UPDATE: My notes from Boris Groys' talk are posted at the end. He had some fairly interesting things to say about image-use in contemporary media. He also described his project as a kind of polemic against D&G's 'Body Without Organs' and the endless flows of desire, because, he said, 'I have a lot of organs'.
For anyone interested who didn’t watch the netcast, or was unable to attend, I’m posting some of my notes from this event. It should otherwise be available in the archives of the Tate’s online events sometime in the next few weeks. I was taking notes the whole while, but as I willingly endured the conference as it ran from 3am – 11am my time, I had some difficulty staying alert and keeping a clear head. Upon later inspection, my notes had a super-condensed, sentence skipping and word misspelling style which more resembled Adolf Wolfli’s prose than any kind of transcription. I’ve attempted to unravel them a bit. The abstracts that precede each entry are from
here. Where I made an attempt to document a larger portion of their talks, I did the best I could - though I would caution the reader that, inevitably, a few words here and there were lost or replaced by others, so it is certainly not verbatim. I would say a 96% accurate approximation. I will make changes to any of this where necessary after I have the chance to see these talks again.
Because so much of this is also important to the place of fiction in Badiou that I touched on briefly in my previous post, more on the subject of the relation between art and politics will be likely to follow in the future when I have more time to do so. Along with that will be some attempts to involve Ranciere’s understanding of an aesthetic regime of the arts, which replaces the representative regime, and paradoxically participates in the potential loss of art as a singular category by being an accomplice in eliminating the distinction between art and other activities.
Surprisingly, this conference did very little to place these issues directly in
current contemporary art. Nothing went far beyond the art of the seventies.
Peter Sloterdijk: ‘On a Few Relations between Surrealism and Terror’Peter Sloterdijk, is Professor of Philosophy and Rector of the School of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe. His numerous books include
Critique of Cynical Reason (1983),
Rules for the People Park (1999) – subject of a notorious controversy with Habermas – and the recent trilogy,
Spheres (1999–2004).
Eric Alliez’s ‘polemical re-introduction’ of the three speakers placed their individual contributions to contemporary aesthetics within a ‘historical anthropology of a new kind’ that has provided, among other things, a ‘de-definition of philosophy, of art, of art history [..] media theory and practice’. Following Alliez’s intro, Sloterdijk took the opportunity to describe himself as ‘a person working on monstrosity’, and began with this humorous and very interesting statement:
‘Philosophy demands of all of us to produce a more or less convicing demonstration of what we call megalomania. It has to be reinterpreted by its carriers…it’s not a choice, its choosing you and you have to cope with it as best you can. It’s a kind of suffering…and one has to be patient of big questions, because as soon as you can accept this kind of existential question you will feel a bit better, though you will not be healed of course…’
His talk, as its title no doubt indicates, focused on ‘some relations between surrealism and terror’ to the extent that ‘modernism is never really able to emancipate itself from its background of fear’. Aesthetic modernity and Surrealism in particular, he contended, use force ‘against indistinct cultural relations’ as a kind of provocation of the art viewer by way of a spectacular investment in ‘radical otherness’. He considered how surrealism had strengthened an ‘explicitation’ (rather than explication) of culture with the ‘articulated aim […] to make the creative processes explicit and elucidate them as much as possible’. As a movement, Surrealism attempted making latent structures apparent while ‘dissolving backgrounds to destroy consensus between producing and receiving sides’, but became a kind of ‘dilletantism’. Surrealism’s ‘wave of attack’ and attempt at ‘astounding the bourgeoisie’, whose public protests they conceived of as being ‘the successful dismantling of a handed down system’ was inevitably only a ‘symbolized aggression’.
As a result, the ‘populus they intended to frighten learned its lesson way too quickly’ – that is, the Surrealist’s attempt to disturb the accepted modalities of artist and artwork reception through shock tactics, spectacle, and a ‘pathology’ or ‘right to individual madness’ had only succeeded for perhaps the brevity of a lightning flash that was the initial ‘event’ of Surrealism. Presenting the viewer with this ‘radical elsewhere in the name of the other’ was only effective until that moment when the bourgeoisie took over through marketing, and indeed, through the artists training of the public itself – at which point the audience could be only formally astounded. Hence, The ‘terrorism’ of the Surrealists cannot succeed when ‘consistently the educated audience adhered to the new conception of art experience’.
