Western
art criticism constructs a chasm between art and politics: art
is free and non-political while aestheticised political formations
are for the most part tainted by events in Germany in the 1930s. In 1939, after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Clement
Greenberg disconnected an avant-garde whose task was to keep
art moving (the art on which he built his career as a critic)
from kitsch (popular culture and Socialist Realism) in his essay
'Avant-garde and Kitsch'. Free art, a term derived from Kant, is the
antithesis of art in a state system just as a free market is
the antithesis of state planning. With Alfred Barr's selective
narrative of modernism in the Museum of Modern Art's white-walled
displays, Greenberg's influence led to a modernist canon radically
separated from politics. What was excluded was allotted outsider
status but popular culture and propaganda were outside even
that.
After
the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Socialist Realism became
collectible, though some Russian critics maintained animosity
towards it. Gleb Prokhorov, for instance, writes of the 'witchcraft
of Socialist Realism' in the privileging of style over meaning,
as if ideology could be passed off as technique.' Prokhorov adds that the spell resembles hypnosis,
so that, 'one is unable to be simultaneously in and not in'
and cannot see 'both the windowpane and the landscape behind
it.' Modernist painting does exactly that, which
is not to say that Socialist Realism does not. Brandon Taylor
and Matthew Cullerne-Bown, in Art of the Soviets, sought 'a broader, more inclusive scheme that recognises
the existence of many types of art, some modernist but some
deeply anti-modernist ... guided by ... the apparatus of the
over-arching state.' Perhaps the model of art's production within
an over-arching structure also applies, if in a different way,
in the West - where an over-arching art-world operates the informal
yet largely binding consensus of dealers, curators, critics,
collectors and some successful artists as to what is included
under the term contemporary art (just as Barr and Greenberg
decided what was modern art). Is the art of that system genuinely
free, or are matters more complex?
Now
contemporary art replaces modernism, with its own museums, but
retains the chasm by which what might be called the art of today
is excluded. The strategy has shifted, however, to a capacity
to absorb and neutralise, to subsume into the market, the most
outsider art. Street art thus transforms graffiti into dollars
without any need to rearrange the social order which gave rise
to such voiceless voices. And social relations, too, are subsumed,
under the guise of critique, in relational aesthetics.
I
want to argue that there is another way to construct this relation:
not as opposition, and not as absorption, but as estrangement.
This shifts from dualism to the drawing of a line between polarities,
shifting attention towards the fluid space between them. What
is estranged is not-near, creating an axis of tension between
estrangement and familiarity: an ambivalent relation denoting
both damage and repair. I draw this ambivalence from Marcuse
and Adorno; and I find it in
Jacques Ranciere's writing, too, which seems in some
ways closer to critical theory than to French post-structuralism.
In
'Problems and Transformations of Critical Art', a paper first
given at a seminar on aesthetics and politics in Barcelona in
2002, Ranciere argues that critical art, 'sets
out to build awareness of the mechanisms of domination to turn
the spectator into a conscious agent of world transformation.' This is political on an epic scale, but not
straightforward. Ranciere states the following difficulties: understanding does
not change things, only the perception of things; the exploited
do not need explanations of conditions they experience first-hand;
and the effort to dissolve appearances destroys the strangeness
of that which is to be transformed. Hence, 'art risks being
inscribed in the perpetuity of a world in which the transformation
of things into signs is redoubled by the very excess of interpretative
signs ...'
I
think that what Ranciere argues here is not far from Marcuse's
argument in the late 1960s that (to summarise), beauty is the
radical other to oppression, its appearance rendering the normality
of oppressive conditions uncanny. Ranciere concludes that, 'Critical art's
vicious circle is generally seen as proof that aesthetics and
politics cannot go together.' Art's agency rests on and is denied by its
withdrawal from that which it critiques. Marcuse writes in The
Aesthetic Dimension:
Art
is committed to that perception of the world which alienates
individuals from their functional existence ... to an emancipation
of sensibility, imagination, and reason ... The aesthetic transformation
becomes a vehicle of recognition and indictment ... [but] requires
a degree of autonomy which withdraws art from the ... power
of the given ...
And
Ranciere extends the argument by writing of an aesthetics which,
contains
a tension between two opposed types of politics: between the
logic of art becoming life at the price of its self-elimination
and the logic of art's getting involved in politics on the express
condition of not having anything to do with it.
