese A ­ esthetics,” Filozofski vestnik 37/1 (2016): 157–78. Online at: https://ojs.zrc-sazu.si/filozofski-vestnik /article/view/4858 2 “Republic of letters” was an enlightenment community of scholars and literary figures “les philosophes”) who in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and America shared knowledge and at the same time respected mutual differences in language and culture. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_026

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no reason why this should not be done again and on a larger scale. This need to cooperate and exchange is a necessary precondition for any authentic understanding among individuals, nations and cultures and is a basic feature of any serious attempt to perceive “them” as part of a larger, more encompassing “us.” I will begin by pointing out that in the comments and remarks published in Professor Wang’s article he often simultaneously refers to aesthetics, philosophy, and the humanities. His own knowledge is mostly about these three realms that—together—he usually calls “theory.” In the West it is typically agreed that aesthetics is a narrower field than philosophy and that the latter is (even if only for propedeutic reasons) subsumed under the humanities. Another key term I shall be frequently using is art. Art is important for the topic of this article because its recent development in China is closely intertwined with the developments in art criticism in China and in the West, in their aesthetics as well as in the humanities in general. A characteristic of recent modern as well as contemporary art is that it requires its proper theory. By “art,” I designate primarily visual art; other artistic genres (especially literature and music), while considered art, are in the West at least since the second half of the twentieth century regarded as realms (or “genres”) that differ from those of art as visual art. Much of what is being said about contemporary visual art (i.e., painting, sculpture, installation art, performance, cinema, video, etc.), however, is valid also for literature or music. There is a general agreement in the West that separation into art and all the other arts occurred around year 1800. 2 Art Chinese contemporary art (visual art) has very quickly caught up with global artistic developments, but this fact was hardly noticed within China. I ­cannot ascertain in a satisfactory manner the reasons for such ignorance of ­contemporary developments. I am intentionally using such strong language as “­ignorance,” for only such means properly address the actual situation. On the other hand, “literature” continues to be regarded as both the most important and the most hegemonic artistic genre. Visual art is thus ascribed the second place in such hierarchy. Specialists in aesthetics often do not know much about visual art, which is why they often tend to privilege, discuss, and ascribe special import to the written word, ignoring visual art and its theoretical discourse. In the West some decades ago literature had to cede its prime place among the arts to visual art. The main turning point was the advent of postmodernism in the seventies and eighties that was both visual and commercial—two things that literature, in general, was not. For a variety of reasons works of visual art are more easily and

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more quickly accessed than novels and poems. Although I sympathize with the Chinese attempts to retain literature as the main artistic genre, I doubt that in the future in China literature and its theoretical discourse will retain their present special status but will—just like in the West—fade into the backstage, with the front stage being glaringly illuminated by visual art and its discourse. 3 Western Zhuyi In recent years I have on some occasions witnessed debates among Chinese aestheticians who criticized their compatriots for being uncritical to Western ideas and for not offering “Chinese” alternatives to them. These critics were searching for an alternative to what they saw as being uncritically pro-­ Western views that encompassed both methods and theories used, as well as subject-matter itself. These proponents of Chinese aesthetics, philosophy, and the humanities in general, are of course also proponents of Chinese tradition. They see Western aesthetics, philosophy and the humanities in general as pushing Chinese thought into the backstage and irrelevance. They wish to stop and even reverse this trend and thus develop theory (or a cluster of theories) that would be an original “Chinese” response both to Chinese and to global contemporary issues. The obvious question raised then is: on which segment or which trend within the Chinese tradition is such “Chinese” theory to rely upon? Could this be Confucianism, neo-Confucianism, Daoism, Marxism or something else? At this point the sterile nature of such a dilemma reveals itself: to me the most productive situation is to have all such theories present, whether coexisting or existing in conflict, with theory as well as literature and art being internally torn among these conflicting traditions and new “foreign” theories. The only path available in such situation are struggles and slow mutual exchange and even in some cases assimilation of “foreign” perspectives to the national and local contexts. In some other countries the dilemma is usually different: in post-colonial countries, for example, the antagonism is often between the colonial and the post-colonial discourse and culture. Since China is not a colony and, furthermore, was a Marxist state for most of the previous century, can lessons learnt in the former colonies be of substantial use when discussing China? I doubt. I also doubt that postcolonial studies can be of great use in interpreting developments in the former socialist countries, as I have argued elsewhere.3

3 See Aleš Erjavec, “Eastern Europe, Art, and the Politics of Representation,” boundary 2 14/1 (2014): 51–77. Reprinted as Chapter 24 of this volume.

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Recent and current complaints of Chinese aestheticians, philosophers, and experts in the humanities who were defending Chinese identity by stressing the importance of Chinese tradition seem to be well-founded, for the Chinese humanities really are (and have been since the late eighties and the early 90s of the previous century) increasingly under the influence of Western theoretical paradigms (the -isms), while their main (if not also exclusive) subjects of investigation were issues raised by Western authors. The question is thus whether something—and if so, what?—can in China be put in the place of contemporary Western thought. Furthermore, is this a choice between Chinese and Western thought or also between Chinese and Western culture and art? If the latter, is such response not a repetition of Chinese tradition of “splendid isolation”?4 The main reasons for the current situation are noted and discussed already by Professor Wang in his article. Of course, the current situation is not limited to aesthetics, philosophy or the humanities (and Professor Wang highlights this fact himself): we find it also in popular music, fashion, popular press, and in the general world view of many, especially young, Chinese people. It is not consoling to say that this is what you get with market economy, and it is even less consoling to notice that in the past other countries have found themselves in situations similar to those found in present-day China. They have attempted to counter the influx of “foreign” theories and artistic practices in different ways. Such countries—in Europe the best-known among them is France—in the past century attempted to actively counter foreign influence (especially that of the United States) which in their opinion promoted foreign ideas and products of mass culture and endangered domestic culture.5 Sometimes such attempts met with success. Let me offer a few examples: Case 1: Half a century ago especially French intellectuals criticized the use of “franglais” (the excessive use of English vocabulary in French language resulting in a mixture of both languages) and attempted to reduce the amount or number of “imported” English language words and American mass culture works into French language and culture by practicing linguistic, educational and cultural purism. The ensuing de facto prohibition has met with some success. Case 2: The more “artistic” (non-commercial) European movies are nowadays supported by a special European fund that offers financial aid for 4 “Splendid isolation” was the policy pursued by Great Britain during the late nineteenth ­century when Great Britain was only minimally involved in European affairs. 5 See Erjavec, “Eastern Europe, Art, and the Politics of Representation.”

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production, distribution and the translation (in the form of subtitles) of ­movies made in European Union for which a very limited cultural market is a continuous fact of life. Case 3: In Europe today many governments sanction the reproduction of popular music, requesting radio stations by law to play minimum 40% of popular music that is in the native language of respective country, with the rest being left to songs in English (or some other) language. Case 4: Culture is not the same as “theory,” but it is not that different either. Thus in philosophy (aesthetics and the humanities are subjected to the same treatment) what the French government does is support the translation of French works into foreign languages. The French viewpoint is often equated with that of Europe as a whole, the reason for this being that France was the only “big” European country to be attentive to this issue and to be constantly averse to the predominance of American culture which it regarded as ignorant, commercial, and civilizationally worthless. Case 5: Some time ago the American historian of ideas, Martin Jay, discussed the preponderance of the post-World War II American art and the fact that at that time the world capital of art has shifted from Paris to New York. He consoled the French public that on the other hand since the eighties the French theory (structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, etc.) have to a large extent conquered American humanities and have positioned French theory as the dominant one in American academia.6 Case 6: Yet another example comes from an important observation by the American (Marxist) philosopher Fredric Jameson who offered another possible answer to the problem discussed by Professor Wang: “Europe—more prosperous and culturally more elegant than ever, a shining museum of an extraordinary past, the most directly of the past of modernism itself—did not succeed in establishing its own forms of mass cultural production. In a similar way the former socialist countries were mostly incapable to establish culture and a recognizable style of life that would be capable of being an alternative, while in the Third World old traditionalisms are equally weak and ossified.”7 Jameson thus detects a problem as regards European culture in the fact that Europeans have never established a strong link between high art and popular

6 See Martin Jay, “Returning the Gaze: The American Response to the French Critique of ­Ocularcentrism,” in Refractions of Violence (London: Routledge, 2003), 133–47. 7 Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press 1998), 67.

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culture and have treated the latter primarily as a product of culture industry and thereby insufficiently dignified to be regarded of equal relevance as art.8 In this respect aesthetic theories and views of Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg are two outstanding examples of Western approach to high art that denigrates mass culture. Unfortunately the tradition of this total separation of two realms of culture in Europe that was set apart already in the 19th and then even more strongly in the first half of the 20th century with these two and many other authors continues to haunt western art as well as aesthetics and evaluation of art. This fact was witnessed by the theme of the 2016 International Congress for Aesthetics in Seoul, “Aesthetics and Mass Culture,” which is directly related to the modernist division into mass/popular/commercial culture on the one hand and high/elite/non-commercial art on the other. Can China produce a sufficient amount and sufficiently specific mass culture? Are there any other alternatives to such culture? 4 Marxism Chinese humanistic scholars were and remain under a strong influence of Marxism. It is certain that they will continue this tradition. Here the question then is: which Marxism are we (or they) talking about? The old division into “orthodox” and “Western” Marxism still holds: if orthodox Marxism is linked to the ruling communist party of a certain community, making Marxism its “official” doctrine, sooner or later conformism and corruption will be born out of such doctrine and its practice. If, on the other hand, the “dissident” Marxism is given priority, then this Marxism will supply criticism but very rarely also supportive and constructive views. If it opts to do the latter (if the “dissident” Marxism opts to support an act of government), then it will often be quickly accused of apologetic approach, ideological intervention, etc. In other words, in the former case we gain the compromising uncritical eye of pure affirmation, while in the latter one (= dissident Marxism) we cannot attain professional support for anything that offers even slight impression of being supportive, for it is immediately compromised by being proclaimed to be an affirmative stance. 8 Jameson notes that Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), the well-known French novelist, although he was the author of best-sellers is not regarded as a part of the culture industry, for “no contradiction is as yet felt in his time between the production of best-sellers and the production of what will be later understood as ‘high literature.’” Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 208.