Sloterdjik recounted the incident/accident that Salvador Dali (whose Breton-penned anagram was “Avid Dollars”) had experienced during his talk at the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 where, coming before the audience in a deep-sea diving suit, he ran into technical difficulties and was unable to breath, eventually collapsing before the audience. An audience that would, moreover, end up applauding his near-death as though it were
supposed to have happened, being precisely the dimension of experience that they had been trained so well to
enjoy. Dali, of course, understood his work as parallel to the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious. His attempt to deal with a ‘precise method which would make the excess of the unconscious controllable’ and his belief that a ‘paranoiac critical method’ could “systematize confusion and thus help to discredit completely the world of reality” (
Art in Theory 1900-200, p. 487) were ultimately a failure. The provocation lost its import. Already here an older observation made by Adorno finds itself insinuated:
“In the administered world neutralization is universal. Surrealism began as a protest against the fetishization of art as an isolated realm, yet as art, which after all surrealism also was, it was forced beyond the pure form of protest.” So that “Ultimately, Salvador Dali became an exalted society painter, the Laszlo or Van Dongen of a generation that liked to think of itself as being sophisticated on the basis of a vague sense of a crisis that had in any case been stabilized for decades” (Aesthetic theory, p. 229)
Sloterdjik considered Dali’s public accident prophetic in the sense not only of the spectators reaction, but that Dali would have chosen the symbolic costume of a diver. Sloterdjik thinks that ‘conscious existence must be lived as an explicit dive into context’; that existence is simply another word for ‘context-diving’. He recalled Marshall McLuhan’s idea that we always wear some form of ‘cosmic diving suits’ in order to ‘practice the necessity to dive in different immersion contexts’, becoming divers in multi-media environments. Dali himself was not far from being a martyr of these ‘context-divers’.
‘the artist permanently faces the decision to advance the position of either savior of difference, or warlord of innovation’
He also mentioned Herman Broch’s “air is the last common property, it belongs to everybody.”
‘Social synthesis took on the characteristics of gas warfare, a symbolic gas war that is addressed as democratic press or living in an information society.’
‘life in a media state is like life in an enthusiastic gas palace’
More interesting was the panel discussion where he insisted that ‘making latent structures of existence explicit cannot truly change your conditions of life’ and that ‘we live after dozens of ‘micro-enlightenments’. He focused on the immune system and the immunologist who would either see it as militaristic or as multi-culturalist..that we had no idea until sometime in the eighties that ther was this kind of ‘microbiological police’ acting as some sort of ‘ministry of the interior’.
Surrealism then succeeded to a certain degree because ‘epistemologically we are not the same people as after these ‘cognitive intruders’ came in to show us we are much different than we imagine ourselves to be.’
"The statement "there is information" implies certain statements: there are systems; there are memories; there are cultures; there is artificial intelligence. Even the sentence "there are genes" can only be understood as the product of the new situation - it shows how the principle of information is successfully transferred into the sphere of nature. These gains in concepts that can powerfully tackle reality diminish the interest in traditional figures of theory, such as subject/object/relation. Even the constellation of I and world loses much of its luster, not to mention the worn out polarity of individual and society. But above all, along with the idea of real-existing memories or self-organizing systems, withers the metaphysical distinction between nature and culture. This is because both sides of the distinction are only regional states of information and its processing. One must anticipate that the comprehension of this insight will be particularly hard for those intellectuals who have made their living on the antithesis of culture and nature, and who now find themselves in a reactive position.” from here
About being reliant on an infinite discourse:
‘The leibnizians would answer explication is beyond the reach of human reason because only and infinite mind could penetrate the infinity of implications. Explication will never reach an end, which is why he appeals to the divine intellect, who can penetrate all implications in no time[…]he is very much a literalist with regard to the metaphors of the fold, which means explaining something always means unfolding something to make it plane. But this work of explanation obviously has the aim to make the world bigger by the surface growth of [information], and it is a paradox of modernity, that we live in a world, the cognitive surface of which is growing. But the individual can always resign and stop thinking, and our convictions are what allow us to participate in explanation….’
His respondent Adrian Rifkin had considered his talk as making an ‘incredibly bold move by taking Dali seriously’, and another audience member made the evaluation that Surrealism was at least a decade old when Dali had made his infamous deep-sea diver suit speech, criticizing the artist as being someone who sucked up to the system, the choice of him as a figure being rather sad
Sloterdjik gave this response:
‘This is an evaluation and it is every difficult to refute evaluations. What I had to say about Dali’s appropriation is quite clear. I see him as a man who is playing a role, a symptomatic role.. that requires a reconstruction. I count him a s a kind of witness. [Witnesses] do not have to be your friends, they are part of a historical evolution that have a right to be heard…this is sufficient reason to go back to witnesses of this quality.’
