‘The Independent Voice of the Visual Arts’
June 1st 2015 $6 / £4 / €5.80
INSIDE: FEATURES: Death of the New Editorial by Derek Guthrie by John Link Editorial by Daniel Nanavati The State of the Art by John Steppling Ed Paschke at the Ashmolean Splitting the Public and Private uses of Art Leon Golub, at the Serpentine by Dr Nizan Shaked Book Review: Who Paid the Piper: Notes From the Last Colony the CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Bill Roseberry Letters NAE MAGAZINE NAE MAGAZINE
LETTERS should never have been allowed to teach. He is in denial of what our most prestigious universities Sir, offer for contemporary art students who are serious about the culture of our time. It is interesting to me that few of the so called top art schools and universities are interested in bring- M. Rutt ing Derek Guthrie to this country after he and Jane Texas contributed so much to criticism and art through The New Art Examiner and other publications. True Editor, one does not invite Derek to talk and expect that This is very interesting news. I hope Falmouth he will perform in a manner that will insure you Art College find time to talk to you to give students accolades for hosting such a swell friendly guy — for a chance to become writers on the arts. Some of the Derek for sure will rustle some feathers. But seri- most profound comments on the role of artists and ously, is that not what being a cutting edge think- their work comes from artists themselves who can er, critic or artist is all about? Funny that a little make excellent critics. university in conservative Augusta Georgia has had I understand you now have several Friends groups him speak on numerous occasions over the years, in the County which I also think a very good way while the bastions of the educational avant-garde of getting ideas into the magazine from the 'street' level. seem reluctant to stick their necks out. Come on I studied art at Wolverhampton and thought int brave souls — show Derek you are interested in real he 60s it was one of the finest, all round educations discourse. you could receive in this country. No more.
Tom Nakashima Colin Edge NC (One Question 11.10.2011) Cornwall
Editor, Delighted to hear the New Art Examiner is com- Editor, ing to Cornwall and the UK. We have lacked a voice I do want to express my chagrin that Chicago in the art world since the demise of Scryfa maga- zine. With such a long history of the Newlyn School art schools and university programs haven’t come and the St Ives group it is good to know you are together to bring in Derek to speak on the occasion here. of the publication of the Essential New Examiner. All of those institutions, their faculty and students, P Tregarthwin reaped enormous benefits from the NAE which put Cornwall the national art spotlight on Chicago — and the Midwest. Most important, the NAE fostered gritty Editor independence and enabled many new writers and Community art thrives here in Cornwall. The artists to contribute to the art discourse. The NAE attraction of Cornwall for artists is long known was a contentious and fresh publication that helped perhaps less well known is the interest collectors to put authority for art back into the hands of have always shown. Not just the casual tourist but artists, often earning the annoyance of entrenched the wealthier business men and women who have commercial and clique-oriented curators and col- second homes and retirement properties in the lectors. I think it’s a sign of weakness and embar- county. The baseness of the wider art milieu hungry rassing new timidity for our institutions to pass on for money and fame has nothing much to do with bringing Derek to Chicago. They all have big ‘visit- the passion people have for creating. ing artist’ budgets and instead of bringing in some That we can now bring on new writers and teach new hot gallery’s wunderkind to put dollar signs in them to be first rate critics with an eye on histo- the eyes of art students why not expose them to one ry and meaning at the same time, is much to be who knows that art is about changing entrenched praised. and stultifying cultural values. Come on, academia and museums, bring Derek here! He can help re- spark the ‘grassroots’ criticality that underlies the Thomas Finegan vitality of any art scene, especially in Chicago. Cornwall William Conger To Whom It May Concern, IA (One Question 11.10.2011) John Link is simply a reactionary neo-con who
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My time at Wolverhampton Art College was one Editor, of the best, all round educations one could ever re- Good Luck. ceive. Now art students are fed theory and self-ful- fillment as a panacea to their life as grant form fillers. Sir Donald Howerth Andrew M. Beckwith Editor, Taunton We live in a Disney world where Koons can be- come the richest artist in the world for making nothing more than feel good, think less matter that isn't one step away from modern style cartoons. This is not the richness of culture we have striven Send all letters to: for centuries to develop and foster. This is am lost [email protected] world where no artist is brave enough to face up to the human condition head on but retreats into the barren wilderness of what's selling. IMPORTANT: Dear Reader, The New Art Examiner is the product of the thinking and life- long contribution of Jane Addams Allen and we thank you in her name for reading her independent journal of art criticism. This is the first edition planting roots in the UK, based in Corn- wall. If you have interest please consult Google, also Art Cornwall for interview with the publisher Derek Guthrie, who is a painter and keeps his Art Practice private. The New Art Examiner has a long history of producing quality and independent art criticism. Cornwall, as any art scene, needs writers to professionalize oth- erwise insider trading will determine success in this troubled art world. Simply please subscribe so as we can encourage and find writers to share their visual experience with you. You can directly participate, also, as all letters to the Editor are published. All editions include the digital issue sent via email. The two interim editions are published June 1st and Au- gust 1st 2015. Subscription to both Interim edition by cheque, Please see page 6 for addresses:
Print and digital UK £10 + £5 postage USA $12 + $3 postage Rest of World $16 + $10 postage
Queries: [email protected] Please send your US name and address to: Annie Markovich: [email protected]
2 NAE MAGAZINE Table of Contents ARTICLES SPEAKEASY ED PASCHKE: New York uber alles: Plural- DEATH OF THE NEW ism - Reprinted from February 1982 John Link p8 p10 SPLITTING THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE USES OF ART BOOK REVIEW Dr. Nizan Shaked p12 Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold STATE OF THE ART War by Frances Stoner George Touche' gives a sociologist’s view John Steppling p22 p37 NOTES FROM THE LAST COLONY EXHIBITION Bill Roseberry p34 ED PASCHKE: VISIONARY FROM CHICA- A CRITICAL VOICE RETURNS GO Stephen Lee and Daniel Nanavati at the Ash- Tom Mullaney p5 molean retrospective p20
I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE AND IT MAY BE CORNWALL EXHIBITION Derek Guthrie p6 LEON GOLUB Stephen Lee on the Serpentine retrospective AWE NOW BELONGS TO SCIENCE, NOT p32 ART Daniel Nanavati p11
LETTERS CARTOONS by Jonathon Coudrille p 23 Steve Hamann p 39 John Kilburn p40-41 All cartoon or graphic images welcome. The subject must be on the state of the visual art culture of the personalities involved.
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE e New Art Examiner is a not-for-pro t organization whose pur- pose is to examine the de nition and transmission of culture in our society; the decision-making processes within museums and schools and the agencies of patronage which determine the man- ner in which culture shall be transmitted; the value systems which presently in uence the making of art as well as its study in exhibi- tions and books; and, in particular, the interaction of these factors with the visual art milieu.
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The following was the fi rst editorial printed in the fi rst edition of the New Art Examiner, October 1973
The Masthead from October 1973
The New Art Examiner is a new kind of art publi- tutional viewpoint and even worse to equate art with cation - a monthly tabloid which will cover without entertainment. "Arts and Fun" with a heavy empha- fear or favor news or the visual arts in Chicago and sis on the "fun" is the password here. the mid-west. Besides reviews of exhibitions - the We believe that art is serious, that it has to do with standard fare of an art publication - we will include ideas and values and that it is far more important to behind-the-scenes stories such as the Sao Paolo ar- our society than the society is ready to admit. The ticle in this issue, news briefs, a regular review of artist is an undervalued man. On the one hand he criticism in the mass media, coverage of alternative is the goose that lays the golden eggs for a vast arts galleries. analysis of various aspects or the art world, industry which rivals the stock market as a money and critical coverage of today's agencies of patron- making institution. 0n the Other hand he is sup- age; the museums and the arts councils at both the posed to be a clown - a master of legerdemain - on state and the federal level. We hope lo combine in an aesthetic trip that has nothing to do with any- one fl exible instrument the qualities of depth or thing else. We say with a bow to Picasso.”What do analysis which one occasionally fi nds in the glossy you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his art publications, with the range or timely informa- eyes if he's a painter, or ears if he's a musician. or a tion that one now fi nds in the bi-monthly arts news- lyre at every level of his heart if he's a poet, or even letters which have sprung up all over the country. if he's a boxer, just his muscles? On the contrary, he's The Examiner is also meant to be a forum for the at the same time a political being, constantly alive to artists of Chicago and a vehicle for their communi- heart-rending, fi ery or happy events, to which he re- cation. sponds in every way. How would it be possible to feel Why such a publication in Chicago? Coverage of no interest in other people and by virtue of an ivory the visual arts In our city suffers from both exter- indifference to detach yourself from the life which nal neglect and internal Indifference. The art pub- they so copiously bring you? No, painting is not done lishing industry is in New York. Reviews of Chicago to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war art events are few and far between in the nationally for attack and defense against the enemy " distributed arts magazines. In fact we lag behind Los We believe that the same standards of journalism Angeles, San Francisco and even Minneapolis in this which apply to other areas can apply to the visual respect. But far more devastating to a creative and arts - a concern for covering the whole not just an lively art scene here than the scarcity of national re- aspect and a respect for the truth- a vision or the views is the tendency on the part of our mass media artist as a whole man not as a myth or a performing to report arts news almost exclusively from an insti- monkey.