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All this is probably true also of China. In the rest of the world Marxism today exists (and remains) as Western Marxism and “radical theory.” By this I denote the tradition of the Frankfurt school, and that of various theoretical discourses associated with Freud, Marx and Saussure, i.e. with psychoanalysis, with M ­ arxian political economy and with structural linguistics and theories and methodologies that are connected with it. One can of course argue that Chinese Marxism is exempt from such pitfalls. I personally doubt very much that this is possible. 5

The Incomprehensible French Theory

When in the sixties “French” theory started to spread across Europe, not many experts outside France understood it. In a sweeping gesture it conquered continental Europe to become and remain the dominant theory on the continent. At the beginning—in the 1960s and early 70s of the 20th century—this cluster of theories (deconstruction, theory of discourse, structuralism and post-­structuralism, structural anthropology, theory of ideology, etc.) was almost equally incomprehensible to mainstream Western academics brought up in the tradition of Wittgenstein, as well as of analytic philosophy and aesthetics, as it was incomprehensible to non-Western scholars. In the 70s and 80s the situation repeated itself with the unexpected appearance of postmodern art, culture and theory. Postmodern theories too once again required knowledge of recent French philosophy and culture. As in the sixties and seventies western experts who were taught in the analytic tradition again had big difficulties to understand French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze or Jean-François Lyotard. The three “philosophical empires”—the Anglo-American, the German, and the French, to use a distinction introduced by Richard Shusterman—coexisted in Europe but this in no way meant that the three philosophical traditions were mutually comprehensible or easily translated one into the other two. There was a joke at that time among the British philosophers that concerned Hegelian dialectics and consequently German philosophy: “What is dialectics?” went the question—“It is philosophy that doesn’t make any sense,” was the answer. In a similar way an English reviewer of Lyotard’s book Discours, Figure (1971) wrote in the Winter 1972 issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics that the French author—much appreciated in the United Kingdom although little read—boasted that his book was full of aporias and voids. Such statements enormously confused the reviewer, for in Britain such admissions would be

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signs of dilettantish and “bad” argumentation, and certainly not as something an author would be striving for. This situation changed in the seventies and eighties when post-­structuralism and the broader interpretation of critical theory and postmodernism in culture set in. These new tendencies entered American and British academia via French departments, and comparative literature departments rather than departments of philosophy or aesthetics. Suddenly two very different traditions were fighting for legitimacy in the United Kingdom and in the United States. This situation lasted until the “continental” tradition (i.e. the “French”) became the dominant one, and pushed traditional Anglo-American philosophy into the sidelines. 6

Eastern Europe

A similar situation emerged in the eighties and nineties in the former socialist countries of Europe and in the former colonies. Due to the lack of information and to their frequent isolation experts from the humanities in these countries knew little about the more recent international developments in their field. If they did, they found no way to bring together “Western” theory and its application to socialist and postsocialist practice. In some respects these countries resembled China. The East Europeans furthermore lacked sound methodology. It took them a few decades of hard work (mostly abroad) to compensate for such weaknesses. A rare instance of the successful application of “­Western” theory to Eastern European social and political practice was the attempt of some Slovenian philosophers (Slavoj Žižek being one of them) who used Althusserian and Lacanian theories to deconstruct the workings of Yugoslav ideology in the eighties, i.e. in the last decade of Yugoslavia and its disintegrating self-management socialism. Some countries of Eastern Europe find it today difficult to compete on equal grounds with their Western European academic neighbors. Also, the humanities are not regarded as something of great import in most Eastern European countries. Funding for the development of humanities remains scarce. Foundations and foreign governments supply aid, education, and partly research funding. Another problem that emerges today or, rather, remains alive since centuries ago, is the distinction between provincialism and periphery. This difference was explicated by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann: province emulates and copies art of the center, while periphery creatively transforms it into a specific extension or variant of the art that already exists in the center. The same applies to humanities.

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369

The National and the International

China has an incredibly long history of statesmanship and thus a very long history of conscious belonging to a single state. A person from continental Europe often finds it surprising when he experiences the strong sentiment of being Chinese among his or her Chinese friends. In Europe such strong patriotic sentiment could perhaps be encountered among the British or the Poles and the Croats but hardly elsewhere. A European intellectual is most often torn between different identities and self-identifications: religious, national, regional, educational, pro-European or pro-national, class-based, etc.9 The same sentiment applies to the humanities. Quite some time ago I responded to the questions put forth by the American journal Metaphilosophy.10 The journal’s question was: how national or international is philosophy? I discovered that while it was at that time very difficult to find “national” philosophers, there still were some, or at least such tendencies existed. One such case was Croatian philosophy which at that time attempted to develop Croatian “national” philosophy. This meant giving special treatment and funding to a research institute doing research on the history of philosophy in Croatia. To be precise: the name of the research project was that of “Croatian” philosophy. Books on little-known Croatian philosophers were funded and distributed, and a few special teaching posts were established so as to give more prominence to the teaching of the history of Croatian philosophy. Although the project appeared sound, it ran for only four years: that is, up until the Croatian nationalist President Franjo Tuđman died, after which the research project collapsed. Croatian philosophers obviously did not want to pursue research in the history of little-known medieval Croatian philosophers but wanted to study Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard and the like. In this they resembled a little their fellow Chinese philosophers. In this case as in many others it turned out that support from the government or its institutions does not produce desired results and that it is more productive to leave the researchers to pursue their own priorities. In a way the difference was like the difference between the production for the free market and production according to the five-year plan. It appears that Zhuyi can be born mostly from the latter. If China decides that such action is necessary it may be more successful than other countries that attempted to carry out the same. It may find like-minded 9 10

See Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). Aleš Erjavec, “Philosophy: National and International,” Metaphilosophy 28/4 (1997): 329–45. Reprinted in this volume.

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(especially) Chinese researchers and thinkers who will be willing and happy to support the broadening and deepening of the place and role of Chinese philosophy and aesthetics in the world. But allow me to voice my belief that such support will be generated only if such researchers and authors themselves will from their own free will decide to carry out such agenda. Only then will they produce results. Otherwise they will spend a lot of funding, visit many countries for talks about academic cooperation but at the end that is all that China will get. Let me conclude this commentary by saying something about Zhuyi. It has been observed that “-ism” is not a perfect rendering of the Chinese meaning of this term in Western languages, although I do agree with Professor Wang that something similar to Zhuyi occurs also in the West. Perhaps the terms “­movement” and “trend” could be partly suitable translations of Zhuyi? 8

Who Possesses Speech and Who Only Possesses Voice?

In my view the contemporary Chinese situation as regards Zhuyi, art and theory (aesthetics, philosophy and the humanities) are in many respects different from the present or the recent situation in the West. If some decades ago the cultural antagonism and competition in the West occurred mainly between the United States, on the one hand, and Europe (especially France) on the other, this bipolar situation has now turned into a quadrilateral one: we are still witnesses to the American and the European culture, but there is now a new player in town, namely China. For some time it appeared that such a player would be the former Soviet bloc countries, but they then never took on this role. The so-called “Third World” has once more moved away, has remained “mute,” while China is striving to gain a “voice” to paraphrase Jacques Rancière. In his Politics, Rancière writes, Aristotle claims that man “is political because he possesses speech, a capacity to place the just and the unjust in common, whereas all that an animal has is voice to signal pleasure and pain. But the whole question, then, is to know who possesses speech and who merely possesses voice.”11 There are numerous small and big countries across the world that find themselves in a similar situation concerning aesthetics, philosophy and the humanities, but not many among them are striving to have their voice heard. I see Professor Wang’s article as an attempt to articulate such a voice and make 11

Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (London: Continuum, 2009), 24.