Peter Weibel: ‘The Political Revolution of the Neo-Avant-Garde’
Abstract: Traditionally the Neo-Avantgarde after 1945 is discredited as a purely formalist movement, blinding out the political content of the Avantgarde of the 1920s. But assuming that the Avantgarde movements from 1950 to 1970 share the same epistemic field as the cultural theories of their time, from semiotics to psychoanalysis, we can apply these theories to these art movements and discover in a new approach that the Neo-Avant-Garde was a political art, not on the level of representation but on the level of the dispositiv: transforming our traditional concept of the image, destroying it and deserting it, extending into space and time, defining it as an arena of action, and therefore expanding our conception of art and art-activities. In daily life, on the streets, beyond the studios and museums. The political revolution of the Neo-Avant-Garde operated on the level of the display, the dispositiv, the tool, negating our traditional media of memory and representation because after Stalinism, Fascism, and Hitlerism it became difficult to believe in the means of traditional culture. The proposed new methods, a radical critique, will produce new and surprising results and interpretations of this period.
Peter Weibel, artist and media theorist, is Director of the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe and author of Fast Forward: Media Art (2004) and The Open Work, 1964–1979 (2005).
Weibel wanted to elucidate the question as to what the relations of experiments in the field of politics and aesthetics could be. He observed that the Neo-Avant-Garde often appears as a ‘purely formalist movement’ and appears ‘in a pejorative sense in Marxism’. He spoke about the ends of painting, the ends of representation, Rodchenko’s ‘last painting’, Malevich’s suprematism, even Duchamp, as artistic strategies which brought about a sort of ‘zero degree’ in art. Instead of understanding them as purely formalist, the question proper to these developments, he insisted, should be: what were the external conditions of this art? One of these conditions was the problem, still existing, of thinking art to be a mirror for society - for instance in the way that Greek sculpture can have a ‘smell of democracy’ (when in fact, it is a ‘beautiful art’ related to a ‘barbarian society’).
Yves Klein
Otto Muehl
Herman Nitsch
Weibel insisted on a ‘comparability’ between the aesthetic and social orders or disorders. To the question of what could replace art as a ‘mirror’ we can go to the avante-garde, the end of representation, the end of painting, the end of the mirror…But they also found a way to go back to representation that was not a mirror - such as can be found in the later ‘naïve’ paintings of Picasso. What Weibel described as a ‘reaction formation’ in the Neo-Avante-Garde was in part the lingering trauma from a war that brought about a kind of
desire to forget through the attempt at representing the unrepresentable, that which has no expression. So in a sense it is ‘impossible to express what has been experienced’. This is something still important today: the unnameable. We see it in Beckett’s ‘writing of the generic’(Badiou’s term) or even in Cage’s ‘works of silence’. His artists of choice here: Yves Klein, Otto Muehl,
Herman Nitzch. ( Weibel also sees the fact that no one mentions the source of Hiroshima in Yves Klein a form of ‘ideological blindness’).
But, just as with Surrealism, and perhaps the fate of all art that presents its ‘radicality’ in the context of a market that will accept, absorb, and repackage everything and anything claiming alterity, ‘culture buys into art’s zero degree, mistaking it for a kind of purification’, and the possibility of any real effect becomes, in a way, silenced. Most are familiar with Adorno’s saying - which was brought into the talk by Weibel - that ‘there can be no poetry after Auschwitz’. The idea that the images are somehow not powerful enough, that ‘it becomes the formalist limp explanation’ which instead gave way to ‘a return of the real condition of art practices…the real context, not the content’. This I assume, is what he means of “socially aware and politically engaged” art that we can see in Beuys, Haake, Kaprow, or the ‘Institutional Critique’ of
Andrea Fraser or Daniel Buren. Incidentaly it was also pointed out that the term 'Institutional Critique' has its origin in the work of Fredric Jameson, and
not, as is so often assumed, with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.
