The aim of this text is not an exhaustive art-historical essay but a short interrogation, for heuristic purposes, of concepts within art that turn against art
‘For heuristic purposes’ means that I write this down to clarify my thoughts in order to inform my own mode of working. While I do not expect to be able to identify any ‘valid’ stance or justify my current practice, I hope to sort through some of the partially overlapping and conflicting arguments around art, un-art, anti-art, applied services, and political struggle. Sorting this out seems better than podding on on the distinctly wobbly ground of a postmodernism that issues sheepish reconciliatory gestures towards the attackers on art, implicitly hoping that the force of the arguments has been muddied and submerged in the reverberations of art history and buried under layers upon layers of reverential, but re-integrated art work.
(Should I become convinced that shutting up still seems the best route to take, the question remains whether any stuff produced despite such conviction (or before it was arrived at) should be seen as sham or embarrassment, as exempt or paradoxical, as economically motivated art craft, hopeless middle-class excretion, worthless nostalgia etc.)
The debate as to whether art should stop, or where it should turn, or what it should become, seems rather quiet currently. Instead, there are signs that some intellectuals and art historians (I think of Wolfgang Ullrich, Flusser may be put into the same camp, to be called something like "benign demystification") have bargained for a new lease of life for art by questioning the utility of applying high moral standards to art production, and by deflating notions of avantgarde, of autonomy, of self-impelled artistic progress. Proponents of this line of though welcome instead the emergence of art as a job or craft of many (a bit as in feudal times) and approve the blending of art with other fields, such as design, town-panning, therapy, or entertainment.
This will not only come as a relief to collectors and art lovers who must resent a suicidal turn that would condemn their mode of consumption (the mingling with the art crowd, the buying of status symbols, the visits to exhibitions as fodder for thought, or stuff for intelligent conversation that will add a shade of depth to their assured epicureanism). It will also be greeted by artists who usually have enough to worry about making a living to admit a fundamental questioning of their practice. The wish to keep up an artistic production and in turn, to sustain an income once the struggle for a place in the market has been successful is very understandable, and a negation of that practice without pragmatic options for alternative (and equally pleasant) ways of generating an income will not be heeded, necessarily so. After all, das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein. (The situation is slightly different for those artists who have a professional day job and are limited to produce whatever they do in their leisure time—at the expense of other activities. Those that do many odd jobs to earn a living—probably most artists—are again in a different position since for them, their artistic practice forms a supposedly meaningful nucleus that makes the multitude of low-profile jobs bearable. But this is a different discussion.)
I feel that the question whether art ought to stop or how it should turn against itself and its role in the capitalist economy is still valid, and the answer far from clear. The positions taken by the Kaprow, Situationist international, Metzger, Buren etc have been digested and turned into repertoire by art history. While they have spawned strands of practice like 'instituional critique' that have been re-inegrated into institutions, they remain at bottom undigestable in that they attack the economic core of art-making. (Taking the analogy of craft, no carpenter would dream of declaring that furniture should be abolished). But then art is no common craft. The analysis is still largely correct; the capitalist system and the role of art within it has not fundamentally changed, or at least not to the better.
What has changed is that today there is hardly a trace of the belief in a potential for a fundamental change of society. This belief was widespread in the Sixties and has certainly encouraged a much more radical critique of the economic and social foundations and functions of art than is evident at present.
Buren calls (in 1969) for a break away from art and its current context because art is reactionary, part of the system, regardless whether it is art or anti-art, two modes which he sees as mutually constitutive [1]. In his view, the question brought up by Cezanne — whether the sujet can become unimportant, the picture a non-referential surface without perspective and without the gesture, the brush stroke (representing metonymically the artist) — has been clouded and bypassed by the Cubists, by Duchamp, basically by everyone who poses the question in order to come up with an always partial mystifying answer and thereby, push his or her own art work.[2]
Buren claims to have developed a propostion that finally makes the decisive step that artists before him were not courageous or clever enough to make. His system of stripes introduces a neutrality that he recommends as the other of the endless repetion of art and anti-art. While it puts the context around the stripes into relief, it also aestheticises them. The function of the stripes is only understood by those who readily carry, as Kaprow describes, the art bracket outside the institutions and art contexts. It may be aligned with Kaprow's art mode 4 (work in non-art modes but present the work as art in non-art contexts [followed by examples] (with the proviso that the art world knows about it)[3].
The break with art is a step that Buren claims to be inevitable (and therefore, one could imply, mandatory for other artists). When investigating whether his practical proposition, the neutral stripes in different places and formats and colours (except that white is curiously chosen as the constant colour of two) implement such break in an exemplary way, it is curious to see that his mind, versatile enough to pontificate on the timidity of all previous efforts to break away, stops short of admitting that the field of art surrounding his own production and his assumed role as heretic and eschatologist is constitutive of his discourse, whether the stripes appear in museums, on public billbords, or in subway stations. Their message is understood only by those who know his work and its discursive context, and is not substantially different from the work of other artists creating an identifiable niche and identity. His efforts to prove the neutrality of the proposition are unconvincing. To me, the stripes seem not neutral, but mystifying; not anonymous, but representative of a personal style. In the context of many other diverse works, they do not stand out as the great liberating 'other' of art.
In contrast to Buren's gesture of a proposition promising radical departure, Debord frequently stresses the involvement of the situationist movement in the universal decomposition that has befallen art and the surrounding society, which explains for him the paucity of work and the difficulty of escaping the repetition and futility of common art practice [5]. He does not hope for more than the beginnings of a collective effort to escape the deadlock, by inventing new practices and experimental methods that take reality itself as material. In contrast to biting attacks on avantgarde authors and artists of his time (e.g., Robbe-Grillet), there is also an utopian promise of 'inventing completely new feelings' and constructing novel situations that allow a new kind of experience, foreshadowing what may become a new society - something Buren would certainly reject as a variant of the idealism he tries to put to rest.
The art strike position which can be seen as a direct descendant of the situationist movement. Steward Home, one of the people behind the proposal for a 1990-19930 art strike (purportedly heeded only by him and two others) aimed to shake up the socially imposed hierarchy of the arts and artists' confidence in their own role. ‘As was observed in some Art Strike propaganda, most artists appear to be nervous about what they do and feel anxious as to whether they perform a socially useful function. What the Art Strike made clear is that artistic activities have no social value whatsoever and in fact are extremely wasteful.’ [7]
(to be continued)
[1] Daniel Buren 1970: ‘Es regnet, es schneit, es malt’. In: Achtung! Texte 1967–1991. Verlag der Kunst, 1995, p87
[2] Daniel Buren 1970: ‘Bezugspunkte’. In: Achtung! Texte 1967–1991. Verlag der Kunst, 1995, pp103
[3] Allan Kaprow 1976: ‘Nontheatrical performance’. In: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. University of California Press, 1993, p175
[4] Daniel Buren 1969/1970: ‘Achtung!’ (Mise en garde). In: Achtung! Texte 1967–1991. Verlag der Kunst, 1995, p75
[5] Guy Debord 1957: ‘Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency’. In: Tom McDonough (ed.): Guy Debord and the Situatonist International. The MIT Press, 2002
[6] Allan Kaprow 1977: ‘Participation performance’. In: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. University of California Press, 1993, p184–185.
[7]Assessing the art strike 1990-1993. Notes From a Talk Given by Stewart Home at The Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England, 30 January 1993