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it heard both at home and abroad. I believe that such stance—to acquire voice—is of paramount importance for any successful emancipation and therefore for erecting one’s own position and place in the world (and society). At the same time the Chinese contribution to global aesthetics, philosophy and the humanities should keep open channels with the Western tradition. I interpret my remarks in this article as my contributing step in that direction. My remarks regarding Professor Wang’s article have mostly been only indirectly related to the Chinese circumstances: I have given a few randomly chosen examples of the ways in which Europe countered the American cultural pressure and expansion. I have also pointed out that the characteristic feature of China today is that its aestheticians and philosophers (or at least some of them) have sensed the need to counter the influence of the West and are now therefore demanding the development of Chinese aesthetics, philosophy and the like. In this process Chinese academics and intellectuals have reached the phase wherein they have started to articulate their critical positions and have voiced their dissatisfaction with the current state and course of events. I cannot judge to what extent such ideas and demands are part of a broader trend and expectation obvious also in other realms of life. It seems that in recent years China is reconsidering its position and its relation to the West, a consequence of this being also the Leninist strategy of stepping back one step so as to proceed forth two steps. To accomplish this feat of establishing in China what I have called “theory” on an equal footing with that of the West and to establish Zhuyi that would help in such endeavor, remains a task that is yet to be accomplished. In his article Professor Wang discerns key steps on the path to accomplish the equality between China and the West. He furthermore notes innumerable obstacles on the path of Zhuyi: its politicization, the lack of independent thinking, the accentuation of discipline, and the expansion of financial and pragmatic interests that counter the authentic thought. He furthermore notes that the official position was to counter Western modernism with nationalism and national culture studies. He supports independent research and ends his article by a call for the advancement and construction of Zhuyi. I believe that such call may in fact offer a persuasive and productive atmosphere for the development of “theory.” Such a Chinese path towards the desired situation is also not only original and specifically Chinese. There is at the same time a danger that the less capable, the more conservative and the less knowledgeable Chinese academics and other involved people will influence the official positions to such an extent that the Zhuyi initiative will stumble and perhaps even fall or go elsewhere. Marxism can also be employed for such undesired purposes. Of course, such Marxism is a parody of its real self,

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but this does not prevent it, as “orthodox Marxism,” to be used and abused for the aims such as power, influence and control. My final remark is that our Chinese colleagues should not forget that in most of the world “theory” is from the left and is on the left. Only through a leftist and radical position can Western “theory” survive. In China today it may be just the other way around: in this time there the “leftist” critique may be more harmful than that from the right, for it is by definition closer to the center of power. The Chinese intellectuals find themselves today in a unique situation: how to solve contemporary questions with intellectual tools from a different time? Reshape the tools, invent new ones? How to theoretically respond to new ideas, new art, novel theories and so on? As so often there are no pregiven answers, only questions. What Professor Wang is doing in his article is posing questions. Whatever direction the answers to such questions may take us, they always require also a new community, a new “republic of letters” which brings us together. An intellectual is not only a part of a nation and of a country, but is at the same time also a part of an imaginary community, the members of which we silently converse with as we do when reading a book by Confucius Aristotle, Kant or Li Zehou; whenever standing in front of a Buddhist or a Greek temple, a contemporary European or American installation artwork, or a Chinese painting from the recent past. And, yes, the “republic of letters” is but a miniature of a much larger imagined entity: the sensus communis or the “common feeling” of which Kant wrote as of a feeling of belonging to the human species, of a sense of solidarity with the members of such species. But to return to Zhuyi: if Zhuyi is seen as being rampant in the West, and is desired by the Chinese scholars, so much better: then it is high time also to start working on Zhuyi, whether Chinese or others.

Chapter 26

Photography: Of Nation and Mountains (2018) In what follows I highlight a particular kind of national art that may act as an instrument of political action. I shall thus not explore art as an instrument for political change in relation to social class, a perspective often being regarded as synonymous with Marxism. Instead, I intend to demonstrate how in the photographic art discussed in this article, art expresses national ideology. I intend to present some of the ways in which in a particular realm and genre national ideology was erected over a span of hundred years, how it aided in creating a particular kind of art, and how it attained its aims without being either avantgarde or revolutionary. 1

Il faut être de son lieu

We have grown accustomed to regard the second half of the nineteenth century as the epoch of modernism. Some claim that realism reached its apogee around 1850, while others argue that that is when it started but then attained its apogee a century later, i.e., in the 1960s. In 1860s the impressionist movement appeared. From Paris it spread like fire to other parts of Europe and to United States, transmogrifying into modernism whatever it touched in its path, facilitating in this way the appearance of various new expressive techniques, styles and genres that claimed to offer new venues to the representation of beauty and truth. In 1904 four Slovenian painters, Rihard Jakopič, Ivan Grohar, Matej Sternen and Matija Jama, held an exhibition in the Salon Miethke in Vienna. While the exhibition was well-received in Vienna, it would not be an exaggeration to say that in Ljubljana it was met with standing ovations. Although the four Slovenian painters initially intended to put the word “impressionist” into the name of their group, Miethke persuaded them to name the group “Sava” (after a tributary of the Danube river, and the largest river on Slovenian territory) thereby pointing to the local and national i.e., Slavic, character of the group and its art. Soon after, their works were exhibited in Belgrade, Prague, Warsaw, Sofia, and other cities. Of course, the “Slovenian impressionists,” as they were soon called, were three decades behind French impressionism and should perhaps have been called “post-impressionists”; nonetheless their approach, style, and subject-matter were pure impressionism. © Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004697515_027

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In the second half of the 19th century, the photographic camera was being developed into an increasingly practical technical device that was soon ready to compete with the fine arts. [T]he ultimate consecration of photography as part of the fine arts required more than the simulation of handwork or the intellectual conversion of a few art critics; photography also had to become accepted by the art institutions. Pictorialism led the way with a series of well-received exhibitions in the 1890s, one of them, the first ever in an art museum, at the Hamburg Kunsthalle in 1893, whose daring director wrote of the public’s astonishment at seeing photographs hung in painting galleries: “To them it seemed like holding a natural history congress in a church.”1 The second half of the same century was also the time of the emergence of realism which was based on a different artistic philosophy than modernism, making Jacques Rancière’s frequent claims about the problematic nature of modernism as a periodizing concept in art well-founded.2 2

Mountain Photography

The topic of this article is the role of mountain photography in the constitution of Slovenian national sentiment or “identity.” Two preconditions had to be met before photography could acquire such a role: (a) photographic camera had to become an apparatus available to general population and (b) it had to be used easily by amateurs. In technical progress from static documentary images from the last decade or two of the 19th century to the sophisticated “art” photographs from the 1920s and 1930s, photography, like cinema, was transformed from a technical invention into an art genre. Mountain photography could thus be regarded as a parallel to painting and analogously as a form of art. Considering the 1893 exhibition in Hamburg and similar events, we can see how a series of small steps was changing the overall status and position of photography. I have pointed out Linda Nochlin’s claim that a basic motto of the nineteenth-century realism was to be of one’s place—“to deal with one’s own

1 Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 232–233. 2 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).

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country, region, or even, at its most extreme, one’s own property.”3 The other realist motto was to “be of one’s times”—“Il faut être de son temps.”4 The first motto concerned a desire which was widespread in Europe of that time: especially after the revolution of 1848 in different countries national aspirations grew. For this reason certain specifics of such nations, mostly related to culture but, as in the case under discussion, reaching beyond the usual realms of language, cultural history, etc., were brought to the fore as arguments for the establishment of a nation-state. Since such nations were often divided among different countries, geographical and topological landmarks were frequently used to denote national specifics. In such a way, characteristics of a national countryside may have supplied additional weight to the identity of the nation which was trying to attain or strengthen its self-awareness. In this respect European countries differed: while some have already attained a high level of national self-awareness, others felt short of it. Thus in 1861 Massimo d’Azeglio exclaimed: “We have made Italy: now we must make Italians.”5 In the last two centuries photographic representations of the Slovenian mountains represented a visible instance of, and a successfully functioning, segment of national ideology. Here “ideology” should be understood as “worldview” (Weltanschauung), although other meanings of ideology (such as Althusserian “Ideological State Apparatuses”) were also involved. Throughout the century-long period that class and national meta-narratives fought for exclusivity or at least dominance in Slovenian society, ideology represented the “cement” that held the national community together. In some cases the “place” where a nation is located is a community that can exist even in diaspora. In Slovenia in most cases the “place” is a very real and relatively well-defined territory. Such a place can, of course, be designated on the basis of “historical” borders, but it can also be based on geographical divisions such as mountain ranges, rivers or deserts. In all such cases the “place” must be symbolically constructed by accreting meanings to physical locations, often through their mediation in images and texts. Thus realist art of the 19th century, too, played the role of constructor and designator of “places.” From Scandinavia to the Mediterranean we find in national museums and galleries national “frescoes” depicting fights against the enemy from whom the motherland or fatherland had to be protected. This certainly is not the only aspect

3 Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), 19. 4 Ibid. 5 Quoted in Noëmi Blumenkranz-Onimus, “Quand les artistes manifestent,” in L’anneé 1913, Part 1 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973), 393.

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of “being of one’s place,” for such a symbolically laden “place” can just as well refer to a region, town, or some other “location.” The conclusion to be drawn from this introduction is that the mountains serve—at least in Slovenia—as a national ideological representation in an almost ideal way, for they are accepted by the national community as the place of its “identity.” They function similarly to the signifier “Heimat” (homeland), and partly as fatherland, motherland, or the national spirit. They have the advantage not only of being able to be visually represented as a singular and homogenous entity but also of being attractive to the whole of the population, for they can be invested with so many different meanings that it is possible to find in them “something for everyone.” In this way they function similarly to, for example, “nature” in the prewar Germany: The surge out from the cities into nature also represented a search for a source of collective identity not to be found in the urban environment. The movement was informed by the presumption that what all ­Pfälzers [inhabitants of a region in Germany] had in common was the land. Nature alone could be the appropriate symbol as well as source of ­Heimat ­feeling; love of nature, like love of Heimat, was not bound by social class or confession. Workers shared it with industrialists, old with young, uneducated with educated, Catholic with Protestant and Jew.6 3

The Mountains

Slovenia is situated beneath the Alps and stretches to the Adriatic Sea. The ancestors of the Slovenians settled in the Eastern Alps and the Pannonian plain. Under pressure from the Avars they moved towards the Adriatic Sea and Lake Balaton and established in the seventh century the first independent Slav state. In the tenth century the Franks began to colonize the territory belonging to the Slovenian tribes. Until the formation of Yugoslavia in 1918 it was the German predominance that threatened the Slovenian national existence. The first books in Slovenian language were published five centuries ago and from that time on, and especially from the end of the eighteenth century, a national consciousness existed on a broader basis. After the Treaty of Versailles, Italy acquired a large chunk of Slovenian territory which remained in its hands until

6 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley and Los ­Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 73.