Here
is the double bind, the key motif of critical theory. Adorno
writes, 'Artworks become relative because they must assert themselves
as absolute ... If it is essential to artworks that they are
things, it is no less essential that they negate their own status
as things.'Art which negates its status remains an intervention,
however, even on the rim of emptiness – which is in effect
the Cartesian extremity. I want to speculate that the appearance
of the double bind denotes, for Ranciere and Adorno, a political
trauma: critical theory is haunted by the failure of the German
Revolution in 1918-19 and the rise of fascism. Ranciere is haunted
by repeated failures of the French Left, and by capital's appropriation
of democracy as choice. In 'The End of Politics', he writes
of politics as having become 'the management of the social'
or the 'reciprocal appeasement of the social and the political'
whereby 'Politics is the art of suppressing the political ...
[and] a procedure of self-subtraction...' In 1988, the neo-fascist candidate, the only
one outside the modernist consensus, received 4 million votes:
in
the face of the supposed collapse of the political sphere, with
the party of the rich and the party of the poor both calling
for modernization ... what emerged ... was not consensus but
exclusion, not reason ... but pure hated of the Other, a coming
together in order to exclude.
When
centrist candidates seek a mandate, from either side, for unity
in face of an abyss, and the far-right (either fascist or neo-liberal)
is the only force for epic transformation (racism or consumerism),
a retreat to aesthetics may be justified. But what can art do?
I
return to Prokhorov's inept metaphor of the window and the view;
modern art specialises in being both, depicting the view and
the glass, playing on the appearances of both. Similarly, I
think, Ranciere reads collage as playing on the space between,
and in a third area of political aesthetics beyond the dualism
of art-life. Collage, '... combines the foreignness of aesthetic
experience with the becoming-art of ordinary life' to create an 'indiscernibility' between the
'legibility' of the sensual and its 'strangeness'. Ranciere cites Brecht's Arturo Ui
- a literary collage playing on sense and non-sense to critique
fascism:
It
is by crossing over the borders and changes of status between
art and non-art that the radical strangeness of the aesthetic
object and the active appropriation of the common world were
able to conjoin and that a 'third way' micro-politics of art
was able to take shape between the contrasting paradigms of
art as life and as resistant form.
He
also cites the work of Warhol and Wodiczko as art producing
shock to reveal, 'capitalist violence beneath the happiness
of consumption ...' This expands collage beyond the bits of wallpaper
found in Cubism, emphasising a moment of rupture, estrangement
of the given, the crack. Ranciere claims that there is 'a specific
sensory experience that holds the promise of both a new world
of Art and a new life for individuals and the community' - the
aesthetic. This is a reassertion of a utopian imaginary
but one now realised by rupture, not pictures of a future (only
imagined) golden dawn. But Ranciere departs from the avant-gardes,
not setting a free future against past oppression in a temporal
trajectory, but employing a dialectic more akin to co-presence
as if in space. In 'The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes'
he says, 'The allegedly pure practice of writing is linked to
the need to create forms that participate in a general re-framing'
of the world, so that poetry is compared to 'ceremonies of collective
life, like the fireworks of Bastille Day, and to private ornaments
of the household.'
The
conjunction derives from Schiller's remark, as Ranciere paraphrases,
'aesthetic experience will bear the edifice of the art of the
beautiful and of the
art of living.' As in collage, the key term is neither but
nor against, it is and. This creates an axis which allows a distancing, when
Ranciere writes of a return to the problem of art's estrangement,
its separation from ordinary life and its immersion in it. He
says, '... the dead-end of art lies in the romantic blurring
of its borders. It argues the need for a separation of art from
the forms of aestheticisation of common life.' The essay ends with characteristic ambivalence:
Aesthetic
art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy,
and thrives on that ambiguity. That is why those who want to
isolate it from politics are somewhat beside the point. It is
also why those who want it to fulfil its political promise are
condemned to a certain melancholy.
A
similar quality of melancholia is found in Tim Clark's work
on modernism: 'unintelligible now because it had truck with
a modernity not yet fully in place' the ruins of which are now illegible because modernity has triumphed.
Is this another critical conundrum? Is modernity's triumph in
technology, money, or globalisation? (Actually it's modernisation).