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A CRITICAL VOICE RETURNS
by TOM MULLANEY
Waking up in Chicago in 2015, following a thir- view in The Reader, Chicago artists have lost mean- teen year slumber since the New Art Examiner last ingful access to a wider public audience. Online, published, can be quite disorienting. It requires see- everyone’s a critic but much of what is produced is ing the art scene with new eyes. superficial. Our intent is to be a voice proclaiming The two major museums in town have new leaders art’s true value and cultural importance. and the Art Institute has a What passes for art cover- Modern Wing devoted to age nowadays are reports on art since 1900. Long lines We aim to cast a critical the art market’s excess and form outside the Art Insti- the obscene amounts being tute on weekend mornings eye to the mission of in- paid for contemporary art. waiting to enter the muse- As a result of such trends, um, even at a lofty $23 adult stitutional oversight and art power and critical au- admission fee. open up a sorely needed thority has largely shifted In addition, a new group from museums and profes- of museums, previously communication channel sional curators to big-time quiescent, has gained wider collectors and auction hous- acceptance and generated for artists. es. some excitement. Universi- Critical standards are be- ty museums at Northwestern (Block Museum), De- ing compromised in the institutional rush for bod- Paul and the University of Chicago (Smart Museum) ies walking through the door. The Museum of Con- have expanded their audience outreach and mount- temporary Art’s two record-breaking exhibits in the ed more ambitious, noteworthy exhibits that have past decade were its Jeff Koons show in 2008 and last gained critical notice, including reviews in The New year’s exhibit of David Bowie’s ephemera. York Times. And the Art Institute has banners blaring that it Since the economic collapse in 2008, the arts are has been voted the best museum in the world on Trip enjoying a moment of strong popular appreciation. Adviser. Perhaps not an unimpeachable art source There is a new spirit of experimentation in art, con- but a key indicator of vox populi. temporary music and literature (graphic novels and Such a state of affairs in the current art world is zines). what prompts the return of the New Art Examiner. A Yet this flurry of good news exists alongside trou- voice of art sanity is clearly needed at this moment. bling developments in the art world. The market for We aim to cast a critical eye to the mission of in- serious art criticism, both local and national, such stitutional oversight and open up a sorely needed as once thrived in The New Art Examiner’s pages, communication channel for artists. We hope you has vanished. will come along for the ride and, most importantly, Both the Tribune and Sun-Times dumped their art support our efforts with your voices and donations. critics. Apart from New City and an occasional re-
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STAFF
Derek Guthrie, Publisher and co-founder Tom Mullaney, US Editor Annie Markovich, US Managing Editor Daniel Nanavati, UK Editor EDITorial Roland Guerney, West Cornwall Editor by DEREK GUTHRIE WEBSITE: www.newartexaminer.net “I have seen the future and it may be Cornwall” UK Cartoons John Dunbar Kilburn Jonathon Xavier Coudrille This Edition of the NAE is the first of two, ad hoc intermediate Editions filling the gap before regular US Cartoons: publishing commences in September. The NAE orig- Steve Hamann inated in Chicago out of Community in 1974, and published monthly for nearly 30 years. The history is Distributor, Ingrams amazing, turbulent and colourful. In spite of humble Cover Image; beginnings in the provincialism of Chicago, it be- came a respected national art journal. Gaverne, Cornwall. UK The first Editorial written by the late Jane Addams © Emily Whitfield Wicks Allen “Without Fear or Favor” precisely defined the www.emilyww.co.uk mission of the NAE which was to present art criti- cism outside the usual orthodoxies of hidden affilia- ISBN: 978-1-908867-99-5 tion. It is widely accepted that the current art world, www.newartexaminer.net centred mostly on New York and London and emerg- ing Berlin, is in crisis. Criticism, discontent and con- Would you like to write for tempt for the workings of International Art Market the New Art Examiner? parallels the dissatisfaction with the working of poli- tics of the major political parties in Westminster and [email protected] Washington DC. The realisation has struck that the political and social agenda are not set by the people through democratic systems but are set by powerful UK Office: Rosehill, Altarnun, Cornwall. PL15 financial interests of Wall Street and City of London 7RL. UK. traders and bankers. US Office: Art is stuck. It maybe under siege and exists in a 13213 S. Commercial Avenue, Chica- time of Mannerism. Academia seems not to offer ref- go, Illinois 60633.USA. uge. American art struggle with the problem of mak- ing art professional. A hopeless task, in the opinion Inquiries: of this writer, who does not exclude the experience of [email protected] [email protected] Art School as a learning experience. The politics of [email protected] Art Education are a growing concern and more words are penned each month focussing and responding to All Letters to the editor will be growing concerns. printed without editing. It is accepted that Modern Art, or Post Modernism [email protected] no longer carries the resounding message that the
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“I have seen the future and it may be Cornwall”
new is ‘good’ and owing to historical necessity is painting and sculpture, took form and forms from inclined to define itself as progressive. Though the a truly unique local experience of urban architec- mantra of these words is not exhausted and still has ture perched on the edge of the mighty forces of the resonance in Community Art. That is Art produced Atlantic. A northern version of the Greek islands without the benefit of a quality degree. in which civilisation can be seen as perched on the Remote Cornwall, in English terms, parallels the edge of the great natural void of the sea. myth of California, maybe Florida the land of the So art and Cornwall are good companions. There distant outpost from metropolis of urban culture. is a multitude of artists in residence, good, bad and indifferent. The last glory days the Post War years are now history. The urban truths of Pop Art in the Art is stuck. It maybe un- 60s laid to rest the romance of the landscape. Now der siege and exists in a St Ives has a Museum; a Branch of the all powerful London Tate; Falmouth Art School with the help of time of Mannerism. Aca- European money is now a University, and Sir Nicho- las Serota and his wife have a second home in Corn- demia seems not to offer wall and are active. Much power from the centre is now in the region. Kestle Barton is a well appoint- refuge. ed and elegant gallery with commercial hospital- English artists for decades have sought inspiration ity attached, founded by Karen Townshend and in and meaning inside this ancient, mythical and mys- partnership with Teresa Serota has also purchased tic landscape with surface remnants in the form of a larger community centre in nearby Helston which granite cottages, ancient harbours, prehistoric set- now houses 30+ much sought after artists studios as tlements, obsolete tin mines and extraordinary sea indeed are the ancient studios on Porthmeor beach, reflected light that arches over the Peninsular. En- which provide residencies for international artists. glish culture in spite of the “dark Satanic Mills” or So Cornwall is on the art map. It will be great in- maybe because of “these dark Satanic Mills” visual- terest that the NAE will follow future developments ised the New Jerusalem which presented God inside in Cornwall and with support and growth extend art the wonders of nature. reporting and criticism to the rest of the Country. In the Post war years St Ives, a beautiful fishing Referred to by Cornish people as “ Up Country.” Village (now unfortunately a tourist trap), was ref- uge for *avant-garde* progressive artists escaping Subscriptions Welcome the bombing of London. Barbara Hepworth, Ben To Pay the Writers Nicholson, Naum Garbo, their presence planted the idea of Modern Art inside landscape. Their art, Page 2
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John Link, Painter, Emeritus Professor of DEATH OF Art, Western Michigan University, Professor of Art and Department THE NEW Head, Virginia Tech, Michigan Editor, the original New Art Exam- iner, one time member by of the New Art Associa- John Link tion Board. Nothing is forever. Different projects within the “New”, then it is. The majority is so overwhelming human endeavor go to different places when they and overbearing that it is pointless to count it up, have run out of life. When major movements in art just as it is pointless to count a mob. To achieve this reach the end of their days, they often find a home in blessed state, of course, anything proposed as “New” the academy of their time: Witness the later French must share many characteristics with everything Salon where eye-numbing “great theme painting” else that is “New”. Projects that “explore the idea of” found almost unlimited nourishment. The dominat- or “develop a dialog about“ or “redefine the bound- ing presence and specific canons of the Académie aries between” or “push the limits of” or other forms des Beaux-Arts kept the thing on life support so ex- of formulaic out-there-new-art will get you a degree, tensive and powerful it looked like it would live for- a grant, or even tenure, depending on where you are ever. But it didn’t. It was sick and had gone there to when you execute them. You get more points if your die. The support it received from its acceptance as project causes normal people to feel guilty about not the only art of contemporary importance just made understanding it. This is because understanding it it sicker. is considered too complicated for the non-academic, unenlightened mind that resides in normal people. Likewise, the university community provides hos- pice service for many dying ideas, thanks in good Intellectualizing art is accomplished by substitut- part to its being structured much like the infamous French institution. It provides plenty of rules, guide- lines, expectations, self-assessments, entitlements, peculiar enthusiasms, and the like. While these pro- cesses hardly resemble what goes on in real life, they generate a sense of immortality that can be convinc- ing, a sense that the ideas dying there are “in truth” GREAT ideas. They may not be well understood by the masses, but they are sanctified by an opulent, powerful, and supremely intellectual community’s assessment that they are permanently worthwhile. It is a perfect place for “New for the sake of newness” to spend its last days. This is not to say all ideas enshrined in univer- Art Must/Should Be Beautiful, study (Norris 2010- sities are silly. Disciplines that are governed by the 11) (Abramovic 1975) scientific method do very well in university environ- A Yale undergraduate is taught to “re-perform” a ments, for instance. But goodness in art must be as- feminist attack on the nature of art created by Ma- sessed subjectively, and there is no way to measure rina Abramovic 35 years ago, intensified by adding which subjective assessment is the best, except by the “issue” of natural, unstraightened black hair. majority rule which, in many humanistic disciplines, closely resembles mob rule. Direct link Thus, the university art community has intellec- ing the question “Is it art?” for the question “Is it tualized “New Art” as if its rudeness is simply orig- any good?” The correct answer for the enlightened inality in the raw that requires nothing more than academic is always “Yes, of course it’s art”. The cra- academic certification to become the most import- zier a normal person regards that answer and its ba- ant aspect of art from now on. The rules for certifi- sis, the better. For those inclined to anarchy, we get cation have made “New Art” easy to identify, easy to performances of inane acts, some very disgusting, evaluate, easy, even, to quantify, as far as the “vote” that involve such “new media” as raw meat, blood is concerned. If most everyone agrees something is from self-inflicted injury, and human feces. On the
8 NAE MAGAZINE pious side of the ledger (a favorite of academics), being avant-garde are not compatible. Instead, ev- the miracle and morality play of the Middle Ages eryone rejoices that a central “idea” now provides has found new techno-life as video conforming to a standard that almost all agree to use. “New” may the liberal ethic, gussied up as a hard-charging, not be new anymore, but the tired, formulaic nature intellect-so-high-it-is-incomprehensible, holi- of avant-gardism is the elephant in the room no one er-than-thou diddling of the political status quo. For notices. Universities are happy to proclaim they fos- electronic faddists (also popular on campus), there ter “innovative art” (just as they foster “innovative are uncountable instances where Twitter, Insta- teaching” – another problem worth investigating). gram, Facebook, and other social sites are enlisted They celebrate its obnoxiousness as evidence that it to present for the ten millionth time the question of is truly “cutting edge” - so long as it is not too ob- whether non-traditional media can be art. Thanks to noxious - as if there is something remarkable going the embrace of these “What on. Since everyone says that is art?” questions, the var- is the case, it is the case. ious units within the ivory University art profession- Thus, deans who once tower have produced mil- wanted to know why an in- lions of instances of their als regard the man-in-the stallation piece was includ- asking and answering. The ed in the student show now only mystery left is why street as a vulgarian, and want to know why there are does anyone still find it a not more of them. Faculty compelling exercise? would never let his values who ignore the trends fear Academic credentialism that the next team of ac- not only defines the lay of into their elevated midst. creditation visitors will pro- the land for this ritual of in- nounce their contributions terrogation, it fuels its per- “dated”. The history of art petuation. Cleverness and hyped outrage are applied is presented as the history of male artists exploiting to recurrent tales of rights denied – women’s rights, subordinate female models. Art education courses students’ rights, gay rights, minority rights, worker’s teach would-be teachers how to use art projects to rights, whatever. You name the violation of the lib- manipulate children into believing the liberal world eral canon, and it becomes a ticket for classroom rec- view is the only morally correct stance. These phe- ognition, grant recognition, exhibition recognition, nomena repeat themselves thousands of times every and peer reviewed recognition, all of which satisfy day in hordes of institutions, year after year, in the the academic thirst for prestige. The truth may set name of the new. you free, but prestige is the hard currency of the uni- Some are scandalized when another odd-ball work versity, what pays the money, what gets you ahead. by a Richard Prince or a Jeff Koons sells for a high Without objective criteria to underpin the pursuit price at auction, yet the amount of money spent on of prestige, another basis is required. In the case of art in that venue pales when compared to the amount art, contemporary opinion provides a good source, spent by the world’s university system. By lavish- but with a qualification or two. University art pro- ing resources on the academicised Avant-garde and fessionals regard the man-in-the street as a vulgari- its promise of morally enhanced newness forever, an, and would never let his values into their elevated “originality” has become fat, cheesy, and prone to midst. But they do seek something tried and true, disease, like the livers of geese that are stuffed with something that has stood the test of time, because food in order to make their taste more appealing. they loath going out on a limb. The beautiful objects The rudeness of the Impressionists may have housed in established museums can be admired as seemed new, but it was a side-effect of them dis- artifacts from the past, but they are suspect as mod- tancing themselves from the flowing “gravies” of els for newly minted advanced art because the man- the Academy that failed to satisfy. Because of their in-the-street likes them too. If art is to be truly new, simple preference for better art, they could not make the less it looks like old art the better. The academy contemporary art; they had to be against it. They has finally learned the lesson of the Impressionists, were robbing the past to escape the credentialed but the first Avant-garde, and how they led the way into flabby art of their present. Today there is more cre- the 20th century. During the ensuing 150 years, the dentialed and flabby art than ever before in the his- Avant-garde established its credentials while re- tory of our species. The majority of it can be found in maining unacceptable to the uneducated, a perfect university art environments. Predicting the future combination. Further, the Avant-garde has become is treacherous, but just as Ben Shahn’s invitation to ubiquitous in learned circles, and so academics know speak at Harvard signaled the death of Social Real- that its value is well established and contemporary, ism, the massive acceptance of “New for new’s sake” both of which are desirable characteristics. It is in- inside university circles suggests its days are like- convenient to recognize that being ubiquitous and wise numbered.
9 NAE MAGAZINE New York Uber S Alles: Pluralism.
Ed Paschke Each issue the New Art Exam- iner will invite a well-known, or P not-so-well-known, art world personality to write a speak- easy essay on a topic of interest – whatever it may be.