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1943. For that reason (and also because the Slovenian coast is only 43 km long) the sea did not play any significant role in the national consciousness.7 Since romanticism mountains played an important role in Slovenian national mythology. They gained a special prominence from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, when throughout Central Europe mountaineering became one of the favorite bourgeois pastimes. Mountains were one of the last frontiers to be conquered and contained much of the adventurous potential vested at that time upon faraway lands. The high esteem enjoyed by mountaineering8 was also strongly linked to the sentiment of national identity, of belonging to a nation, especially when it came to smaller nations of Europe aspiring to gain independence. Such was the case of the Slovenians and also of the Czechs. Indeed, later in the century there existed a Czech branch of the Slovenian Alpine Association. Mountaineering was not limited to men, for women too played a visible role in hiking and climbing endeavors. Obviously, all these phenomena 7 Similar to the role of mountains in Slovenia was that played by the puszta (plains) in Hungary, or by the Great Karoo in South Africa. The first documented recreative ascent on mountains was Francesco Petrarca’s who climbed Mount Ventoux in Provence in 1336. The highest mountain in Slovenia, Mt. Triglav, was climbed for the first time in 1778. The possibility to appreciate the mountains is a relatively recent phenomenon: “For us today it is hard to recapture the sense of repulsion, displeasing irregularity or, at best, disinterested boredom felt by most people prior to the eighteenth century (and still during it) at the sight of mountains (or of the sea). John Evelyn, to give a mid-seventeenth century example, crossed the Simplon Pass in 1646 and was, incidentally, set upon by brigands as an additional suffering. He tells that the way—‘said to have been covered with Snow since the Creation’—was ‘through very steepe, craggy, and dangerous passages … through strange, horid and firefull Craggs and tracts’ … and he concluded: ‘Nature has swept up the rubbish of the earth in the Alps.’”—D. G. Charlton, New Images of the Natural in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 42. In the eighteenth century the situation started to change. At first, mountains acquired a special significance only for a few individuals. Thus the Swiss botanist “Haller went to collect plant specimens, but the outcome was the first major work of mountain literature, his long poem Die Alpen (1732). Paul Van Tieghem (in his Le Sentiment de la nature dans le préromantisme européen, 1960), writing of European literature as a whole, distinguished three phases: from about 1730 a gradual rise of interest in mountains; from about 1762 a more emphatic liking for the lower, more pastoral slopes of mountains; from about 1773 an extension of that liking to include the high and deserted mountain peaks.” (­Charlton 46). It was romanticism, with Shelley, Byron and Coleridge, that came to regard storms, mountains and the sea not as products of human sin, as Thomas Burnet did in 1681, but that relishes instead in the “­mountain glory.” 8 The fashion, of course, did not have only national or nationalist significance for its participants, but often represented a test of personal endurance, strength and even superiority. In Slovenia the best example was the philosopher Klement Jug (1898–1924) who became so obsessed with mountaineering that he devoted most of his time to it and finally died while climbing. He was also an avid reader of Nietzsche.

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were consequences of the new ideas and values of the nascent bourgeoisie emerging after 1848 as well as a consequence and part of the national aspirations for the formation of nation-states. In 1874 the “German and Austrian Alpine Association” was founded. It was reestablished on Slovenian territory in the 1890s and was, at that time, very nationalistic. The time was overflowing with ideas of national autonomy and independence for the nations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These had already gained an important degree of cultural autonomy and their next aim was political independence, either in separate states or in a federation which would bring together various Slavic nations. In this respect German and Austrian nationalisms can be viewed also as a countermeasure to the Slavic drive for independence. In 1893 the “Slovenian Alpine Association” was founded and in 1897 its “­Photography Section” was established. The founding of the German and the Slovenian associations had much to do with the strengthened polarization of the population of the present-day Slovenia at the turn of the century into Germans and Slovenians. Slovenians, like some other Slavs in the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire such as the Czechs or Croatians, developed a prosperous middle class, which wanted to attain national independence. The Germans were, of course, opposed to such an idea, and different means to retain or attain not only their physical hold over the territory, but also to appropriate it symbolically, were used by the parties in conflict to achieve their aims.9 Mountaineering turned into a competition between the proponents of the pan-Germanic idea and the Slovenians. Each tried symbolically to appropriate the mountains to use their already existing symbolic value in the struggle for dominance between the two national groups. At that time paths were created in the mountains called the “Slovenian” and the “German” paths, with members of each nation trying to create and name paths which would bear names showing that they appertain to the German or the Slovenian nation. As already mentioned, these mountains (and Mt. Triglav as practically the only “concrete” mountain among them) acquired their Slovenian national significance well before the second half of the previous century. The cause of this feature was that the mountains were viewed not only as a shelter, in which, for example, the predecessors of Slovenians would hide from the attacking (Germanic) “foreigner” who tried forcefully to Christianize them, as the well-known Slovenian 9 Perhaps the best example of this appropriation was the purchase of the very peak of the highest mountain in the Slovenian Alps, Mt. Triglav (2864 m) in 1895 by the parish priest, Jakob Aljaž, so the peak (and symbolically the mountain as the symbol not only of the “­Slovenian mountains” themselves but also of the Slovenians and Slovenia) would remain in Slovenian hands. Aljaž had a shelter built on top of the mountain.

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romanticist sonnet “Baptism at the Savica Falls” (1835) by France Prešern tells us; but sometimes also as the birthplace of the Slovenian nation. A theory, refuted by professional historians but even recently attracting a substantial popular interest, professed that Slovenians were not really a Slavic nation but were of Illyrian descent instead, originating in the Alps.10 “From being the last enemy, nature is now a ‘friend,’” comments D. G. Charlton.11 The change in the romantic perception of the mountains was thus compared to previous depictions, from less than a hundred years earlier, of the mountains as repulsive and displeasing irregularities on the surface of the Earth. It is from romanticism and subsequently that the mountains acquire a special significance in Slovenian history. With romanticism, popular myths and tales are recorded and are fused into the more widespread sentiment of national identity. Representing mountains as a shelter was not far removed from representing them as the source of national identity, for they were linked not only to popular tales and myths, but also to literature and painting from the late 18th century well into the 20th century which established them as “typical” for the Slovenian nation. The notion of the mountains as the “source” (and not only the “place” of national origin as in the aforementioned case of the “Illyrian theory”) gained perhaps the most widespread support, although it was not explicitly stated except in poetry, and in monographs about the mountains. The idea of the “source” is most probably related to the fact that practically all the rivers in Slovenia have their sources in the mountains. These rivers themselves were often viewed as “Slovenian” at their birth (at their source and while they were still in the mountains) and something foreign when they entered the “foreign” (Italian or eastern) plains. Mountains turned into a widely accepted national symbol and remained such for the last century and more. A whole range of representational practices established them in this privileged position vis-à-vis other possible national signifiers, which positioned them into a unique place when compared to similar symbols, representations and landmarks or landscapes in other nations. The mountain landscape became a favorite source of photographic motifs. “Many members of the Slovenian Alpine Association from Ljubljana and its surroundings and even from other countries have called,” reported The Alpine Review (Planinski vestnik) in 1900.12 Its editors organized lectures while the first 10 11 12

A consequence of such reasoning was that Slovenians “have nothing in common” with the other nations of the former Yugoslavia, such as Croatians, Serbians or Macedonians. Charlton, 96. Mirko Kambič, “Fotoamaterji in njihova združenja. 1884–1919,” in 150 let fotografije na Slovenskem, 1839–1919 (Ljubljana: Mestna galerija Ljubljana, 1989), 26.

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exhibition of mountain photography took place in 1898. Every year the Review also organized a competition for the best photograph, accompanied by prizes and critical reviews. In this way, mountain photography received a continuous place and attention in The Alpine Review, which is still being published. This continued in the interwar period when mountain photography was joined by the first Slovenian full-length feature film, entitled “In the Kingdom of the Goldhorn” (1931) and the following year by the film “The Steep Slopes of Mt. Triglav.” These films were similar to German “Heimat” and other patriotic films, praising one’s land and country. Thus we read in the introductory text to the first film (director Janko Ravnik): This is a silent film. Nevertheless in our hearts resounds a powerful song: sacred you are, Slovenian land. If this film stirs this emotion in everyone, its aim will be more than attained.13 The film was based on the opposition sacred/profane and nature/culture, with mountains representing unspoilt nature, the birthplace of the Slovenian nation, and something to which the man from the city strives to return or to escape. The paradox of course was that this nature was represented and symbolically appropriated through technically-mediated culture. The second film focused on Mt. Triglav.14 At the turn of the century, photography was still viewed as a document, but so was, in many respects, realist painting. The basic difference between the two consisted in the impossibility of the latter to be reproduced without becoming a “copy” devoid of the “aura” appertaining to a painting as the original work of art, and thus being reduced to the status of the former i.e., photograph. There is a continuation in the treatment of mountains from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, and it is in this respect that Linda Nochlin’s statement of the need to be of one’s place becomes so important, for, as mentioned, we can easily broaden it from the fine arts into gallery photography. For what, in our case, does mountain photography witness? At the beginning it is just a recording, a “still” of a certain presence as in many photographs from the sixties of the nineteenth century onwards. It documents a waterfall in the Alps, 13 14

Bojan Kavčič, “Kult(ura)—Natura,” in V kraljestvu filma (Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki in filmski muzej, 1986–87), 289. In Slovenian Triglav means “the three headed.” (The mountain has three peaks.) The origins of the name are related to old Slavic mythology: the Slavic god the “Three-Headed” was the god of the three lives: underground, on earth and above it.