Clark
begins that he, 'wanted to imagine modernism unearthed by some
future archaeologist ... a handful of disconnected pieces left
over from a holocaust that had utterly wiped out the pieces'
context .... The image is familiar: Pound's bundle of
broken mirrors: Clark goes on, 'I realize that what I had taken
for a convenient opening ploy ... speaks to the book's deepest
conviction ... the modernist past is a ruin .' Modernization is a disenchantment of the
world against which, 'Any mass movement or cult figure that
promises a way out ... will be clung to...'A number of instances come to mind, not least
the Holocaust, but Clark cites, 'social life driven by a calculus
of large-scale statistical chances' in a period of technocracy,
and 'the de-skilling of everyday life' which is 'tied to, and
propelled by, one central process: the accumulation of capital.' When social action becomes purposeless, modernism
is caught 'between horror and elation ...' in an agonising represented by Nietzsche
and Rimbaud.
Clark
notes the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when 'the
project called socialism' came to an end at the same time as
'the project called modernism .... If they died together, does
that mean ... they lived together, in century-long co-dependency?'
The
close reading of artworks which Clark undertakes is an attempt
to chart the evolution of the conjunction. Of David's The
Death of Marat he writes
that it is, 'made out of' the detail of French politics at the
time, when Marat was a member of a state committee, creating
a narrative of revolutionary heroism. Similarly, El Lissitzky's lithograph Beat
the Whites with the Red Wedge (1920) is art and politics - a campaign poster printed and distributed
by the Literary Publications Section, Political Directorate
of the Revolutionary Military Council (Western Front), in an
emerging, as yet unresolved, vocabulary of abstract forms from
the work of Malevich and his own architectural training. Clark argues that Lissitzky's work demonstrates
a 'sense of the possible relations ... between the two great
forms of established sign language in culture ... visual and
verbal, picture and text.'The visual elements are flat, without a play
on representation; picture and text are the conjoined elements,
a means to assert and as a modern motif. Clark identifies a balance, too,
'between making demands on one's viewers and leaving them completely
behind.'
This
is close enough to Ranciere's statement that critical art, 'sets
out to build awareness' whereby the spectator emerges as a conscious
agent of transformation.Few artists were more concerned with
transformation than Lissitzky in the period of War Communism
around 1920. Clark adds that, 'the better a Bolshevik [he] was,
the better his art. Not a verdict likely to endear him or me
to anyone much at present ...' I will avoid aesthetic judgements and return
to Ranciere:
From
Dadaism through the diverse kinds of 1960s contestatory art,
the play of exchanges between art and non-art served to generate
clashes between heterogeneous elements and dialectical oppositions
between form and content, which themselves served to denounce
social relations and the place reserved for art within them.'
Or,
in a parallel assertion: 'The artist's desperate effort to make
art a direct expression of life cannot overcome the separation
of art from life.' Marcuse cites Warhol's soup cans, which are
deeply nihilistic. And the dualism is as if beyond resolution
when Marcuse writes that art 'draws away' from Auschwitz because
it cannot represent suffering 'without subjecting it to aesthetic
form ...'. I could leave it there, with the shards of
a modernist argument strewn around the metaphorical floor (like
Ezra Pound's bundle of broken mirrors), overshadowed by the
ur-image of modernisation: the gates of Auschwitz. But then
I would be captured by my material, and the disenchantment of
the world would be undone (as some critics and cults would like
to see). Ranciere does not adopt such conceits: 'Art's singularity
stems from an identification of its own autonomous forms both
with forms of life and with political possibilities.' I remember the landscape and the window glass.
Or,
To
the extent that the aesthetic formula ties art to non-art from
the start, it sets that life up between two vanishing points:
art becoming mere life or art becoming mere art ... the life
of art ... consists precisely of a shuttling between these scenarios,
playing an autonomy against a heteronomy and a heteronomy against
an autonomy, playing one linkage between art and non-art against
another such linkage.
Could
the same be said of politics, as in War Communism? Did the Bolsheviks
play a politics of destiny against another of spontaneous insurrection?
Did the Stalinist terror follow failure of movement between
the two? The question is rhetorical but perhaps art and life
construct an axis of creative tension:
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. This work informs an aesthetics of politics that
operates at a complete remove from the forms of staging power
and mass mobilization which Benjamin referred to as the 'aestheticization
of politics.'