The critics and curators have all buried it. Before in the name of the seriousness is to indulge in laying it to rest consider: in its diversity and lack of self-deception. E distinction, it may have been the ultimate metaphor Where have all the people gone? Electronic for the seventies. Its multiplicity was an extension shadows of their former selves watching video of th ME generation - of divergent interest groups screens, ignoring the right of refusal. all shouting for equal rights - of individual morality demanding “get down”, “do your own thing,” and Or perhaps they are driving up in their new “I need m own space.”It was the personification in Mercedes and BMWs to buy German Expres- A paint, plastic, plaster and, yes, “works on paper,” of sionist paintings. Do the ladies clutch their Gu- non-judmental, non-hierachcal sub-cultures pro- ccis as they strut in Claude (not Joe) Montana claiming “I’m O.K - you’re O.K” - and “anything I and shell out for the newest European cultural call art is art.” Literary, narrative, collage, mixed imports? media - it was the essence of a society stuffing sat- Perception, or what we experience through in shirts in denim pants and pas as you go. How do our sensory apparatus, is being affected by the K you define pay? What is the value of anything ... rapid acceleration of media-related technol- What is someone willing to pay for it? What is all ogy. Our view of the world is changing as the the business about justice and fair play? There is global-environment” expands through media always force (of course). accessibility and the information reservoir gets Manhattan has 20 blocks to the mile. New York- deeper. My belief is that these elements (good ers seem to spend the better part of their time in or bad) have woven their way into the collective fabric of our lives. I also believe that any artist E an area of maybe 40 or 50 blocks, To them the “ter- ritory” sounds impressive but it’s only 2½ miles, a always works within the context or conditions distance any non- New Yorker travels for even the that are indigenous to his or her own time and, most mundane, self-supporting reasons. Granted in doing so, reflects the energy, temperature there’s a lot compacted on the bedrock of the island and attitudes of that climate. - one big experience is going on in the compressed Paint may seem like an outmoded medium but the human imagination is endless. A mass of humanity. It is in a sense a city full of semi- finalists. A marketplace in which peddlers descend to hawk their aesthetic and practical wares. But Ed Paschke (June 22, 1939 – November 25, 2004) how are the natives responding? Do they see more His childhood interest in animation and cartoons, of life? Or do they shut themselves off - sensory as well as his father’s creativity in wood carving overload - and become provincial and smug. His- and construction, led him toward a career in art. As torical tunnel-vision as concept. a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chi- S How would Leonardo feel about his Mona Lisa cago he was influenced by many artists featured in the Museum’s special exhibitions, in particular the as a billboard - wearing Koss stereo headphones? work of Gauguin, Picasso and Seurat. This Speak- We live in an era of embryonic, computerized life- easy, first published for the New Art Examiner in styles ... pathetically domesticated and shriveled February 1982 and republished to celebrate the cur- instincts. Regeneration is a universal phenomenon. rent exhibition at the Ashmolean. To eliminate from one’s life the natural processes Y
10 NAE MAGAZINE UK EDITOR
Today, awe belongs to science not to art Image: from Hubble Space Telescope by DANIEL NANAVATI
Awe has vanished from art. We may consider that and everything is designed, but the successive idea a good thing as misguided religiosity has bound it- that ‘everything is art’ leaves art without a defini- self like ivy around the image for its own dogma, to tion and without definitions ideas are stuck in the do with the myth the image depicted and the archi- instability of reason. If art can be everything, it tecture in which it was displayed. The image used as is nothing we can talk about. The struggle to find part of worship eventually fed into secular society, words to describe Contemporary art exemplifies the with huge portraits of the wealthy and officers of problem: you cannot discuss something that cannot State proudly displayed where the human eye could be defined. It is as if art disappeared in the twentieth see them in their own pomp and glory. century. Like a metaphysical God you either believe Hegel incorrectly said God was dead (a ridiculous or not, proof of existence is elusive. Conceptualism assertion for how can you kill something metaphys- went one stage further telling us the work matters ical?), but he set out the philosophy through which less than the idea behind the work but if that is awe could effect this change. true, as the ideas fall from contemporary artists like The invention of the camera around the 1820s leaves from autumn trees, they beggar themselves de-professionalised the artist who worked in por- for the artists are not creating art but the ideas of traiture or presented the patron in a variety of poses art. One step back from art. Like writing the notes or conformed to the expectations of the Royal Acad- for poems one never writes. emy. The camera penetrated nature in a way the hu- We are left with astonishment at some of the man eye cannot and later in the movies of the silver prices attained by contemporary works but now we screen, amazed and delighted a new audience. This know all those prices are manipulated through the mechanical eye became an essential tool of scientific art market we don’t give it any regard as stating any- research and visual consumerism. thing about our culture. It is just business involving The incredible image of the Hubble telescope itself in a portable (and sometimes not so portable) floating above our planet taking images of the Cos- object of investment. Albeit potentially with higher mos' abstract brilliance, inspires awe. A close up of short-term returns than the traditional investments swirling gases on Jupiter exhibits the abstract in and of gold and jewels. of Nature. We are continually awed by new discover- Today visual culture is more affected by sport and ies and the Sistine Chapel, still a place of brilliance, television than by art works. The Internet, which is beggared by the night sky, and the older myths of started as a means of transferring nothing but infor- societies are rocked by the facts of science, unveiled mation, has become the greatest landfill of images in for us by electronics and mathematics. human history. The reason we should note the passing of awe in The true galleries of awe are the high-rises and art is because contemporary artists wish to aspire skyscrapers built by multi national companies. The to the high esteem previously enjoyed by artists in work of the people in these places is to make money the nation’s, any nation’s, image of itself. Education and receive the awe of their fellow citizens for being is built on transferring that idea of nationhood to rich, to be worshipped not to worship. The art works children hopefully reattained as adult citizens. Du- on display in these places are asides. champ pointed out wisely, that there is art in design
11 NAE MAGAZINE
Photo: Nicolas Gaby
SPLITTING Dr. Nizan Shaked is Associ- ate Professor of Contempo- rary Art History, Museum THE PUBLIC and Curatorial Studies at California State University Long Beach. Her book, The Synthetic Proposition: Con- AND PRIVATE ceptualism and the Political Referent is forthcoming with Manchester University Press for the series: Rethinking Art’s Histories (edited by Ame- USES OF ART lia Jones and Marsha Meskimmon). She can be reached at [email protected]. In this excellent essay, Dr Nizan Shaked describes by how investors borrow money against art collections, underpinned by the trove system and how new systems of art investment threaten the non for pro t Dr. Nizan Shaked status of the private/public museum partnership. Ab- stract art especially runs the risk of becoming noth- ing more than a semi-liquid asset. e market need to acquire young, saleable artists has run rough-shod First published in Counterpunch February 2015 over commentary by art historians and critics who are better trained to comment than lay-collectors. Some of the answers to this, she concludes, are straightforward.
Although Marx’s thought settled accounts with To retreat is to leave the future of our collective bourgeois morality, it remains defenseless before cultural patrimony in the hands of the upper eche- its aesthetic, whose ambiguity is subtler but whose lon. The extremely inflated price of art at this mo- complicity with the general system of political econ- ment has increasingly transferred control of content omy is just as profound. away from the hands of professionals and into the — Jean Baudrillard, “The Mirror of Production” [i] sway of laymen patrons, who unabashedly use the institution to increase the value of their private col- Taking responsibility for the role of the artist in lections.[iv] the machine we call “the art world,” the artist An- While some may argue that this has always been drea Fraser concludes in her essay L’1% C’est Moi, the case, financial tools introduced on the art mar- that: ket since the 1980s have been gradually altering the playing field such that the ethical and aesthetic con- sequences of such patronage for museums are now “as our survey of Top Collectors shows, many of our far graver than they ever were. patrons are actively working to preserve the political and financial system that will keep their wealth, and The invention of the art-credit system in the 1980s inequality, growing for decades to come.” allowed collectors to borrow money against art, potentially turning art into a liquid asset. Togeth- er with the development of art advisory boards by Tracing the direct connection of collectors to the major banks and auction houses that taught inves- 2008 “great recession,” Fraser asks: tors how to collect, the art-credit system formed the economic infrastructure that drove the incremental “[h]ow can we continue to rationalize our partici- growth of the art market to its unprecedented mag- pation in this economy?”[ii] nitude, and to the headline-garnishing spectacle of art’s auction prices today.[v] When it comes to the public institutions, though, Art has been recruited to serve the capitalistic my answer is that we don’t have a choice.[iii]
12 NAE MAGAZINE venture of inventive profi t increase, echoing the The museum trove enjoys what we can call for broader shift in investment patterns and the boom shorthand ‘the modern condition’, and which was in market speculation.[vi] developed in a slow market. The trove ensures the During the great recession (which commenced value of art in circulation, as Baudrillard analyzed: before its public visibility in 2008), the market for art, like that of other luxury In fact the museum acts as commodities, surged to new The invention of the a guarantee for the aristo- heights.[vii] cratic exchange. It is a double Having become an ac- art-credit system in the guarantee: ceptable, if not standard, —just as a gold bank, the component of a diverse in- 1980s allowed collectors public backing of the Bank of vestment portfolio, an as- to borrow money against France, is necessary in order set class if you include real that the circulation of cap- estate or commodities in art, potentially turning ital and private speculation your defi nition, art today be organized, so the fi xed re- is fulfi lling the potential of art into a liquid asset. serve of the museum is nec- its initial liquidation in the essary for the functioning of 1980s. Consequently, market-based value assess- the sign exchange of paintings. Museums play the ment is exerting direct infl uence on decision-mak- role of banks in the political economy of paintings. ing for public museums. Rather than divorcing —not content to act as an organic guarantee of themselves from this structure, public institutions speculation in art, the museum acts as an agency have been subsumed into the system that estab- guaranteeing the universality of painting and so lishes art’s prices. Today we have two simultane- also the aesthetic enjoyment (a socially inessential ous dynamics of how value gets conferred on art. value, it has been seen) of all others.[viii] In their overlap, wealth wins and a critical idea of Under this modern condition art has a double what contemporary art may mean, suffers.
13 NAE MAGAZINE form of value, where works have a monetary mea- Before the invention of art-credit if you owned sure, a price, (as seen in the recent threats to liq- a work it would be static until you sold it. The uidate the collection of the Detroit Institute of Art art-credit system positioned art as collateral for in order to pay the city’s debt), and also embody credit, allowing its equivalent in money to move. a social value, the combination of the two allows [xii] the museum trove to function as a guarantee for an As an investment incentive, the art-credit sys- active market. Without the infrastructure of social tem (and the support mechanisms erected to pro- value, art would not be able to circulate. mote art investment) incrementally increased For the most part, art circulates as a luxury com- art’s market circulation, recently sped even more modity in the sense ex- by the growing practice of plained by Michael Hein- “flipping.” While the accel- rich: erating market has made canonized art a more sta- Whether or not a par- ble investment, this is not ticular article is “really” the case for unverified con- useful for the reproduction temporary art, where sig- of society does not play nificance has not yet been any role in determining its established, and prices character as a commodi- fluctuate like fashions.[xiii] ty. A luxury yacht, a video This renders contempo- commercial, or tanks are rary art an extremely un- commodities if they find sound investment for pos- a buyer. And if these are Daniel Joseph Martinez Museum Tags: Second terity.[xiv] produced under capitalist Movement (Overture) or Overture con claque-Over- Prices for young art are conditions, the labor ex- ture with Hired Audience Members, 1993 Metal and unstable precisely because pended during their pro- enamel on paint Courtesy of the artist and Roberts the criteria for the assess- duction is “productive la- & Tilton, Culver City, California ment of new practices takes bor.” [ix] time to be established and take effect. The recent museum rush to acquire The artworks in the museum trove therefore young art is detrimental, increasing likelihood that have value because of the work vested in them and we will be stuck in the future with a trove of inferi- because value has been retroactively conferred, or cultural patrimony. and valorized, in the process of exchange.[x] Another danger stems from a systematic problem As Christopher J. Arthur observes: in the ways in which non-profit institutions have been acquiring young contemporary art. Although museums claim that curators are making such de- “the logic of exchange imposes the same iden- cisions, it is common knowledge in the field that tical abstract form on all goods, namely the val- increasingly it is individual donors siting on acqui- ue-form, which then develops to capital as the form sition committees or foundations that are deciding of self-valorizing value.”[xi] which work they “give.”[xv] Contemporary art foundations in the US func- Commodity’s double abstraction in labor and ex- tion as tax havens that serve wealth while arguing change also exists in the work of art, just in differ- that they operate for the social good.[xvi] ent measure. We have to ask what types of professional stan- The process of exchange confers a work’s price. dards, processes, or procedures are practiced in If a work is deemed to be of “museum quality,” its these foundations, and who is it that supervises or social value is established through institution- regulates them. In many cases it is laymen/women al accession, and prices for the artist’s works in- collectors deciding what art is significant or what creases significantly. In a slow market, the interval activities might be considered public service. between a work’s initial creation and its paced sub- When museums have become valorization ma- sequent circulation generally allowed enough time chines in the service of wealth, the term “anti-trust” for verification, making its procurement into the may not be far-fetched. Mandated or charted to trove less vulnerable to error.