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the ascent of Mt. Triglav, Aljaž’s Tower on top of the same mountain, etc. But slowly, photography acquires an “artistic” value as well. Now it not only witnesses an event or natural fact (of some special significance) but also creates it by choosing and carefully editing the motif and playing upon the pre-existent symbolic context. These gallery photographs are thus always already framed. However, they are framed not only by the general knowledge and national features appertaining to the “mountains” as such, but also by previous documentary photographs within the series represented by their continuous appearance in the same publications and aimed at the same public. In our case this feature is much more striking because it is limited to a small and limited environment and thus more easily diagnosed than would be the case with a larger nation and culture. A series of events ranging from interest in mountaineering in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, to mountaineering becoming a combat zone for the symbolic appropriation of Alpine territory between the Germans and the Slovenians; to photography being relatively well-established in Slovenia in the same epoch;15 to the foundation of the Alpine Association which subsequently promoted and stimulated mountain photography in an organized way; all blended in the emergence of a well-developed mountain photography which often exhibited patriotic overtones. A relatively large number of photographers and writers was encouraged to produce mountain photography and a whole series of publications ranging from newspapers and journals to monographs devoted exclusively to the Alps and mountains, usually lavishly illustrated with photographs and sometimes consisting exclusively of them. One might expect that this trend would cease with the demise of interest in “Heimat” ideas and ideologies throughout Europe after the defeat of Nazism. What happened instead was that in certain parts of Europe it continued immediately after the war. In the case under discussion this course of events had a lot to do with Slovenians retaining within the socialist Yugoslavia many of their cultural characteristics. In this way mountain photography and various publications presenting it to the broader public flourished into the present.16 15 16

The Slovenian, Janez Puhar (1814–1864), invented photography on glass (heliotype) and, in 1859, the first photography studio appeared in Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana. Mountain photography is but one of the vehicles for retaining or enhancing the paramount role of the mountains in the national consciousness under discussion. Another, perhaps the central role, was played by the aforementioned Slovenian Alpine A ­ ssociation which had in the recent decades almost 400,000 members i.e., a fifth of the whole ­population.

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The photographic image has a special power: Photography’s vaunted capture of a moment in time is the seizure and freezing of presence. It is the image of simultaneity, of the way that everything within a given space at a given moment is present to everything else; it is a declaration of the seamless integrity of the real.17 Mountains function as a seemingly unideological entity, for they hide their ideological functioning in an almost perfect and veritably sublime way. Of course, I speak here of their pictorial representation, which is by far the most common way in which they are presented to us. In his Investigations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant had already described the sublime as deep loneliness, but in a frightful way. The sublime must be big, but the beautiful can also be small. A view of the mountains, the snowy peaks which loom over the clouds, a description of a savage storm, or Milton’s depiction of the kingdom of hell can induce pleasure, but mingled with horror.18 Mountains are sublime. This feature, to be sublime—or, following Kant, to invoke in us this feeling—is crucial for the mountains being able to function as a place of origin and identity, for in the form of their representation and their imaginary mental form they constitute a void. As Derrida points out in The Truth in Painting, the sublime cannot be framed: thus the connection between the sublime and the parergon makes no sense.19 Frame in this sense, the parergon, has as its necessary precondition, to rephrase Rosalind Krauss, “the seamless integrity” of that represented within it. Within the parergon there is no void. The body of photographs showing the mountains produced a realm of “mountains” which are simultaneously “real” and fictitious, real because they really are there, fictitious because with a few exceptions (Mt. Triglav being paramount among them) they are not referred to as actual mountains, but only as a body of mountain peaks represented through paintings, photographs of individual peaks or slopes and, more often, of scenes from these mountains, the latter enabling us to build a fictitious image of the mountains. As they are not geographically defined they can function in many different symbolic and ideological ways, their imaginary parergon being very similar to the picture frame of a painting or photograph. Within this imaginary parergon everything is integrated and complete, but as this is a fictitious place it is impossible to be 17

Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avantgarde and Other Modernist Myths (­Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1985), 107. 18 See Investigations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Part I. 19 Jacques Derrida, La vérité. en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 146.

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“within” it. Even if we go hiking and mountaineering, the real value of such an experience emerges only before or afterwards. The “aura” is absent when we are “there” and emerges only when gazing at the mountains from afar: Motionlessly gazing in the summer in the afternoon at the line of hills on the horizon or at the branch casting its shadow on somebody resting— this means to breath in the aura of these hills and of this branch.20 Or, as Terry Eagleton remarks: “Auratic experience can only be recollection.”21 The mountains to which I am referring hardly ever belonged to anybody in an actual or practical way, for they are uninhabitable. Even if they were partly and in some ways claimed (as in the case of Aljaž’s purchase of the peak of Mt. Triglav), they still remained empty. Also, they were not annexed from some other nation or race. The case of the aforementioned attempts of appropriating the mountains by the Germans and the Slovenians in the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth, was, of course, a symbolic appropriation, with the interesting fact being that even today the German names are often preserved and used interchangeably with the Slovenian ones. On other occasions, the name in one language persists while the name in the other language is losing its presence and is drifting into oblivion. The imaginary presentation of the mountains in question can obviously be invested with an almost infinite number of acceptable meanings. In mountain photography under discussion in most cases the titles of the photographs are those that give us the cultural message. Without them the whole cultural and ideological content would be absent or only implied. Thus the combined message of the photograph and its title serves as the vehicle of the meaning that is then invested into the frame of the national identity. In what follows I shall use Althusser’s theory of ideology, and the complementary psychoanalytical theory of the constitution of the subject. If we discard the problematic aspects of Althusser’s theory (such as the absence of a persuasive link between the unconscious and ideology and of ideology and the Real), then national identity and nationalisms fit well into Althusser’s description of ideology as the lived, experienced relationship of people towards the world, as a “representation of the imaginary relationship 20 21

Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, I/2, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (­Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1974), 479. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin (London: Verso, 1981), 35.

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of individuals in their real conditions of existence.”22 He continues, “What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of the individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the relations in which they live.”23 4

Identities and Imagined Communities

National identity functions like a belief and obviously responds to the human desire to belong, to appertain and to be rooted. In spite of having a nonrational character it is often supported by an extraordinary high number of intellectuals of a certain nation. In many cases the intellectuals are those who articulate, defend and most ardently propagate such ideas. It also remains true, as Celia Applegate writes that, “consciousness of national belonging is one of the most striking and least understood of modern phenomena.”24 Still, it can be interpreted as a peculiar strain of ideology, combined with other (especially religious) ideologies and being carried out with the help of different institutions and apparatuses. As in the case of Slovenian mountaineers who strove to turn the Alps into the “Slovenian mountains,” in Germany too, one must note from the outset that those who held on to regional identities were, with a few exceptions, not conscious of being or doing anything remarkable: “They understood their regionally directed activities, if they thought about them at all, as a private enjoyment, comparable to a hobby, and as a public service—a civic-minded contribution to the health of the community.”25 Similarly, the struggle for the symbolic appropriation of the Alps was not an action directed from a center. In most cases these were very spontaneous actions by both parties to achieve their aims. The love of the mountains and the wish to appropriate their symbolic value or potential were simultaneously preconditions for, and consequences of, national and nationalistic actions carried out by the Slovenian and the German mountaineers. If we leave aside other cases of national consciousness and return to the Slovenian case it could be claimed that mountains conflated two topics which carried great potential for strengthening the national consciousness. First among these was the age-old issue of Slovenians (or their predecessors) versus 22

Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 162. 23 Ibid., 165. 24 Applegate, ix. 25 Applegate, 3.

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the “Germans.” This struggle had a much longer history than the relatively recent events from the second half of the twentieth century. As such, the former were able to serve as an abstract vehicle for the latter, with the role of the enemy being exchangeable and sometimes even disappearing. (That is, when there was no enemy in sight who would endanger national sovereignty, identity, etc.). The other feature of the mountains was that they acted as a source of national identity. Celia Applegate mentioned, in the previously cited passage, that the “surge out from the cities into nature also represented a search for a source of collective identity.” According to Althusser, “Ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious.”26 We know from psychoanalysis that the subject is constituted around a certain void, which by its very emptiness, enables us to invest it with different meanings. We as subjects—Cartesian subjects, as Jacques Lacan would put it—are in a continuous process of constitution, reconstitution and changing that point or “line,” as Michel Foucault phrased it in The Order of Things, which we experience as our subjective identity. The same can be applied to the collective subjectivity of the Slovenians (for those who can be interpellated as such) in the last century and beyond, when the mountains have played the role of a void which enabled the constitution of the subjectivity around it. The photographic representation of these mountains essentially contributed to such national subjectivity. For the essential trait of the perception that a subject has of himself/herself is that it is identical with himself/herself. This search for identity, which is impossible to reach, is the essence of the Cartesian cogito: “I am not there where I am a plaything of my thought; I think of what I am there where I don’t think thoughts.”27 A community—in our case a nation or rather those individuals who feel to belong to it and can thus be interpellated into this role—is a more static entity. Although it is an imaginary entity it builds a whole network of symbolic representations which enable its members to feel a common identity. This search for “identity” which is a common denominator of all forms of national consciousness has in the Slovenian case found a perfect vessel for it: the mountains. The curious issue here is really the identity itself. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, “Hegel ‘stages’ identity (imagines a subject saying ‘Plant is … a plant’) and thus arrives at its truth—that is to say, demonstrates that identity-with-itself consists in the absolute contradiction, in the coincidence of the (logical) subject with the void at the place of the expected, but failed, predicate.”28 26 27 28

Althusser, 161. Jacques Lacan, “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient,” in Écrits (Paris: Seuil. 1966), 517. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do (London: Verso, 1991), 141–142.