As a helping hand to my inability to truly capture what was said by Weibel, here’s a (rather lengthy) polemical supplement from Ranciere on “politicized art”:
“It can be said that an artist is committed as a person, and possibly that he is committed by his writings, his paintings, his films, which contribute to a certain type of political struggle. An artist can be committed, but what does it mean to say that his art is committed? Commitment is not a category of art. This does not mean that art is apolitical. It means that aesthetics has its own politics, or its own meta-politics. […] The fact that someone writes to serve a cause or that someone discusses workers or the common people instead of aristocrats, what exactly is this going to change regarding the precise conditions for the elaboration and reception of a work of art? Certain means are going to be chosen instead of others according to a principle of adaptation. The problem, however, is that the adaptation of expression to subject matter is a principle of the representative tradition that the aesthetic regime of art has called into question. That means that there is no criterion for establishing a correspondence between aesthetic virtue and political virtue. There are only choices. A progressive or revolutionary painter or novelist in the 1920’s and 1930’s will generally choose a a chaotic form in order to show that the reigning order is just as much a disorder. Like Dos Passos, he will represent a shattered reality: fragmented stories of erratic individual destinies that translate, by their illogicality, the logic of the capitalist order. Painters like Dix or Grosz in Germany, on the other hand, will represent a human/inhuman universe, a universe where human beings drift between marionettes, masks, and skeletons. They thereby play between two types of inhumanity: the inhumanity of the masks and automatons of the social parade and the inhumanity of the deadly machine that upholds this parade. These plastic or narrative devices can be identified with an exemplary political awareness of the contradictions inherent in a social and economic order. They can, however, just as well be denounced as reactionary nihilism or even considered to be pure formal machines without political content. Novelistic fragmentation or pictorial carnivalization lend themselves just as well to describing the chaos of the capitalist world from the pint of view of class struggle as to describing, from a nihilistic point of view, the chaos of a world where class struggle is itself but one element in the Dionysian chaos.” (The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 60-61)
Boris Groys: ‘The Politics of Equal Aesthetic Rights’
Abstract: Art and politics are connected at least in one fundamental respect: both are realms in which a struggle for recognition is being waged. The artists of the classical avant-garde have struggled to achieve recognition for all possible signs, forms, things or events as having the equal “aesthetic rights“, e.g. as having the same right to be represented in the public collections, put on display on the art exhibitions etc. But after many decades of struggle the art of today still operates in a gap between formal equality and factual inequality. Art practice is still a material practice operating in the context of the contemporary mass media market. To understand the actual functioning of art under the regime of equal aesthetic rights means to reflect on the material, technical and economical side of the contemporary art system.
Boris Groys, art historian and theorist, is Professor at the School of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe. His books include
Stalin’s Total Work of Art (1988)
Ilya Kabavov (1998) and
Über das Neue! (1999).
‘Art is of course political. It is impossible to isolate art from the political sphere. All the attempts to define art as autonomous, to situate it above, beyond, and nearby the political field, is utterly naïve.. But having said that, we should not forget that art cannot be reduced to a specific field among many other fields where the political decisions are made, or reflected. It is not enough to say that art is dependent upon politics. […] Our aesthetic tastes , our aesthetic predispositions, dictate to us, very often unconsciously… certain political decisions.’
Boris Groys – lecture at platform 1 documenta 11 (ending statements)
'The museum has been stripped of its normalizing role…the general public now draws it’s notion of art from advertising, mtv, video games, and Hollywood blockbusters…The most powerful and invasive are 'not images of entertainment, but those of war, terror, and catastrophy of all kinds...The dominant aesthetics of our times is commercial mass media'.
If all images are already potentially acknowledged as being of equal aesthetic vaule, ‘media has become the space where the quest for the true art takes place’…War images functioning as ‘contemporary media sublime’. 'Abu Ghraib videos and images have a parallel to the quality of American art of the sixties and seventies, where the goal is to reveal a naked body that is habitually covered by cultuaral conventions’. Although this is ‘perverted in the war images…in an act of humiliation of the other’. Yet, these images have also become ‘Icons of the contemporary collective imagination… in a more powerful way than Picasso or Goya could ever achieve’…which is ‘something painful to art’. Because art had wanted to be radical, though such a ‘criteria of radicalness has not been lost to our current understanding of art’.
‘[…]fundamentally flawed, terrorism is not iconoclastic as the Avant-Garde was… and [the images] are instead the iconic realizations of what is terribly real…the war images cannot be criticized in aesthetic terms’.
Groys insisted that, with the birth of the museum, it was the curators who produced “art”, not artists. ‘Art is not primarily the production of art objects, not art market…it is the ability to put disparate elements in a secular shared space’. So that ‘what we have now is not peace, but a peaceful coexistence among certain practices’. ‘Museums cannot be places where ‘everything is possible’ but are always limited and questionable’. ‘museums are like cemeteries…it’s a good compliment because with media you have the illusion that the images are alive – they are not vital’. ‘Art has an incapacity to curate itself, truth has an incapacity to product itself’.
‘The space of the museum […]is often disliked because it is a closed space, as opposed to the open space of media…this closure should not be interpreted in opposition to the outside, but as creating its outside…media does not create an open space, but an ‘undifferentiated homogeneity’ that has no outside’. There is an ‘imperial hubris of contemporary media…images don’t emerge in the clearing of being on their own accord’.
'There is a ‘violence of showing’ that says an artwork can be interpreted as a near document, which in the curatorial dimension becomes a complete document for a narrative purpose'.
‘You can use certain images for art which is ok…but you can use it in a pragmatic unjust way - just as a material’. ‘There is not a situation of stability between art and not art…with any art production we delineate the difference, define the difference in new way’.