14 NAE MAGAZINE hold works “in the public trust,” most non-profi t upon the relative operation of negation (since the private museums benefi ting from tax-exempt sta- moment when value is conferred upon a work is tus are governed by trustees. If institutional bene- also the moment it is subsumed into the system factors are serving their personal interest and not of capital). Following Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory a public notion of qualifi ed art, then this is a condi- Spaulding explains how art sustained its negative tion of anti-trust. work: Relying on the logic of value largely formed un- der the conditions of modernism, museums are us- "Under capitalism, art is and is not like any other ing the wrong measure to gauge the signifi cance commodity. It is and is not like any other congela- of contemporary art. I am not claiming that pro- tion of abstract labor time. It occupies something fessionals can predict the future, however, histori- like a permanent gap in the structure of value’s re- ans and curators have a better chance of assessing production, and hence is in contradiction with the long-term contribution than do laymen collectors. value-form even as it is nothing other than this re- Ideally, professionals possess a commitment to lation to it. During the epoch of programmatism, attempt objectivity. Museums should be held ac- it was the specifi c form of this contradiction that countable to such standards. accounted for art’s positivity, as a practice that was Given the new logic of art’s circulation we need to able to sustain itself, indeed to thrive on its predic- rethink verifi cation and assessment of art’s signif- ament, at least for a time. Modernist art was also icance outside its monetary value. In Value-Form negative because it stood for everything beyond and Avant-Garde, an account of modern art as a se- the law of value. In certain of those extreme mo- ries of negations, Daniel Spaulding shows how the ments that defi ned its very being, it was nothing modernist work of art negotiated the boundaries of less than the concrete fi gure of utopia. As such, its own defi nition, a central limit being the com- however, it perhaps remained a specifi c and con- modity form: fl icted instance of the value-form’s own properly utopian content, which is to say its prefi guration of a socialist mode of production that would be even Under capitalism, art more thoroughly mediated by labor than is capi- is and is not like any talism, though under the conscious direction of its human bearers. […] other commodity. Art could play this role only by continually de- Daniel Spaulding fying its relapse into identity with the value-form. This required an immense labor of the negative. At In any given instance of modernism at its high- the same time, art had to assure its reproduction as est intensity it was the possibility of the mark itself an image of value’s blocked tantalization, which is that was at stake: whether line or colour or shape to say, as an image of the dictatorship of the prole- could be adequate to history and still be recogniz- tariat, or the transitional phase, or any other place- able as art, and whether the artist’s subjectivity holder for a future social order grounded on labor could be adequate to the making of such marks. in the form of value and hence on reproduction of Modernism mediated that limit and made it into the class relation." form. Art courted reifi cation when it failed to con- front the limit of its reproduction as an institution Today the situation is different. Due to the – whenever, in other words, it started to look too art-credit system any practice that is successful on much like art – yet it risked still more disastrous the market becomes identical with the value-form. reifi cation when it exceeded that limit […]. Either Recast as equivalent to money, art has been re- possibility was built into modernism’s basic proce- cruited to serve the logic of fi nancialization as a dures.[xvii] form of value that mediates between other transac- tions. This may take place regardless of the meth- Temporality sustained Avant-Garde art as a od or attitude taken by the artist. Sold in art fairs, “special commodity,” progress of time allowing it Daniel Buren’s conceptual stripes, once subversive, to remain suspended between the value-form and have now, by his own volition, collapsed back into its negation. [xviii] That “Modernism mediated the abstractions they once aimed to critique. I do that limit and made it into form,” was dependent not intend to deny artists profi t from their past glory, but rather to recognize that what were once
15 NAE MAGAZINE gestures of negation have become part of a stan- Pollock, negating the cerebral thrust of his early dardized vocabulary arsenal, a way to derive more work, and much of is intellectual justification. The surplus value from the art by placing it within a world is awash with objects, with no basis in sight genealogy. Professionalization and networking op- to distinguish one from the other. Auction-house portunities offered in lucrative MFA programs have blurbs and gallery press releases efficiently appro- bred a new generation of artists savvy at activating priate a modernist language of connoisseurship, conceptualism as a business model. Postmodern- but to no avail, justifying value with hyperbolic ism has allowed for a revival of every mode of at- language jokingly identified by the literary journal titude and style in art. Figuration and abstraction Triple Canopy as “International Art English.”[xix] exist simultaneously and there is little left to ne- Prices, nevertheless, continue to rise. gate. Once analytic, today formalist and abstract The current market has pushed museums out of practice or discourse provides excellent border and the game—they simply cannot afford the art, leav- culture-crossing currency—ready for consumption ing them to rely on donations for acquisitions.[xx] by totalitarian wealth from the Gulf to Russia and When it comes to historically verified art this beyond. Abstraction today is currency. does not pose a theoretical problem, but when it comes to contemporary art a blatant conflict of in- Daniel Joseph Marti- terest is introduced. This is not news; critics and nez Museum Tags: Second historians have commented on questionable nature Movement (Overture) or of “art-world” transactions.[xxi] Overture con claque-Over- Infamous for lack of regulation and transparency, ture with Hired Audience the art market benefits from the allure of mystery Members, 1993 Metal and attached to how sales are conducted. enamel on paint Courtesy As is also well known, dealers often “place” works of the artist and Roberts & in collections, choosing what to sell and to whom, Tilton, Culver City, Califor- activating the lure of withholding to their advan- nia tage. Thus for example a dealer wishing to promote a young artist will sell their work to a new collec- As synchronicity and si- tor on the contingency that the collector purchase multaneity of practices are the current logic of art two works and donate one to a museum of choice, we face a paradox—where a relatively static trove, in effect committing a public institution to years reliant on the value-form logic of the modern art of research, care, and other resources required to object, is what confers the possibility of value on maintain a work of art. Another example of acces- a rapid market. In its static form the Avant-garde sion under coercion takes place when curators make (as a period, as an idea, as a set of practices) func- wish lists but foundations eventually choose works tions as the reserve upon which the circulation of by which artist to donate, enforcing taste and opin- contemporary art draws its claim to value. Since ion in institutions where objectivity is an ethical rarity and scarcity are still (and forever) the sta- imperative. Dealers, collectors, foundations, and tus of modern art, we can attribute its enormous private museums make sure that information re- prices to the conditions of the market. However, for mains shrouded, as employment in many of these contemporary art, where contradictory claims of institutions is often contingent on signing secrecy oppositional practices have been collapsed for the agreements. sake of profit, this is no longer the case. Although often claiming the seriality of minimalism, Pop, or Daniel Joseph Marti- Conceptual art, the vast majority of contemporary nez Museum Tags: Second art confirms the logic of the limited edition luxu- Movement (Overture) or ry object as types of mass-produced hand-made Overture con claque-Over- objects; functioning like the pre-modern master’s ture with Hired Audience workshop (with studio assistants replacing appren- Members, 1993 Metal and tices) while banking on ideas whose currency be- enamel on paint Courtesy of longs to the “post studio” impulse. For example, up the artist and Roberts & Til- to a certain point in his career, the significance of ton, Culver City, California Gerhard Richter’s work is indisputable, but his later production relies on notions of genius à la Jackson
16 NAE MAGAZINE
With a specifi c caveat, a recent exhibition at the than thirty years, whose success is utterly specu- Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) can lative, the museum could acquire work that has al- prove my point. It is not my intention to call the ready been historicized. Museums should not par- state on museums—no one today wants to be caught ticipate in the game of speculation. dialing 911, but I do so precisely because I hold it in The paradoxes of the contemporary art world such high esteem and have written favorably about have been the subject of artists engaged in critical other projects presented there in the past. As a case practice. Daniel Joseph Martinez and Andrea Fraser study it refl ects a structural problem replicated far have dealt with these questions astutely. Not one and wide. Variations: Conversations in and Around of the many critics that attacked Martinez’s contri- Abstract Painting (2014-2015) featured, according bution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial identifi ed that to the museum website: “29 artists whose work re- the piece was conceived in response to the develop- fl ects the language and style of abstraction.” The ment of the art-credit system, which was gaining inaccuracy of calling abstraction a “style,” is indic- traction by the late 1980s and early 1990s and was ative of the misguided curatorial attitude, as is the substantially discussed in news-media. In Study second sentence of the introductory wall-text that for Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or reads: “Most recently, abstraction has dominated Overture Con Claque – Overture with Hired Audi- painting, viable with critics and urged by the mar- ence Members (1993), Martinez replaced the Whit- ketplace.” Are these the qualifi cations for an exhi- ney’s color-coded museum admission buttons that bition at an encyclopedic museum? Is this a theory usually spell WMAA with fragments of a sentence of contemporary art? The contribution of the cu- as follows: I CAN’T/ IMAGINE/ EVER WANTING/ ratorial gesture in Variations is rendered meaning- TO BE and WHITE, as well as a button including the less, as it consolidates artists whose practices do entire sentence. Falling not necessarily engage into the obvious trap of methodically with the What exactly the “verifi cationreading the work only question of painting or through its racial sig- abstraction, thus that window” for recent art might nifi ers, critics entirely the exhibition affects missed the work’s fo- neither a point of view be or mean is up for debate. cus on the moment of on questions pertinent box-offi ce transaction, to painting, nor a statement on contemporary art. and the fact that the artist had given visitors a work Based on recent acquisitions the show does boast of art for the price of admission. Visitors, it seems, several works that have already proven to be of appreciated the gesture, many hanging on to their merit, either through their critical import or infl u- entry tag, as evidenced by the empty recycling box ence on other artists. However, since they are inap- at the museum’s exit, habitually full at other exhi- propriately contextualized, their clear and distinct bitions. social commentary comes under erasure. The im- In Untitled (2003) Fraser targeted the transaction pulse to render them abstract is the impulse to turn as a site of intervention for the contemporary art- them into currency, catering to the collector class work. Through her gallerist the artist contracted that some of the included works are actually aiming a collector, who already owned one of her works, to criticize. to have a sexual encounter in a hotel room and to For many included works there seems to be no cri- produce a video, in an edition of fi ve. The silent teria for verifi cation other than market success, as 60-minute run of the event is intended for display they have little to no track record of critical writing on a small monitor, perched on a single pedestal, or institutional exhibition. Catalogues produced by in an otherwise fully lit empty gallery. The real commercial galleries do not count as verifi cation, scandal of the work is not the sexual encounter, in as they have no system of external review. Many of which Fraser had relative agency. The artist is not the works in the exhibition, as competent or beau- presented as a victim but as a participating agent tiful as they are, have yet to make any contribution on equal footing as the collector, focusing the prob- to the fi eld, and many do not have the ambition or lem on the system and not on the individual partic- the capacity to do so. Why would an encyclopedic ipants. The real injury is the subsequent valoriza- county museum accession works that belong on a tion of the artwork independent of the artist, since, wall in a domestic setting? In a bubble market the as Fraser has emphasized, the work will always be irony is that for the same price of an artist younger sold for more than she had been paid. “Everyone
17 NAE MAGAZINE was obsessed with the sum the collector paid,” she politan Museum of Art.[xxv] recalls, and for this reason refuses to disclose it.[xxii] The works of artists mentioned by Carson (Buren, Insisting on the distinction between price and val- Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, Robert Smithson, and ue, the point is also that the harm of a systematic Laderman Ukeles) pointed to the hypocrisies and condition is ultimately registered on the body, show- deficiencies of the art institution and its ideologies. ing the relation between the operation of transac- Although many today mourn the agency of institu- tion, and the formation of the subject. tional critique as defunct, I believe its ideas can and should be revived as institutional policy. Revisiting Solutions and Ideas and developing alternatives offered by artists or fig- ures like Tucker is possible. The first move is to split It is not my intension to call the state on muse- the public and private use of art, and then—let his- ums—no one today wants to be caught dialing 911. tory be the judge. Instead, a simple solution: public museums should Images: Daniel Joseph Martinez stop acquiring young art. Museum Tags: Second Movement (overture) or Over- Think about it, what does owning very recent art ture con claque - Overture with Hired Audience mean for a posterity-based institution? Public muse- Members, 1993 ums should pay wages to living artists for displaying 1993 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York work, but refrain from acquiring it.[xxiii] Paint and enamel on metal Real museum patronage is to support such pro- 12 x 15 in (30.48 x 38.1 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Culver grams, with no personal agenda. For the price of the City, California work of a young artist the museum could acquire a work by a 1970s-1980s feminist artist whose sig- nificance is established not only by critical writing and exhibitions, but also by a living record of influ- Notes. ence on subsequent generations of artists. Why then would a museum accession a lesser equivalent? Let [i] Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975), 39. us leave the unverified art to private collections— have them take the inevitable risk of buying based [ii] See Andrea Fraser, L’1%, C’est Moi, 2012. on market criteria.
18 NAE MAGAZINE porary Art in a Global Financial Market (New Jersey: [xv] Several artists have shared with me their ob- Princeton University Press, 2011). Horowitz rigor- servations under conditions of anonymity. ously considers a range of events that led to the cur- rent art bubble, but in my opinion underestimates [xvi] Carol Kino, “Welcome to the Museum of My the significance of the art-credit system as the criti- Stuff,” The New York Times, 18 February 2007. cal event that made art compatible with the neo-lib- eral global economy. [xvii] Daniel Spaulding, “Value-Form and Avant-Garde,” Mute (27 March 2014). [v] On the speculative boom see Tony Norfield, “Derivatives and Capitalist Markets: The Specula- [xviii] Stewart Martin, “The Absolute Artwork tive Heart of Capital,” Historical Materialism 20, no. Meets the Absolute Commodity,” Radical Philosophy 1 (2012): 103–132, 117. 146 (November/December 2007).
[vi] Bijan Khezri, “The New Art of Art Finance,” [xix] Alix Rule and David Levine expose the vacu- Wall Street Journal, Sept. 19, 2007, D10. ous nature of much art writing in “International Art English,” Triple Canopy
[xi] Christopher J. Arthur, “Towards a Systematic [xxiii] In the US see Working Artists and the Great- Dialectic of Capital,” 6.