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[S]uch a notion of identity implies the presence of the symbolic order: for an object to ‘coincide’ with its empty place, we must in advance ‘abstract’ it from its place—only in this way are we able to perceive the place without the object. In other words, the object’s presence can be perceived as such only within a differential order in which absence as such acquires positive value.29 This is very similar to the empty mountains which in our case play the role of the “repository” of the national identity. I have referred before to collective subjectivity which is also the level of ideology. On this level the interpellation of individuals and groups coalesces into a social group, community, nation, etc. In our case the perception of the “mountains” and of finding in them one’s own identity functions as such an ideological mechanism. It is by belonging to this common denominator that the majority of the Slovenian population regards these “mountains” as their common denominator. This, of course, is not unique; rather, what is unique is that this denominator has no competitors. In various other countries, a certain part of their territory is perceived not only as the most typical but also of special national significance. Sometimes, due to various (usually historical) circumstances, it is employed for representing or symbolizing the nation or country as a whole. In most of these countries the territory itself does not play such a significant role as is the one played by the mountains in Slovenia. This is so either because its role is divided among different parts of the national territory or because such a territory and its depictions are supplemented by other national attributes such as political power, sovereignty, long history of the nation-state, etc. The other case mentioned was the German Heimat. In this case the rural countryside, consisting of various and disparate parts of Germany, and therefore essentially different in outlook and national specifics, was collapsed into an imaginary whole in which differences were nevertheless retained, even if they were not explicitly shown. Hence depictions of Heimat represented a unity of differences which were based in German regionalism. In the Slovenian case the situation differed because the mountains were constructed simultaneously as (a) the place of origin (as the source of collective identity), (b) the location of national identity (the most typical part of the national territory), (c) the symbolic and historic national battleground (the battleground of the nation with the foreigners and, in parallel, of the individual with the forces 29 Ibid.

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of nature, both carrying many shared or exchangeable traits), (d) a place of escape/refuge from everyday urban life, where all class differences vanish and where everybody finds himself in basically the same situation, i. e. the quest for survival and mountain beauty. The notion of Heimat is thus only partly valid when applied to Slovenian homeland. We could, of course, also say that a Slovenian is defined also by the national territory, for the mountains cover only a part of the country. But this would be only partly true, for large segments of the territory previously populated by Slovenians are today in Austria or Italy. One also could claim that there exists a common culture, and this certainly is true, for culture (especially language) is that broader common national denominator. Still, culture as such is not so specific as to offer a clear recognition, although this could certainly be said of language. Nevertheless, the language does not compete with the role the mountains have, for in the case of visual representations of the mountains the national language functions as their auxiliary tool. It offers the “cultural message” and a discourse on them and about them. It verbalizes the mountains. What the mountains primarily offer is a visual representation of identity, of its straightforward material presence. They offer a symbolic feature which was hard to confuse with features of other nations in the former Yugoslavia and also when compared to neighboring countries (Italy, for example). A general consensus existed in the past and in the present (although it is less pronounced after the independence of Slovenia in 1991 for there is less need for it) that mountains can serve as the national common denominator. Thus Mt. Triglav appeared on the provisional banknotes issued before the independence from

Figure 9 Slovenian two tolar banknote with mountains Permission for image use by ­p urchase from Shutterstock

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Figure 10 Slovenian passport Permission for image use by purchase from Shutterstock

the former Yugoslavia, on the newly designed insignia, on the new national flag (both designed in 1991), while the mountain contour map of Slovenia was used in designing the newly issued passports. Many old as well as recently issued postcards show motifs from mountains, usually without specifying

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the locations photographed, and numerous monographs of mountains or of mountain photography continue to be published every year and sell out quickly. Again, this is not specifically Slovenian. What is specific is that beside the coffee-table kind of books with images of the mountains, the only specific ones are those concerning mountains. Also, in general publications regions are specified and locations duly noted, while in books about mountains, especially those of mountain photography, locations remain vague, only poetically described, or absent. But in these locations another kind of absence can be located: the absence of people, of life in general, and of civilization. Furthermore, these places are meant to remain empty, to be sanctuaries for spiritual and symbolic use, to be a place of nature to escape, as it was mentioned, from culture and urban environment and then return to them. In this respect, again, these mountains do not differ much from national parks, and the like, except that they receive a symbolic treatment rarely encountered in other cultures. This applies not only to poetry, novels, and even music, but also to the aforementioned cinema (from the thirties and again from the fifties) and especially photography. It is this photography which appears to have carried a special role in the development of the contemporary image of these mountains and to represent them as an almost fictitious place, which can function as the location of the national identity and even origin. As a void this place is never filled and fulfilled and thus remains a place of our permanent desire. Mountain photography helped to constitute the representation of this place or space in an adequate, imaginary, ideological way. At the same time these mountains served as a mythical place of origin: the source or Ursprung in the Heideggerian sense that helps us to answer the question “What is my identity?” by another question: “What am I as a subject?” followed by a third question: “Where do I come from?” (Often all three, of course, have little to do with reality.) Furthermore, because these mountains are the sole location of the visualized national identity they can function as the “real object” in the Lacanian sense of the word. Although they exist materially, they are hardly ever located in their “reality.” Mountains, like characters in fiction, cannot be pinpointed, for this would spoil the poetic effect. Hence the “mountains” exist as a fictitious entity side by side with the actually existing mountains, or better put, they exist on a different plane of reality, on the plane of effects which are pure symbolic effects, constituting the real. This “real” of the represented mountains is impossible to attain; whenever we are there, we have already missed it. It is like the “aura” that occurs only in recollection or when gazing at the mountains from a distance, which excludes simultaneous actual contact with them. In mountain photography the effect is only strengthened. To stress again, the described phenomenon is not unique. What is unique is that it exists in the Slovenian case in such a pure form. One of the reasons

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for this is the existence of a general national consensus that the mountains can serve this function of the locus of national identity. This imaginary representation can be invested with a plethora of possible acceptable meanings, including political ones, from the liberal to the most conservative and nationalistic. The mountains in their present representational form function as the perfect signifier, because they enable all possible meanings to coexist without giving rise to the awareness of the impossibility of such a coexistence in reality. This consensus is, of course, mostly unconscious. The majority of the population simply feels that “mountains” are acceptable as a national symbol and, simultaneously and additionally, as vehicles of other associated significations, mostly related to issues arising from the division between nature and culture. 5 Conclusion In the last century and a half, mountain photography in Slovenia has helped to strengthen the image of mountains as the place of national identity and origin. In this way it helped strengthen Slovenian national sentiment. This was made possible due to a series of events, ranging from the early attempts of the Slovenians and Germans to symbolically appropriate the mountains, to their later poetic and artistic photographic representations that strengthened their role of the “Real.” In local and national consciousness mountains were continuously present for a century and more, for they were not only the geographical and topographical frame or context in which people lived but also a sight visible from a large part of Slovenia including the capital of Ljubljana from which the easternmost peaks of the Alps are very close. From romanticism on the myths and folk tales served as the basis for the strengthened national awareness. During this same time but in a population broader than the local one, the mountains tied locals and those who imagined themselves to be sharing with them a sensus communis, of being tied “together by a certain sensory fabric, a certain distribution of the sensible, which defines their way of being together.”30 Due to the possibility of investing mountains with almost infinite and unconflicting meanings and to the aforementioned events or features, mountains could attain an extraordinary symbolic value in the constitution, retention and strengthening of Slovenian national identity and thus of its Heimat. For the mountains to be able to function in such a way they had to function as a void, capable of being invested with different and 30

Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 56.

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contradictory meanings. Such contradiction should have existed between the class and the national metanarratives, but this did not happen. Unlike those of most nations, the mountains in Slovenia represented a unique symbolic locus of identity and thus of collective subjectivity. Yet with the transformations in national sovereignty due to its independence in 1991 and to the novel role of the European Union of which Slovenia is a member, their specific symbolic role is diminishing.