19 NAE MAGAZINE paschke at the ashmolean
Daniel Nanavati
Boxer with Masque 2004
I was fortunate to attend the Paschke show at the unlike New York as it is like it. He is figurative in a time Ashmolean in Oxford, UK, with several people who had when figurative painting (indeed painting itself ) was not known the artist. Equally fortunate in that they were cared for very much. His colours as brazen as some of his honest in their opinions which ranged from a feeling women, his texturing of the background utterly superb in that his few works in the Hairy Who? and the Chicago a time when computers were not available to control the Imagists were effective but 22 Paschke together was too flawless flow of the gradients from dark to light. much. There was one early work in this exhibition from Yes, there is something of the poster in his work but one 1968 which certainly has has the feeling looking at sharper lines and none of his paintings that nothing the ’neon light’ effects of In part Paschke is the visual here in the awkwardness the other, later works. he shows us in his version One has to say there experience of the words of Nel- of Chicago, is accidental. is a cramped feel to the One step further and his siting of this exhibition son Algren in City on the Make. people may have become with three layers of grotesques but they artwork up the wall in one Another Chicagoan who knew remain on the edge of the corner. Other curators circus. They are about to might have grouped the street savvy life-stylers and perform for us and we are the Mona Lisa images about to watch. together but not so they the gangster mentality of the His more traditional could only really be seen icons, the Mona Lisa from the first floor bridge city and entered into a love- and Hitler, are for me in the galleries high above. less interesting than his Some of those with hate relationship with them. attempt to make icons of whom I viewed the show the Chicago people he has think Paschke is one of the two most significant painters painted. That is because they are independent of a history to come out of Chicago since the Second World War. The prior to Paschke. He is presenting them to us in their other being Leon Golub, who, incidentally is showing at the artificiality but with their humanity utterly recognizable. Serpentine Gallery in London and who is also reviewed in He even paints a star behind Hilda (over right) in the this edition. tradition of saintly icons the models for whom were always In part Paschke is the visual experience of the words ordinary folk. of Nelson Algren in City on the Make. Another Chicagoan Whether it be hockey players or boxers Paschke shows who knew the street savvy life-stylers and the gangster us what the city does to its people and how its people mentality of the city and entered into a love-hate create the city. He is less than ugly, sometimes bizarre, relationship with them. always begging for attention, unreasonable, completely Paschke is complex. On the surface his colour is neon unpretentious and yet showing us images trying hard and his subject the icon, whether that be Hitler, the to hide a part of themselves. Shoes that are not always typical policeman, the showgirl or the allure of glamorous just shoes, masked boxers, faces with painterly elements footwear. But underneath his colour is an entire city and around the features and of course, the gun - that elemental his subject is what Chicago has made of its people. For like part of the American psyche, that is always pointing at all cities the character of its inhabitants and their traditions someone. are unique, despite our shared humanity. Chicago is as
20 NAE MAGAZINE ED paschke: visionary from chicago Stephen Lee
“You know, 'power corrupts, and of collecting took the form of por- tions into the methods of coercion absolute power corrupts absolute- trait subject matter. He collected practiced by the mob? ly?' It's the same with powerless- images of people: bar flies, trans- Jeff Koons, the richest artist in ness. Absolute powerlessness cor- vestites, circus freaks, boxers, po- the world and Paschke’s prodi- rupts absolutely…..” Studs Terkel lice, history of art and gangster gy followed him around the bars ‘glam’. The original Ashmolean learning the ropes. He has con- Colourful, exoticised gangster Museum collection is likewise a tributed to the exhibition cata- culture adorns the walls of the cabinet of curiosities: King Al- logue. Again there are limita- Ashmolean Museum. The late fred’s enamel broach, Powhattan’s tions to the practice of both Koons Chicago Imagist painter Ed Pas- mantle- the mantel of the ‘King of and Paschke based on market led chke’s paintings are stacked one Virginia’ and a beaten up old shoe kitsch, or parody of culture as ce- on top of the other in the man- worn by a John Bigg a hermit and lebrity come curiosity. Consider ner of a nineteenth century salon beggar of the seventeenth centu- Koon’s portrait of Michael Jack- display. They confer the chic fla- ry. Ed Paschke’s curiosities exhibit son, a magnificent and quint- vour of Chicago but not its sub- similar contrasts, images of those essential product of the culture stance. Imagism was a style of with power nearby images of the industry. As an alternative could painting associated with the city disenfranchised; gangsters and Jeff Koons or Ed Paschke signifi- beginning in 1968. It interpreted misfits with camp eroticism in cantly make a portrait of Freder- strands of European modernism: between: for example Hilda 1973 ick Douglas without trivialising Surrealism, Pointillism and Art and an image of gangster number and exhausting the dynamic of Brut from the perspective of Mid- one-Hitler. In a similar way to the history and class consciousness west Regionalism and the new art whimsical taxidermy of early mu- that this iconic figure represents? form of Pop Art. The resulting seums which combined the head work was closer to Paolozzi than of one creature with the body of Rauchenberg. another to create fantastical curi- The surrealist sensibility of a osities, Paschke adopted the sur- collector runs through much of realist ‘cadaver exquisite’ method the Imagists work: ethnographic to combine the heads of celebrities collections at the Field museum, with odd bodies in strange an- turn of century Tramp Art of itin- drogynous configurations, such erant workers, cartoons and found as Pink lady 1970. objects and trinkets from Maxwell To understand the relevance street market were all reference and limits of his work it’s worth points for their artwork. Painting examining which famous Chi- in relation to technology was also cagoans are excluded from the inspirational for some of the Imag- roster of portraits. Perhaps one ists. The Art Institute’s La Grande of the Chicago Haymarket anar- Jatte by Seurat with its’ merging chists might provide a culturally of painting and photography was richer slant on the city’s history? a progenitor and Paschke’s paint- Along with Hilda 1973, perhaps ings combine the effects of what a portrait of Jane Adams and her was, at the time, the new technol- settlement house for vulnerable ogy of overhead projection and working class women, accompa- video. For Paschke the aesthetic nied with a text of her investiga- Hilda 1973
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State of the Art by John Steppling
“As a preamble to their performances, traditional Charles Ives, Essay 22/23 storytellers in Majorca would say, ‘It was and it was The discussion of art today seems to take one of not so’”. two directions. Or perhaps three, but I will come David Shields to that. The first is the dismissive. The dismissive posture is cynical about contemporary art, or post “The first apprentice we took was an old skateboard- modern art, and cynically suggests it’s all a lot of ing friend of mine who was working as a garbageman. junk, and there are too many bad galleries and Bien- He just loved hanging around the shop so we offered nales, and too much money in it. This is the sort of him a spot, and now, a year and a half of training really easy and obvious posture that is appealing because hard later, he’s working as a full-time barber. Because it contains a lot of truth. There is an astounding of all the photos we post on the internet, we think we’re amount of really bad work out there, but then there making it look more attractive to become a barber, and is an astounding number of artists out there. The ra- now we get a lot of guys asking for apprenticeships.” tio of citizen to ‘professional artist’ has never been Bertus, Schorem Haarsnijder en Barbie this high I don’t think. I find the dismissive attitude Rotterdam bothersome, though. There can be nothing eas- ier than making fun of bad contemporary art. The “Artists’ long-faltering, sporadic, but not inconsider- dismissive has a toxic effect too, for there are huge able identification with the working class was largely amounts of excellent contemporary art. The dismis- forgotten, and mainstream criteria of success—identi- sive tone feels self congratulatory, it is comfortable. fying with your collectors, or at least their bankrolls — “Rather the existence of trash expresses inanely were adopted just in time for the emergence of punk and and undisguisedly the fact that men have succeeded club culture to provide an outlet for unruly excess, with in reproducing from within themselves a piece of what large doses of cynicism and irony.” otherwise imprisons them in toil, and in symbolically Martha Rosler, ‘Artist as Debtor’ breaking the compulsion of adaptation by themselves creating what they feared; and an echo of the same “An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, triumph resounds in the mightiest works, though they may become orderly . . . A rare experience of a moment seek to forego it, imagining themselves pure self unre- at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal lated to any model” (Adorno, Minima Moralia) all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is Of course Adorno was writing about bric a brac part of the day’s unity.” mementos and kitsch paper weights and miniature
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Eiffel Towers. But it is worth noting that he suggests all great works carry within themselves the echoes St.Ives of those Eiffel Tower refrigerator magnets. As for the then... second direction, it is the critical (sic) writing of post modernity. E-Flux publishes a lot of this stuff, much of which makes little sense, to be honest. I stumbled across an essay recently that began with a quote from HBO’s Girls. I continued reading anyway, for a while. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-new- depthiness/ That said, E-Flux also publishes a good deal of ex- cellent stuff, as does Cabinet, or even Brooklyn Rail. The problem resides, really, in a culture betrayed by and blanketed with finance. “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Marx Post modernism, if anyone can even begin to de- fine it, is probably that to which Marx’s quote does not apply. I want to talk about a piece at E-Flux, by McKenzie Wark, who writes; “The sort of things that get called “art” these days exist on a continuum which, if it keeps stretching, will probably break. On one end, art becomes a kind of fi- nancial instrument based on singularizing money into an “object” that can have provenance. It can be any kind of object—conceptual, imaginary—all that mat- ...and now ters is that there is a document stating who bought it from who. Mind you, pictures work particularly well as such instruments, particularly if they look good in the .jpeg sent to potential buyer’s iPhone. What we might designate as the “art world” is this subsidiary finan- cial market, one with side effects such as dissipating boredom, fostering art-fair tourism, and giving today’s rentier class conversation pieces and home decoration. Artrank.com is this version of an art world perfected.” And there is little to disagree with in that para- graph. But the second paragraph cuts to the problem I want to talk about. “At the other end of the art continuum, there’s the attempt to inhabit those spaces of production that the art world requires as its hinterlands—to do something else. Usually, it takes the form of experimenting in those spaces with practices of everyday life that could either have a negative, critical function or an affirmative, con- structive function. Some old-fashioned art theorists in- sist on the negative role of art, as if still hankering for that industrial solvent smell of high modernism.” This I am less sure about, because it feels like a lot of the misreading of Adorno I come across. It is also guilty, to some degree, of a clichéd one dimen-
23 NAE MAGAZINE sional and ahistorical take on modernism. What is artist if one doesn’t make a living at it. it in the cyber enthusiast that wants to believe an There is a sense that from the 1970s on, and insurmountable rift has appeared between the past particularly from the mid 80s on, the affluent up- per classes, and certainly the very wealthy white ownership class, had begun a process of appro- priation of art. Of all culture, in fact. The working class sense of identity, fragile enough in the U.S., was eviscerated further. But none of this fell out of the sky. This was and is the logic of capital, the start of a financialized capitalism. The post modern posture and theory was only accommodating itself and shaping its opinions to the forces of advanced capital. Let me return to McKenzie Wark’s piece. He goes on to write about artist as hacker. The entire essay is here. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/designs- for-a-new-world Now, Adorno’s name is raised a number of times in these sorts of essays, almost uniformly as an outdated champion of modernism, and modernism, as we all know, is so five minutes ago. Most writ- ers on art and aesthetics (both words are treated as corrupted) are entrenched in various post struc- Malevich, Kasimir (Ukranian, 1878-1935) turalist branches of thought. Which is odd in a way, because structuralism itself had never enjoyed any and the present? great popularity in the U.S. And I feel that focusing Martha Rosler’s essay at Artist as Debtor is quite more on the U.S., partly because I know my native good(ish). It was linked in the comments thread of country better, makes sense here. As Hullot-Kentor my previous post. One of the things she said was; points out, academic journals from the 1980s on- “From the late 1970s on, students were rapidly ward, in the U.S., simply did not publish articles on being disciplined by debt—indeed, the whole society Adorno. The difficulty in writing about culture to- was persuaded that credit card debt was the rational day, then, has to do with an assumption about post way to finance one’s desires, a pillar of neoliberalism. modern or post structuralist thought. The various As Andy Ross has explained, your categorization by banks is that you are a deadbeat if you pay off your debts and a repeater, the best kind of person, if you never manage to do that. Whereas students— and cer- tainly artists—had long understood that those with- out family wealth would have to live frugally, entering freshmen, and even high school students, were pep- pered with credit card offers, often on school premises, such as with each bookstore purchase. The repeated attacks on working-class people’s ac- cess to education has meant that increasingly it is the children of the upper middle class who are admitted to higher education without crippling burdens, while many fewer students of color from less financially Amelia Bauer advantaged circumstances can be offered sufficient scholarships.” branches occupied by everyone from Agamben to Add to this the quote from Rosler at the very top Badiou, to Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, and Ran- of this posting, and one can see a tectonic shift in ciere (who, though, is also a critic of it in places) how culture is viewed by, or at least sold to and en- created new vocabularies and methods, exiling old- couraged to be viewed by the public. One is not an er vocabularies and methods. And logically, along-
24 NAE MAGAZINE side the dismissing of Adorno came the dismissing that conceptual art is a side effect of the rise of the of Freud. What has been lost, at least the most glar- concept business. This is exactly so. And this is why ingly obvious loss, is found in the assumption that Adorno remains crucially important in any cultural the arrival of post modernism more or less came analysis. about spontaneously. The forces of history are ig- Labor isn’t immaterial, it remains alienated and nored. exploited. There remains a very neglected realm Now Wark, who I agree with more than I dis- of discussion in most critical writing on the arts agree, perceptively writes…(it’s a long quote, but today. And that is the changes in perception that important); have occurred in the audience. The lack of depth, “Perhaps what we’re dealing with now isn’t ac- then, becomes a sort of psychoanalytic metaphor. tually capitalism any more—but something worse. Adorno’s collaboration on The Authoritarian Per- Companies like Google are in the business of sur- sonality defi ned the authoritarian as one who plus information, not surplus labor power. The goal (among other things) was allergic to introspection is to build and own an infrastructure that enforces or ambiguity. Mass culture today, the entertain- an asymmetry of information, where for whatev- ment business, produces work made by people who er information the user gets, much, much more is abhor the introspective, and anything not clearly harvested. It no longer even matters whether this defi ned, for people who abhor the introspective and information is culled from work. It can also be ex- anything not clearly defi ned. Robert Hullot-Ken- tracted from everyday life. And lest one think Goo- tor writes of Adorno’s philosophy…“But to present gle is something of an outlier: take a look at the what is at stake here in the most general terms, the Fortune 500 companies and it turns out that most critique of domination necessarily remains anoth- of them are now, in part or in whole, in the informa- er form of domination — hardly rare in that ges- tion business. Even the biggest of them, Walmart. ture of emancipation as domination comprises the Those big-box stores are just a physical manifesta- whole of ideology — unless there is the possibility tion of a fi nancial and logistical data system. They in domination itself of recuperating it from its own are money and information congealed into a thing destructiveness.” in the landscape. In that regard they are rather like “And we {the Academy} need to collaborate more art world works of art. widely, to be in dialog with very different domains The ruling class itself has changed form. That’s of both technical and aesthetic counter-production.” part of the reason the art world changed form. Art has a new kind of patron. One much less interested in the making of things than in the reaping of sur- plus from information. Its goal is the commodifi - cation of information fl ows. As such it undermines all of the old gift exchanges via which information used to fl ow, in the family, the community, via schooling, and so forth. What the capitalists did for the production of things, the new ruling class is doing for the production of information. I call them the vectoralist class. They rule through the owner- ship and control of the vectors of information, its stocks, its fl ows, its design. The “dematerialization of art” was homologous with this transformation of capitalism into some- thing else, something even more abstracted. Con- ceptual art is a side effect of the rise of conceptual business. But it was more a shift in the relation be- tween information and its material form than a de- materialization. What transpired was an abstract- ing of information from any particular material expression, but not from materiality in general.” But let me point to one sentence in the above, Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, 1501
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Mckenzie Wark bourgeois individual is Wark’s demand for ...(that) we are both free and loathe to admit his de- abandoning the spe- pendency or complicity cialized realms of the unfree, and more ... (that) we in the irrational. And Academy couldn’t be that implies, in turn, a more right. Hullot-Ken- are both some form of individ- conflicted relationship tor could also have ual and some form of group, between the self and the turned around his group. This is even more equation; with the ges- is a delicate edge and one that true today than sixty ture of domination as years ago, in that the emancipation, with connects with cultural mat- contemporary Western equal truth. And this psyche is even more de- brings me to Adorno in ters and with art. fended, more insistent one of his late lectures, on keeping the animalic circa the mid sixties. aspect of itself at arm’s length. The pathologies, or The dialectic of freedom and conformity. “If the obsessions of everyone living under Capitalism are process of societalization continues to advance, designated as sickness only when they prevent one and if therefore the elements of freedom that I from doing one’s job. Or fulfilling their slot in the have told you about are progressively swallowed up great machine. The rise of branding, of self brand- by the elements of adjustment, then freedom and ing, in a culture of shopping has meant that this what we might call the impulses of freedom, spon- elaborately constructed *self* must assign blame taneous actions, will come to appear increasingly for those flaws one recognizes in oneself. That old fashioned, or even archaic.” For Adorno saw blame is usually directed outward, but if not, if it that a certain archaic impulse, a element of the Id, seen as a problem *inside* you, then that part that was necessary as a pre-condition for spontaneity. is problematic must be treated. But not just treated, He saw it as connected directly to mimesis. for that is pretty illusory, but confessed and atoned “The more the ego obtains control over itself and for at the therapeutic alter. The residue of Puritan- over nature, then the more it learns to master it- ism, and Calvinism. The acceptance of a model in self and the more questionable it finds its own free- which one can accept that we are both free and un- dom.” free, and more, that we are both some form of in- dividual and some form of group, is a delicate edge This is relevant on two fronts; one it is an element and one that connects with cultural matters and of pre-history, or pre-ego. And two, it is linked to with art. that extra mental mimetic behavior that always contains some trace of bodily impulse. Adorno The new University produces something very later, in an aside almost, says that the exaltation malleable and abstract, and it has little to do any- of the ego, in contemporary society goes hand in more with traditional notions of learning. It turns hand with the “abyss of the self”. Now he suggests out mostly obedient information producers. Or, in- this idea or vision of inwardness finds expression in formation technicians. My problem with much of Marx. It does so in the sense of revolutionary im- Rosler’s other writing, like my problem with Virno mediacy. And it seems to me that therein lies an (who has written some excellent stuff, but not usu- aspect of what is reactionary in post modern/post ally) or Hardt and Negri is that the new connectivi- structuralist thought and its embrace of depthless- ty, the new matrix of immaterial information, is all ness. There is also in this something to be pondered true, but it has not replaced the old model(s) of pro- in how spontaneity has migrated from or distanced letarian wage slavery. It is only superimposed atop itself conceptually almost in those of us opposed to it, and often serves more as a veil than anything the relationships of domination today. else. Rosler also is herself, paradoxically, trivial- izing cultural history with a tone of cyncism that “…the concept of spontaneity, which might be de- tends to be dismissive of earlier movements. She scribed as the organ or medium of freedom, refuses also regularly speaks at events such as the Shang- to obey the logic of non-contradiction, and is instead hai Contemporary Art Fair, and is on the board of a unity of mutually contradictory elements.” Adorno the Whitney, and MOMA, and is associated with In other words the idea of freedom was an inven- Columbia and The New School, and remains firm- tion, in the imagination, of a narcissistic ego. The ly entrenched in the world of Biennales and major
26 NAE MAGAZINE museum shows. That is not inherent- ex-cons, in fact. Some, but those were ly corrupt, or I don’t think so anyway, the broken men. but the academics today must take “What gives knowledge the stamp of some responsibility for their partic- authenticity is the refl ection of possibil- ipation in this system of intellectual it y.” Adorno (in a conversation with peonage. In Rosler’s case she takes Horkheimer) none, and her writing, even when ad- The charges of pessimism, when mirable, is tainted with that feeling of leveled against almost anyone, are insularity so common to the world of always suspect. Reminds me of being million dollar art commodities, and told to smile when getting your pho- those brie and chablis conferences. to taken in Junior High School for the Now, both Rosler and Wark, and in yearbook. And the snark attached to fact the majority of writers I read at discussions of authenticity often feel E-Flux this week, and a good many the same. Rosler also enacts a sort of post modern commentators, are high- Freedom_of _Speech subtle sleight of hand, too. Here she ly critical, if not just snarky, about the Normal Rockwell writes: idea “authenticity”. Now there is good “Forms, rather than being empty reason for this, of course. It is most often a market- shapes, carry centuries of Platonic baggage, most ing tool. It is a branding concept, and its vagueness clearly seen in architecture; formal innovation in and abstract quality make it perfect as such. But, twentieth-century high modernism, based on both when the elite practitioners of the art world employ Kant and Hegel, was interpreted as a search for an- this term, they are exhibiting, I fear, a distinct class other human dimension.” elitism. The underclass is constantly strip mined for This was in an essay discussing Romanticism, its creative projects. This is established, but it is also and contemporary art. First, that’s just not cor- subject on the level of community craft to wholesale rect. Another human dimension? It is these subtle appropriation. In black urban centers, and to only a (or not so) summations that dot a lot of her critical slightly lesser degree in Latino neighborhoods, the writing, and it’s done from her preferred position *barbershop* was a center for social connectivity, of sort of mildly putting down everything. Except and for support. It was also a place where respect herself, presumably. was developed from the passing on of craft knowl- And this returns us to the dialectics of freedom edge. Many barbers I knew were ex-cons. Today, and conformity. And also to questions of aesthetics there has been a small resurgent growth in neigh- vis a vis Rosler and post modernism. borhood barbershops. Some of it annexed already Freedom became a topic only with the liberation by white hipsterdom, but not all, and that’s not the of the bourgeoisie. It was an external material defi - point anyway. The personal style, the maschismo nition related to the loosening of feudal restric- (in a progressive sense), honor, and the dedication tions. The emancipated bourgeoisie then sought to craft is all too easy to ridicule from the perches to discover an ur-freedom, or essential sense of of elite MFA programs, or from trembling branches human freedom connected to man’s nature. This of ruling class insecurities. It is not to be dismissed, then became a topic for Locke and others, in vary- a tutorial in a hot towel and shave, hand poured po- ing ways. This is only worth pointing out because mades, or varieties of shaving cream. The story of of the later mystifi cations of the topic. And because the *Scumbag* barbers in blue collar Rotterdam is such philosophical debates are related to an investi- a sort of fascinating example. And really, tattoo- gation of post modern aesthetics. And post modern ing has shown great re- aesthetics (and the term silience in this regard, post modern is sudden- too. I have always said, ... the academics today must ly quite unpopular I’ve only poor kids shine their noticed) is linked to, so I shoes. If you see an adult take some responsibility believe, a failure to fully man shine his own leath- for their participation in appreciate the erasing of er shoes, you can be pret- mimesis from contempo- ty sure he grew up poor, this system of intellectual rary artistic production. or did time in prison. I Depthlessness or this never met many messy peonage.