Index Adorno, Theodor W. 4, 24, 34, 74, 77, 78, 89, 125, 134ff, 178, 187, 271, 303–304, 351, 366 Philosophy of Modern Music 87–88 “aesthetic regime of art” (Ranciére) 156ff, 219, 236–240 aesthetic revolution 3, 4, 156, 178, 223–224, 231, 232, 234, 235–240, 265, 267–271 Althusser, Louis 33, 57, 79, 96, 99, 123, 132, 177, 210, 214, 217, 219, 226, 246, 288, 375, 383–384, 385 anamorphosis 41 anarchism 158, 200, 241, 244, 245, 248–250, 251, 252, 268, 272 anthropological Marxism 29, 90, 98, 127, 131, 158, 350 architecture 11ff, 80, 88, 89, 153, 165, 170–171, 201, 250 avantgarde 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 21, 33, 67, 85, 89, 97, 112, 115, 122, 123, 127, 128, 136–138, 139–141, 152, 154, 158, 166, 171, 175, 187–189, 192, 197ff, 224, 228–232, 233, 235, 238–240, 241ff, 254ff, 265–270, 272, 301, 302, 304, 307–309, 317, 320, 322, 356, 358, 373 Badiou, Alain 124, 132, 169, 177, 179, 180 The Century 175 Baudrillard, Jean 31, 76, 77, 82, 90, 270 Bauhaus 18, 20, 21, 160, 165, 177, 197, 200, 255, 261, 262–263 Bauman, Zygmunt 58–60, 62, 63, 66, 79, 92–93, 116, 172, 179, 307, 311 Barthes, Roland 30, 91, 288, 367 Behrens, Peter 12, 21 Belting, Hans 101–102, 122 Benjamin, Walter 24, 26–27, 34, 78, 90, 130–131, 144, 151–153, 204, 219, 302, 303, 304 Biermann, Wolf 215 “binary effect” (Erjavec) 203, 209, 211, 320–323 Bloch, Ernst 23, 34, 219, 297 Bourriaud, Nicolas 4, 169, 178, 270 “relational aesthetics,” 173–176 Bryson, Norman 39–40, 42–44, 46–47, 53–54, 304

Buchloh, Benjamin 131, 203, 207, 266 Bürger, Peter 4, 73, 108–109, 120, 139–141, 148, 149, 152, 188, 189, 232, 304 Theory of the Avantgarde 70–71, 122, 154, 158 Cankar, Ivan For the Benefit of the Nation 358 Cézanne, Paul 44, 46–49, 51, 52–53, 55, 96, 143, 218 Chinese painting 42, 43–44, 46, 47, 372 “cognitive mapping” (Jameson) 83, 171, 174, 195, 247 communism 3, 33, 121, 123–124, 169, 196, 200, 223, 241, 245, 247, 248, 250, 252, 310 conceptual art 50, 71, 79, 85–87, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102, 109–113, 116, 270, 271, 312, 314, 317, 322, 329, 331 conceptualism 111, 120, 131, 313–317 contemporary art 2, 3, 4, 6, 20, 26, 38, 48, 68, 71, 74–76, 79, 80, 87, 88, 92, 96–97, 98, 110, 129, 131, 135, 139, 143, 146, 148, 150–153, 155–159, 163, 168, 169, 175–181, 213, 221, 222, 265, 270, 271, 297, 304, 305, 309, 349, 355, 362 constructivism 4, 7, 12, 25, 57, 123, 165, 197, 199–200, 207–208, 211, 212, 231, 232, 233, 240–244, 253, 255, 257–258, 262, 263, 264, 266, 269, 307, 322 cubism 3, 12, 131, 197–198, 199, 227–232, 234 critical theory 4, 5, 6, 28, 81, 91, 171, 288, 297, 300, 301–303, 305, 368 Croce, Benedetto 81, 105–106 Crowther, Paul 66, 85–87, 94 Černigoj, Avgust 262–264, 329, 349 dadaism 122–123, 131, 137–141, 148, 188, 197, 224, 244, 268–269 Danto, Arthur 4, 64, 72, 73, 75, 85, 86, 90, 92–93, 95–96, 98, 101–102, 104, 108, 114–115, 116–118, 120, 122, 134–135, 143–144, 151, 154–155, 161, 167, 219, 241, 251, 271, 303 Davies, Stephen 78

394 deconstruction 14, 16–18, 88, 90, 91, 98, 158, 297, 304, 317, 321, 361, 367 Degot, Ekaterina 359 différend 195 Derrida, Jacques 16, 51, 88, 91, 302, 367, 369, 382 Duchamp, Marcel 48, 50, 62, 75–76, 85–87, 91, 94, 96, 97, 102, 109–117, 134, 148, 199, 212, 255, 303, 318, 329, 330–331 Eagleton, Terry 26–27, 305, 383 The Ideology of the Aesthetic 79 enthusiasm 20, 25, 194–196, 238, 267, 312, 345, 359 Epstein, Mikhail 78, 310, 314–315, 321 Erjavec, Aleš Aesthetic Revolutions and TwentiethCentury Avant-Garde Movements 2, 3–4, 266, 272 Ljubljana, Ljubljana: The Eighties in Slovene Art and Culture (with Marina Gržinić) 1–2 Postmodernism and the Post-Socialist Condition: Politicized Art Under Late Socialism 2, 3, 201–203, 210–211, 272, 327 expressionism 24, 87, 113, 131, 197, 199, 219, 227, 231, 255 feminist theory 303, 304, 365 Ferry, Luc 71, 73, 93, 97–98, 106, 107, 297 Fischer, Ernst 127–128, 131 Flaker, Aleksandar 233 Foster, Hal 17, 19, 85, 94, 207–208, 241, 297–208, 266, 270–271, 304 Foucault, Michel 38, 63, 90, 91, 130, 134, 175, 176, 188, 194, 220–221, 288, 302, 367 The Order of Things 59, 176, 220, 289, 385 Frankfurt School 4, 23, 24, 27, 28, 76, 78, 82, 98, 125, 134ff, 302, 304, 351, 352, 367 Fried, Michael 93 futurism 4, 12, 25, 123, 129, 139, 140, 160, 165, 166, 178, 197–199, 224, 228, 229, 231, 233, 238, 240–244, 247, 250, 252–253, 255, 257–258, 266–269, 343 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 4, 30–31 Garnier, Tony 15, 17

Index Garaudy, Roger 26, 127, 131 Genette, Gérard 4, 72–73, 85, 86, 89, 94, 96, 99, 108, 149, 151, 297 Goldmann, Lucien 59, 218, 247 “grand narratives“ (Lyotard) 14, 15, 19–22 Greenberg, Clement 85, 98, 110–111, 112, 218, 366 Gropius, Walter 20, 205, 207, 262 Monument to the March Dead 205–207 Groys, Boris 2, 4, 74, 150, 175, 187, 189, 192, 203, 242, 266, 325 Gržinić, Marina 1 Ljubljana, Ljubljana: The Eighties in Slovene Art and Culture (with Aleš Erjavec) 1–2 György, Péter 2, 74–76, 78, 327, 328 Habermas, Jürgen 18, 108, 171, 246, 301, 303 Havel, Václav 187, 312, 354 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm 13, 14, 23, 64, 70–73, 74, 79, 97, 101, 102, 104–109, 112, 113, 119–120, 121–122, 123, 145–146, 147, 156, 161, 185–187, 218, 236, 297, 299, 334, 385 Heidegger, Martin 30, 46, 48, 49, 72, 73, 74, 79, 89–90, 91, 96, 98, 107, 108, 109, 114, 122, 142–143, 149, 150, 152, 161, 288, 292, 302 Huyssen, Andreas 20, 79 ideology 89, 124–126, 128, 132, 137, 186, 189, 190, 201, 208, 210, 214, 217, 219, 240, 241ff, 269, 278, 281–282, 293, 313, 317, 319, 323–324, 329, 341, 346, 348, 351, 359, 367, 368, 373, 375, 383–386 “end of ideology” (Bell) 241 institutional theory of art 29, 32, 62, 63, 78, 92–93, 98, 114, 150, 304 International Association for Aesthetics 4, 5, 6, 81, 296ff Irwin (NSK) 3, 257, 314, 318, 319, 326, 328, 347, 355, 356, 357 East Art Map 3, 355–356 Jameson, Fredric 4, 74–75, 82–83, 107, 114, 115, 130, 148, 149, 171, 172, 190, 194, 219, 247, 278, 307, 313, 365 Aesthetics and Politics 219

Index Jay, Martin 77, 84, 365 Jencks, Charles 16, 18–19, 74, 170–171, 301 The Language of Post-Modern Architecture 170 Jianjiang, Wang 4, 6, 362–372 Kafka, Franz 11, 24, 37, 127–128, 138, 189, 216–217 Kandinsky, Wassily 12, 28, 30, 87, 112, 205 Kant, Immanuel 14, 70, 121, 156, 194, 218, 223, 225, 236, 298, 299, 303, 322, 372 “The Contest of Faculties,” 194 Critique of Pure Reason 225 Investigation on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime 382 Kolli, Nikolai 212 The Red Wedge 205–206 Kristeva, Julia 91, 132 Kusterica, Emir 186 Lacan, Jacques 47, 52–53, 54, 55, 288, 367, 369, 385 Laibach 2, 3, 193, 266, 313, 314, 318, 320, 323 Let It Be 318 Lefebvre, Henri 64, 71, 73, 79, 86, 97, 127 Introduction to Modernity 86 LEF 231, 252–253 Lefort, Claude 219, 325 Lenin, Vladimir 130, 210, 227, 245–248, 252, 253, 255, 317, 323 What Is To Be Done? 210, 245–246, 317 Liblice Kafka Conference 128, 216 Lissitzky, El (Lazar) 25, 41, 200, 203, 204–205, 207, 208–210, 211, 213, 231, 244, 251–253, 262, 320–321 Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge  201–203 Lukács, Georg 24–25, 27, 33, 34, 82, 83, 128, 130, 148, 149, 174, 219, 246, 278, 351 Lyotard, Jean-François 4, 18, 76, 135–136, 158, 160, 172, 188, 194, 210, 211, 292–293, 301, 307, 308, 320–322, 367–368, 369 Discourse, Figure 47, 56, 84 The Postmodern Condition 83 Macherey, Pierre 28 Malevich, Kazimir 25, 30, 107, 123, 177, 205, 210, 250, 257, 264, 319, 321, 329