27 NAE MAGAZINE attachment to and valorizing of surface, contains pointed out was the reflected image of the social within it, as a concept, a denial of inwardness as relations in a society of unfreedom. The rise of a a valid topic. No wonder then that Freud is dis- neo-camp aesthetics has come to be the province missed. One of the roles of mimesis in artworks is of hipsterism, of white University educated and as a factor of awakening to the coercive character relatively affluent consumers. Embedded in this is of the ego. The re-narrating of artworks, meaning the really pernicious resurgent and regressive new the mimetic engagement with artworks, entails of definition of populism. That somehow The Walking necessity almost a glimpse of the trauma that is al- Dead or Breaking Bad are simply the cultural bon ways involved in the development of our personal- bons given over for privileged consumption. Not ity, or idea of self. Without the space to allow that nutritious, but entertaining and fun. Such products to happen, and I would do many things, but argue an aesthetic chief among the things strategy that privileges ... the principle of advertising they do is mask the ab- surface disallows just is manipulation, and manip- sence of those narrative that space, then the self qualities that engaged is validated. The count- ulation is predicated upon a allegory, sacrifice, and er argument to this is to mimesis. suggest there is anoth- reduction of the model of the A connoisseurship er road to the ‘inward’. of kitsch cannot but be However, though ad- world and reality. linked to this new de- mitting the possibility, fensive definition of partially, that road (to stretch and abuse this met- populism. I was thinking this week, and I digress, aphor) entails a high toll, and Lambert Zuidervaart of Tina Modotti. Modotti embodied something of a touches on this when he writes; “Just as consumer modernist aesthetic that was never, or rarely, overt- capitalism is the purest stage of capitalism, so post ly didactic, and her best photography was purely modernism is the virtual apotheosis of reification in modernist, influenced by Edward Weston among culture.” The current conditions, ones Wark writes others. But her work retains on all levels a quality about, ones that Jonathan Beller has written about, of radicalism. The photo above however is among and Lazzarato, if accepted on their own theoretical my favorite photographs ever as a sort of found-art terms, suggest culture is dying a slow sleepwalking example of multiple narratives and accidental mi- death. metic depth and complexity. The primal crime is The belief that commercials or marketing delve off stage, and hence the photo is almost unbearably into the deeper recesses of our consciousness (or uncanny. The emancipation of the bourgeoisie, and unconscious) is simply not the case. For the prin- the questions of freedom are also linked to post in- ciple of advertising is manipulation, and manipu- dustrial capital, today. Adorno used the example of lation is predicated upon a reduction of the model Hamlet, in discussing the idea of consciousness and of the world and reality. For the very same reason, freedom, and indeed Hamlet as both character and sentimental kitsch is predicated upon a reductive as Shakespeare’s play, is another example of the world view. The Spectacle, as Debord repeatedly inescapable inwardness triggered by certain narra- Police archive photo, with Tina Modotti, recreating tives. The Prince cannot act, even when he believes possible version of Mella assassination. in the action, and as Adorno writes: “This problem becomes entangled with the question of insanity because he finds himself cut off from reality in a way that really does possess structural similarities with madness. For it involves the same withdrawl of libidinal energy from external reality that is one of the typical symptoms of schizophrenia.” This is a play about the dialectic of inward and outward, and of freedom and conformity. The medieval mind would not understood this play very well. And I wonder if post modern America understands it very well either. This posting began with discussions of the artist as panderer, today. And with the art stu-
28 NAE MAGAZINE dent as abject court supplicant. Perhaps it is that on modernism are simply so much ad copy, because reminded me of Tina Modotti and her friend Diego the topic isn’t defi ned anyway. The logic of Google Rivera, and other friends and intimates such as and Microsoft and that of all the giant information leviathans is one in which maximum exploitation is the end result and desire. And yet, the world con- tinues to become ever more proletarianized. The role of art is not social transformation, but it is in- terior emancipation and awakening. The Bunuel, like Hamlet, ends in violence, and so does much Conrad and so does Melville, for the truth of our selves is that we must unknot the enigmas of our own trauma, our own birth into violence before we can alter the system of mass violence. There is a need, I think, if social transformation . is to take place, for extra institutional art and crit- The Exterminating Angel (1962). Luis Bunuel 31 ical writing to recuperate what has been lost over the last eighty years. Today the working class fi nds Pablo Neruda, Weston, Xavier Guerrero, and even expression in forms that are both marginalized by Dr. Bethune. I think, often, the radical left artists of the ruling class, but often are more linked to craft the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, and even 50s, are reduced and often, in turn, to legacies of servility. Graffi ti, in the cultural rear view mirror to one dimensional or car culture; low riders and custom cars, or even crude social realists. Even many on the left do them tattoo art, various comic book illustrating trends, this injustice. are all in varying ways balanced on a thin ledge There is a through line from Cervantes and of resistance and submission. The Latino low rid- Shakespeare to Dostoyevsky and Kafka and Mel- er culture occupies the resistance end of aesthetic ville. From Hamlet to The Confi dence Man to representation. It is also born in the southwest and Brothers Karamozov. Hamlet’s feigned madness is in Southern California where space was delineated also his real madness (per Adorno), and Bartelby by automobile travel. The low rider was and is an the Scrivner is also so mad, and Joseph K. Bunuel’s expression of cultural defi ance, but however sophis- Exterminating Angel is an expression, too, of this ticated, is still locked in a dialectic of service and indictment of the age of refl ection. social immobility. It was an incor- The interior lives of hidden mad- poration of and reinventing of so- ness, and the relativity of that defi - cial restrictions and power dynam- nition. And of the narcissism that ics with an oppressive racist police is the self. It is easy in comparison, infrastructure as personal and eth- to note the disappearing of the in- nographic style. The aesthetics are ward in much current cultural prod- complex but shallow. And perhaps uct today. In fact it is about keeping in a sense, the aesthetics are not ex- thought focused on the surface. And actly that, for they are ceremonial if that is seen as a confusion on my projects. Low riding was socializa- part between registers of metaphor, tion and maschismo. They ingest I submit that it’s not. For that IS the legacies of Religious pilgrimage metaphor, and it is today exactly as and a Catholic iconography of sacri- Debord and Vaneigem suggested. fi ce. Low riding is also, of course, a The illusory nature of social in- way of pushing back at the fortress stitutions in the Bunuel, a fi lm that city, at the bantustan demarcation is really an anti-Franco metaphor, of class. and anti fascist, never loses sight of The community displaces cre- this historical materiality. The dia- ative or Utopian impulses (mimet- lectic at its heart is also, in its way, ic) into either co-opted sociological a sign of collective madness in the bureaucracies or into relatively nar- age of refl ection. They cannot act, Tina Modotti, photography. row aesthetics of folk culture prac- just as Hamlet cannot. The attacks Mexico 1926. tices. Graffi ti of course had some
29 NAE MAGAZINE cross over success, but that only served as alibi for panded its jurisdiction. liberal reflexes and guilt. The subject today is faced with the intensifica- I’d like to conclude this with some open ended tion of demands on his or her attention. The pa- observations about contemporary mass culture, rameters of the subject, in fact, are expressed by and about the psychological, or rather psychoana- the rise in screen images and sounds, in the non lytic tensions of today’s audience for art. One point stop stream of information. What Jonathan Crary of interest is in seeing just how rationalized mass calls *reality maintenance*. Now, the question of culture has become. The loss of spontaneity, or per- mimesis is just unavoidable here, and it is because haps only it’s criminalization, is linked to the denial attention is itself mimetic. The contemporary sub- of the regressive or archaic part of human behavior. ject is elastic and adaptive, in terms of perception, Acting out of impulses incom- for the flow of image and data patible with an ever more re- changes so rapidly. There has pressive society of surveillance The contemporary been, I suspect, a shift in the and police authority and impu- foundational character of per- nity has meant that all archaic subject is elastic and ception; where it is presumed trace elements in ourselves are that most everything looked at designated as pathological. The adaptive, in terms of or heard is easily replaced with degree of oppressive restric- perception, for the something nearly just like it. tions has had the effect, I think, Heidegger saw the Greeks as of eliminating those trace ele- flow of image and datahaving a self disclosing ‘look’. ments altogether. Adorno and And that this became, and Horkheimer in conversation changes so rapidly. more intensely now, a predato- said: “…in the framework of to- ry look. Putting aside the idea tal planning characteristic of the culture industry of a primordial clarity, I suspect that predatory look human beings regress to the reactions of amphib- is better described as the wise-shopper-look. The ians.” What they meant was that under a system fact remains though that however one imagines that so effectively dominates daily life the action this shift, the forces of Capital are technologically of regression takes on, or is replaced by, reflex ac- deploying a strategy to fragment community. The tions that are de-linked to individual will. They are individual subject however, regressing amphibi- libidinal dead ends, or cul de sacs. If regression was an-like, is also implanted in a vortex of hyper plan- always reactive in a sense, the change has been to ning and organization. That one cannot even get render the secondary implications inert or static. car insurance without a cell phone number is only And there are no doubt psychic costs to this mental the tip of the iceberg of identity control under way bludgeoning. And one of those costs is the atrophy- in the West today. ing of the imagination. And here one might argue Foucault introduced the idea of ‘diffuse’ forms that contemporary or post modern aesthetics are of power, which tacitly demanded a certain mental reflections of this atrophy and loss of willpower. It upkeep to track or follow. The subject can never ful- is almost a mental double tap, to use the vernacu- ly engage mimetically for fear of wasting time, and lar of drone assassination. The super-ego has ex- loss of valuable attention. The mental bookkeeping is constantly refreshed. The internal ledger though elicits an acute anxiety. Artwork today, if we for the moment limit this to painting and video and gallery art in general, is instinctively going to re- ward that which can be processed and noted in the mental ledger quickly. The mimetic behavior of one focusing attention on an object is durational — it takes time, too much time. Time is money. And herein lies, perhaps, the fulcrum for aes- thetic taste today. Warhol ushered in the actual commodity itself, so shopping time was reduced. Since then, much post modern work has been an ironic gloss on Warhol. The point for this posting Nuno Silve is to argue that modernism never ended, and post
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John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Fes- tival, a two-time NEA recipient, Que Viva Mexico (1932) Rockefeller Fellow Sergei Eisenstein, dr. in theatre, and PEN-West winner modernism never began. What happened were for playwrighting. technical alterations of the subject’s sense of self in Plays produced relation to his or her culture. The role of culture to- in LA, NYC, SF, day is differently defined. But that happened gradu- Louisville, and at ally, starting perhaps all the way back to the 1950s. universities across The taste for surface oriented art, witty, ironic, but the US, as well resistant to, or immune to, prolonged contempla- in Warsaw, Lodz, tion, was convenient, as take-out Chinese food is Paris, London and Krakow. Taught screenwriting and convenient. Jeff Koons is just MSG art. It lends it- curated the cinematheque for five years at the Polish self to later cocktail party bon mots, or more im- National Film School in Lodz, Poland. Plays include portantly, to academic post grad theses. The Shaper, Dream Coast, Standard of the Breed, The “The issue of the automatic is crucial within the Thrill, Wheel of Fortune, Dogmouth, and Phantom specifically modern problem of attention: it poses the Luck, which won the 2010 LA Award for best play. notion of absorbed states that are no longer related to Film credits include 52 Pick-up (directed by John an interiorization of the subject, to an intensification Frankenheimer, 1985) and Animal Factory (directed by of a sense of childhood. The inwardness of what Hegal Steve Buscemi, 1999). A collection of his plays was pub- called romanticism is not so much exceeded here as lished in 1999 by Sun & Moon Press as Sea of Cortez it is paradoxically turned inside out, into a condition and Other Plays. He lives with wife Gunnhild Skrodal of externalization: attention as a depthless interface Steppling; they divide their time between Norway and simulates and displaces what once might have been the high desert of southern California. He is artistic autonomous states of self reflection or *sens intime*. director of the theatre collective Gunfighter Nation. The logic of the Spectacle prescribes the production of separate, isolated, but not introspective individuals.” (Jonathan Crary).