395 Malraux, André 153, 156, 235–239 Marcuse, Herbert 78, 303 The Aesthetic Dimension 228 Margolis, Joseph 92, 94, 304 What, After All, Is a Work of Art? 92 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 139, 140, 224, 226, 231, 242, 243, 247, 249, 250, 257, 343 mass culture 20, 34, 60, 68, 76, 78, 99, 115, 118, 268, 271, 313, 335, 352, 364, 366 Marx, Karl 33, 38, 57, 103, 123–126, 130, 146–149, 210, 230, 234, 244, 245, 246, 249, 254, 269, 270, 288, 302, 367 Marxism 7, 27–29, 33, 34, 38, 90, 98, 122–125, 127–133, 158, 169, 188, 218, 282, 323, 350, 361, 363, 366–367, 371, 372, 373 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 123, 211 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4, 44–57, 79, 88, 90, 96, 99, 130, 149, 297 “Cinema and the New Psychology,” 49 “Eye and Mind,” 50, 129–130 Miller, Tyrus 266 mimesis 30–31, 40, 105, 166, 308 Minglu, Gao 2, 3 modernism 5, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17–19, 21–22, 27, 30, 50, 71, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 83, 86, 96, 98, 99, 103, 107, 109, 110, 113, 115, 119, 120, 130, 136, 137, 139, 141–142, 148, 150–152, 160, 161, 166, 167ff, 204, 207, 210, 213, 218, 219, 222, 230, 249, 254, 266, 270, 271, 302, 310, 311, 318, 324, 325, 348, 351, 355, 361, 365, 371, 373, 374 Moholy-Nagy, László 204, 211, 257, 260–262, 263, 350 Morawski, Stefan 85, 99, 127, 137, 218, 230, 234, 254, 303, 308, 309, 350 Mosquera, Gerardo 2, 316 Mt. Triglav (Slovenia) 320, 378, 380–383, 387–389 Mukařovský, Jan 62–63, 72, 77, 285, 349, 351 Negri, Antonio 169 neo-avantgarde 2, 7, 29, 33, 50, 62, 63, 85, 122, 131, 148–149, 158, 174, 189, 230–231, 235, 254, 303, 308 Neue Slowenische Kunst 2, 3, 4, 166, 256, 264, 314, 318, 326, 348

396 Niederhauser, Emil 285–286, 288 Nochlin, Linda 26, 374–375, 380 Nordic Society for Aesthetics 291 objecthood 24, 28, 30, 32, 34, 175 ocularcentrism 42, 46, 58, 76, 84 overalls 256–262 Paetzold, Heinz 5, 80–82, 83, 90, 95–97 Papini, Giovanni 198–199 parergon 382 Passeron, René 84, 94, 118, 159, 298 Pevsner, Nikolaus 15, 17 Philosophy and Theory of Visual Culture program, University of Primorska 5 Plečnik, Jože 12–13, 21 post-avantgarde 18, 235, 309, 217 postmodernism 170–172, 178, 180, 181, 189, 219, 266, 270–271, 290, 297, 300–304, 307ff, 343, 349, 351, 361, 362, 368 postsocialism 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 141, 210, 220, 254, 272, 310–326, 327, 344, 349, 352, 360 poststructuralism 4, 73, 91, 92, 288, 297, 301, 302, 305, 365–372, 373 Rancière, Jacques 4, 132, 160–162, 165, 166, 169, 170, 174–178, 199, 219–221, 222, 237–240, 338, 370 readymade (Duchamp) 75, 86–87, 96, 102, 109–111, 112, 113, 115–16, 148, 150, 199–200, 212, 303, 330–331 realism 25, 26, 72, 87, 107, 109, 126, 127–129, 131, 148, 215, 218, 252–253, 311, 317, 318, 319, 324, 351, 356, 358, 373–374 recognition 23–24, 30, 31, 32, 38, 40, 54, 95, 111, 113, 114, 137, 185, 294, 330, 336, 341, 347, 354, 359, 387 representation 20, 23, 30, 35, 39, 40, 41, 55, 42–43, 82, 91, 93, 95, 153, 177, 196, 204, 220, 228, 238, 269, 270, 272, 324, 336ff, 373, 376, 382, 383, 385, 387, 389–390 revolution 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 14, 20, 87, 103, 121, 123, 125, 131, 156, 162, 178, 186, 188, 190, 193, 194–195, 197, 199–201, 204, 205, 212, 216, 223ff, 244, 246, 249, 251, 252, 255, 258, 267, 268–270, 312, 323, 324, 352, 354, 375 Rivera, Diego 197–198, 227–228

Index Ristić, Ljubiša 185ff Rodchenko, Aleksandr 203, 211, 231, 243, 244, 245, 250, 251, 252, 253, 257, 259–262 romanticism 11, 13–14, 22, 23, 32, 38, 73, 74, 81, 87, 103, 106, 107, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 139, 149, 160–161, 168, 256, 377, 379, 390 Rorty, Richard 82, 84, 279 Schelling, Friedrich W.  J. 104, 121, 185–187, 192 Schiller, Friedrich 90, 121, 136, 188 Schlegel, Friedrich von 223, 235–236, 237, 239 Schusterman, Richard 59, 68, 82, 287, 292 Pragmatist Aesthetics 68 “seduction” (Baudrillard) 31, 90 Shklovsky, Victor 13, 87, 97, 316 Silverman, Kaja 42, 56, 120, 132 Sloterdijk, Peter 91–92 Critique of Cynical Reason 91 Slovenian Society for Aesthetics 290 Smith, Terry 169, 170, 178–181, 270, 337, 355 socialism 2, 3, 7, 13, 33, 127, 129, 141, 169, 190, 195, 216–218, 229, 231, 246, 248, 272, 277, 278–279, 296, 308, 310–311, 313, 317, 321, 323, 324, 325, 342, 348, 350, 351, 354, 368, socialist realism 25, 129, 252–253, 301–302, 311, 317, 319, 351 Souriau, Étienne 87, 90, 99, 115 “Stars” (Chinese art group) 3, 213 structuralism 28, 50, 61, 73, 285, 288–289, 297, 361, 365, 367 Šuvaković, Miško 2, 355 Szabolcsi, Miklós 228, 255 Szombathy, Bálint 191, 195 Tatlin, Vladimir 57, 123, 126, 198–199, 201, 202, 243, 245, 251, 262, 270 Monument to the Third International 201 Tel Quel (journal) 88, 91 Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles) 258–260 totalitarian 27, 124, 187, 219–220, 253, 266, 281, 323, 325, 328 trans-avantgarde 270, 309 “transculturality” (Welsch) 65–66 Tretyakov, Sergei 208, 209, 218 I Want a Baby 208, 209

397

Index Tschumi, Bernard 15–18, 88 tuta (garment) 258–260 Valéry, Paul 91, 145, 289, 301 Vattimo, Gianni 79, 101, 104, 113–114 Venturi, Robert 21 Virno, Paolo 169 Voloshinov, V. N. 210 Warhol, Andy 82, 83, 96, 114–115, 118, 149, 150, 151, 303, 324, 331

Weibel, Peter 66, 100, 119, 173 Welsch, Wolfgang 4, 58–60, 63–64, 66–67, 89, 138–140, 150, 153, 168, 172, 307 “Western Marxism,” 27, 125, 130–131 Wolfe, Tom 18, 89 Zhuyi (“isms”) 361–372 Živadanov, Dragan 190, 257, 264 Žižek, Slavoj 2, 132, 154, 169, 312, 368, 385

31 mm

by aleš erjavec edited by tyrus miller

 479 tca

Emeritus at the Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has published widely on the avantgarde and postsocialist art, including Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements (Duke UP, 2015).

tyrus miller, Ph.D. (1994), Stanford University, is Distinguished

Professor of Art History and English at the University of California Irvine. He has published extensively on modernism and the avant-garde, the Frankfurt School, and Georg Lukács, including Georg Lukács and Critical Theory: Aesthetics, History, Utopia (Edinburgh UP, 2023).

Aleš Erjavec Tyrus Miller (Ed.)

ISBN 9789004697508

issn 2773-0921 brill.com/tca 9

789004 697508

tr ans cu ltu r al aes thetics

aleš erjavec, Ph.D. (1988), University of Ljubljana, is Research Professor

Art, Philosophy, and Ideology

This volume presents a selection of aesthetic and art theoretical writings by the internationally renowned philosopher Aleš Erjavec from the 1990s to the present. Erjavec was an active participant in the artistic revolt in Slovenia throughout the 1980 and became one of the most notable international theorists of late- and postsocialist developments in art. His work also extended to new, emergent forms of contemporary art and visual culture in global art and culture networks. The diverse contexts and artists with which he has engaged gives him a unique critical perspective on major debates in philosophical aesthetics and art theory.

Art, Philosophy, and Ideology Writings on Aesthetics and Visual Culture from the Avantgarde to Postsocialism