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31 NAE MAGAZINE GOLUB at the SERPENTINE Stephen Lee, writer and teacher, reviews 'Bite Your Tongue' - 4 Mar to 17 May 2015 Curated by Emma Enderby
Severed hands…….. I recall a talk given by Leon Golub in the mid 1980’s where he and Nancy Spero sat with the audience afterwards answering questions. An image of a victim whose hands had been cut off during the Vietnam War suddenly slipped into the conversation. The normally lucid Golub glazed over and became incoherent and appeared mesmerised. Spero ‘snapped him out of it’, by talking through and remembering where they first encountered the image and resolved their apprehension of this cruel or symbolically evil act of dismemberment. The title of this retrospective show, ‘Bite your Tongue’, refers to the blocking of speaking and implies several levels of meaning in the exhibi- tion: The audience may have bitten its’ collective tongue, astounded by the aestheticized malevolence of Mercenaries 1V, 1980. The author and by extension the audience may in a Freudian sense have experienced loss of speech as a result of sympathetic psychic trauma induced by Interro- gation 111, 1981; or the subject in this painting of torture by CIA trained Contra agents and mercenaries engaged in covert political activity in Central America, has bitten her tongue and is silent. Likewise some of those who might defend her human rights have been silenced. Semantic meaning in Art is conveyed through facial expression, fig- ural gesture, titles, statements, discussion and criticism. The depiction of hands gesturing, taunting, pointing guns, tucked in Jeans, holding a cigarette or tethered is overt in most of Golub’s works. His response to the severed hands I mentioned is understandable in light of Gerald Mar- zorati’s account of how a person under torture will follow the torturer’s conversation and gestures looking for signs of humanness and for hope. Though it is difficult to glean any signs from the brutes portrayed- they
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transition into the Vietnam series and is inseparable from the idea of artwork where the author is producer. Proletarians are nevertheless invariably displayed as brutalised and brutalising in this show, there’s little re- prieve or salvation on offer. There is no sense that a rev- are what we have to work with. olutionary proletariat could politically emerge from these These 1980’s Interrogation series are installed in the depictions. There is a strong and vivid sense of protest central domed gallery at the Serpentine, a former tea pa- that is coupled with impotence. Goya who is clearly an vilion in the centre of Hyde Park. They depict interroga- influence through his Disasters of War series, for exam- tors at work or at down time: figural compositions across ple the etching Why? 1810 directly shows a soldier being flat or generic backgrounds: it is ironic that these grand strangled. His Cappricho series however visually satirical- history paintings in the line of Jaques-Louis David, should ly connects the class structure of society with the clergy hold pride of place in the art world yet they ‘loudly’ display and aristocrats horsing around on the backs of blind peas- a non-place: a torture chamber. ants. Similarly Terry Atkinson makes connection with the The show is introduced by the Monster school paintings structure of the means of production with his titles in his of the 1950’s flanked on one side by Golub’s late works or WW1 paintings. Dog paintings and on the other by the Vietnam paintings. Elsewhere, not included in this show, Golub has pro- Vietnam 1 1972, is positioned nearby Gigantomachy 11 duced portraits of corporate and military power selecting 1966 and the retrospective turns on this juxtaposition. patriarchal figures such as Franco and Rockefeller. These The transition from universal human suffering mirrored effigies of power structure are not critically applied to the from the battles of the gods of the Pergamon alter, visually class structure of the Interrogation, Mercenaries or Viet- akin to a naked game of rugby with a raw painterly surface, nam series. Is the aim to reveal a deep fascination with to the specific consciousness of history painting of the power or to resist this? The Sphinx as self-portrait is a re- Vietnam war is the politicised focus of Golub’s life’s work. curring theme. It’s possible to imagine Golub as Oedipus A massive misshapen canvas Vietnam 1 1972 inverts asking the sphinx ‘what is the riddle of the politicisation the implication of a return to the old orders of figurative of aesthetics?’ In the process of destroying the riddle of painting by cutting and erasing areas of the canvas. The power he and the viewer alike are implicated through fas- homogeneity of painting is refused and the audience be- cination with its’ spectacle. comes aware of the unusual production of the work. We are left wondering what element of violence Golub would choose to remove. The overall composition of the work reminds me of Degas’, The Young Spartans with its’ two groups confronting one another, though for Golub youth- Main Image: Agent Orange 1993 ful energy is transposed onto the violent political stage as one of the young soldiers turns to look at the viewer as Above: Vietnam I, 1972 participant rather than voyeur. The influence of photog- raphy is felt in this posed gaze. Golub collected numerous Far Left: Mercenaries II, section I, 1975 images from the media as reference material. Both Leon Photographs - Nancy Sparo & Leon Golub Foundation and Nancy Spero were political activists: he joined the for the Arts artist and writers anti-war group in 1964 and Nancy was part of the Women’s Ad HOC committee. The discourse that accompanied these activities informs the politicised
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and museum directors, as well as the select art- Notes from the ists with whom they were connected. So, to infer that any current problem within the art industry is unique to an isolated segment of the industry, such Last Colony as “ it’s all about the art market”, “it’s all about the state of art criticism”...”the incorporation of cul- ture by institutions”, “the power of the collector class”, “the relevance of arts education”, “gender and race”, “politics”,” technology”, “the artist as by Bill Roseberry celebrity entrepreneur”, etc. is mostly a failure to recognize where this trail of misleading priorities begins. Art is not generated by the art-world, nor does art engender itself from nature to be extracted like a plant or mineral resource, or is it there to be colonized like a newly discovered continent. Artists Bill Roseberry attend- make art and the idea that someone is said to be ed Columbus College an artist is in no way contingent to the myths and vicissitudes of the “art-world”. of Art in Ohio and West Virginia Univer- What does that mean “to be an artist “? Does it mean that he or she is a rebel of sorts, unsuited for sity Graduate school of any other occupation? No. Does it mean that the Fine Arts. he is cur- person has some exceptional talent that will insure rently retired from the their success? No. Does it mean that an artist is a Smithsonian Institute. person who is given wider parameters with which to seek their own terms of success? No. Does it mean that the potential artist, like any other career or Image: with Giotto - “Ma- occupation-seeking individual might possibly also donna and Child”, contribute something significant to the growth of a National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. long-term viable example of his or her native com- munity? Perhaps. What the notion of being an artist does mean “If only we could make this kind of short and is, that unless someone decides they will be ‘self- extremely simple argument for art. I value art be- taught’ or that they have other means of support- cause its existence has had more positive impact ing their hobby, they will begin like everyone else than negative in our world. I value art because it training for their chosen career at a college, univer- helps guide us through life. I value art just cuz. Of sity, or private institution. And they will most like- course this would all be easier if artists were seen ly enter into a legal contract that places them first more as working people than wizards who dwell in and foremost deeply into financial debt. After com- the mystical.” - Victoria Ward pletion of a BFA, MFA, or PhD. providing they can afford it or secure additional loans, they will begin ...To begin with, it is simply absurd to speak of to look for work to pay those loans. While they were the ‘art-world’ as though it represents a common training to become artists the student artist will truth about anything primary to the production of have been given skills and techniques that would art. Apart from a world of images that artists de- supposedly prepare them to earn a living and be- pict, it’s a catch-all term coined during the 1960’s gin repaying the debt they incurred. On rare oc- to account for the rapid growing number of person- casions the art student might have encountered a alities who began prospering and making news in solitary course of study on the business of art or various arts-related businesses. In other segments how best to approach the art industry. More often, of the economy the equivalent is better known as and more informally, the typical art student will an industry, such as ‘the music industry’ or ‘the be exposed to the language of art academia also fashion industry’. Those personalities included art known as ‘art speak’ (or International Art English ) collectors, art dealers, art critics, philanthropists, the common language of critiques and subsequent art historians, art professors, museum curators, self-promotion and grant writing. It should be not-
34 NAE MAGAZINE ed that those from whom the student receives ad- “As defi ned by Adam Smith, the laws of supply vice on the business of art or the vagaries of the and demand are still a basic framework for under- market for art are mostly professional academics standing how the economic system works. Accord- with little expert knowledge of business or mar- ing to Smith’s explanation there is no “supply” of ket economics. What the artist student will never artworks. Looked at from the perspective of this have received is the suggestion that they may have simplifi ed lesson in economics we can see a possible entered a fool’s errand - that they will spend more explanation for the peculiar state of the contempo- money in the course of their career as an artist than rary art world today: The impossible-to-value art- they could ever hope to earn. Nevertheless art stu- work becomes the object of impossible value.” dents are encouraged daily to continue to invest in --Nicolaus Schafhausen, director/Direktor this false assumption not to theirs but to the bene- Kunsthalle Wien http://conversations.e-fl ux. fi t of art galleries, art dealers, art consultants, arts com/t/kunsthalle-wien-curatorial-ethics-confer- administrators, arts non-profi ts organizations, art ence-livestream-and-coverage/1349/3 therapists, arts publications and the whole gamut But the valuation of artworks isn’t an abstraction of arts-related businesses and non-profi ts, there despite its limitless supply. There are accumulated ostensibly to assist artists, depend on the cheapest man-hours to be accounted for. There are resourc- labor infi nitely and unquestioningly provided by es that must be acquired and renewed when they artists. become depleted. There are acquired skill sets, the The entire art-world cost of materials, rent- economy hinges radical- al space for manufacture ly on this thought; only ... artists are left to pointing and storage, delivery, those artists who sacri- those categories that in fi ce themselves to their fi ngers amongst themselves any normal professional work within the premise about which of them has activity would be seen as of the evolving tenets of overhead but as an artist’s western modernism and sold out and who is playing responsibility is somehow without promise of ma- unaccounted for. terial gain can ever hope the system. “(Imagine the immedi- to attain the posterity ate fi nancial consequenc- of a place on a wall of a museum or in art history es if, even for just one month, no artist purchased books. The making of art is, as we’ve been told, “a art supplies, read online art blog or cultural jour- priesthood” (it doesn’t occur to anyone that a priest nals, visited museums, paid fees for lectures or is fed, has a roof over his head, and collect baskets workshops, fabricated somebody’s project, installed of money every Sunday...). We are led to believe a museum exhibition, handled a shipment of paint- that the making of true art cannot be predicated ings, taught an adjunct art class, or even mentioned on the promise of any return value except at which the word “art.”)” - Gregory Sholette point (the artist is likely deceased) the artwork is Of course we’re assuming that the typical artist is assigned a market value by someone other than the only committed to their art and if that doesn’t pro- artist based on comparative aesthetic and cultural vide the income to cover costs, what does? There considerations by yet another non-artist. One may are grants to be had, but in all but a few cases that argue that this systematically prevents artists from requires that the artist has already acquired a his- infl ating their own worth, and, in fact, it does. Any tory of success as determined by likes of the very discussion of the value of art invariably leads either institutions that are providing those grants - or, by to the unbelievable dollar amount recently paid for the galleries which in turn looks to the institutions a painting at auction (giving the impression that it those artist are applying for grants from as a factor is the artist who profi ts) - or to the social benefi ts of in choosing their stable of artists. having art in public places, arts in education, or as To receive a grant it helps to be connected to a some manner of economic stimulus to the commu- college or university or private school in more nity - all at the behest of philanthropists, non-prof- ways than one. But now we are back to the original its, educators and wealthy donors - while artists are source of the problem. With a degree or two in hand left to pointing fi ngers amongst themselves about the debt-ridden art student has limited alternatives which of them has sold out and who is playing the (1) to provide an income for themselves (2) to pro- system. vide for the continuation of their work (3) to repay
35 NAE MAGAZINE the debt. The obvious “The seamless screen choices are to begin of bohemian oratory teaching art as a part- maintained by artists time adjunct professor of the New York School - a dismal prospect - or in the 1950’s masked to find work to which he the fact that with them or she is qualified in an originated today’s mod- arts-related field, bear- el of art as a career to be ing in mind that most manufactured, in oppo- of those positions will sition to the older mod- pay little more than el of it as a vocation to a volunteer receives be followed.” Bradford working for a non-prof- R. Collins, “Life Maga- it organization. zine and The Abstract That so many art pro- Expressionists”- The fessors and those with Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, “The artist creates” _ (after Van Eyck) No. 2, Jun., 1991, p. 295. arts-related incomes ar- digital collage, 2014. By the author. en’t always aware of the But like all false di- stark realities of a life devoted strictly to the artist chotomies the premises are misleading; before profession isn’t their fault - they’re teachers and artists began visibly signing their work art wasn’t their curriculums focus on the tools, materials and a ‘calling’ or a ‘vocation’ where acolytes willing- theory of art, not economics. As Educators, artist ly enter a life of bare necessity in search of some academics generally declare teaching as their oc- abstract accomplishment. It was a trade, a craft, a cupation and primary source of income and often career, a means of livelihood, work for which one file their art-related expenditures as in income loss negotiated somewhat standard compensation de- or deduction to the IRS. Their academic standing pending on their proven skill. But that leaves a se- and eligibility for tenure requires that they contin- rious problem when it comes to distinguishing ‘art’ ue to make art and exhibit as often as possible and from mere production. The solution: to inflate the that counts as an occupational expense. A full-time value of art to the degree it becomes more import- artist may deduct similar expenses as a small-busi- ant economically and socially than the artists who ness owner but is limited to how often he or she can produce it. Whether art is defined as an object or an file at a loss and still qualify as a small business. (I act, the primary foundation on which to establish don’t have the numbers and I don’t know if they’ve art as a commodity, a business, or an institution is ever been compiled but my hunch is that the vast precisely to devalue the artist practitioner in favor majority of art shown in commercial galleries is by of both blanket social theory and the precious ob- artist/educators. While that may not be significant ject of posterity. What purpose this false dichotomy in itself it does give a hint towards the dwindling serves today is to mask the real source of a multibil- numbers of artists who are not somehow depen- lion dollar industry while endlessly mythologizing dent on colleges and universities to fund their cre- its own noble aims. ative work. ) As with those who once argued the value of sug- Looking at the larger picture we see that modern ar and cotton to the southern economy, the very culture (and to some extent the complete history production of which could not exist without the of western culture) proposes an unspoken dichot- benefit of slave labor, the purpose this dichotomy omy as it pertains to artists; art is either an occu- serves between art as art as industry and art as so- pation that produces goods and services for which cial meditation is to force any dialogue about the the artist receives nominal compensation as with value of art and culture from fact to supposition, other workers in other occupations, or, that art is from substance to speculation; literally. Perhaps the singular byproduct of independent individuals the true value of art is no more than the value of for which compensation could be viewed as a liabil- honest and equitable labor, tenacity and qualified ity to its veracity and the independent nature from skill of artists? At this present day and age what which it manifests - the accidental or naive genius thought could be more radical, more truthful, more on the verge of discovery. Art is either a career or a inspiring? vocation, it cannot be both:
36 NAE MAGAZINE Who Paid The Piper THE CIA AND THE CULTURAL COLD WAR by Frances Stonor Saunders
Review by George Touche'
Saunders provides an informative historical de- nisms of deception had translated into a kind of scription with case specific accounts to investigate un-freedom where people, in fact, are bound to the cultural Cold War. Her attention to the cultural forces beyond their control. Further inquiry ad- and the political is refreshing. She commendably dresses whether the ideological commitments and moves beyond arguments in the literature that normative contingencies of the CIA had affected tend towards pure structural reductionism (or ex- the provision of financial aid and the selection of planations of political-economic causation). intellectual contributors. Such lines of inquiry un- The book is impressive from the opening. The derpin basic conceptualizations of truth and choice emphasis on secrecy is important to introduce the that warrant the entire cultural struggle to sway Central Intelligence Agency and the Congress for western Europe to the American way, as suggest- Cultural Freedom. Ironically, the typical political ed by the appeals of President Truman and General pundit might suggest critically that words such as Marshall who called for American intervention to secrecy conjure up wild notions of unobservable assist free peoples in their choice to resist the sub- conspiracy. Saunders, nevertheless, opens provoc- jugation imposed by opposing forces of terror and atively with a qualified emphasis on the intended oppression. secrecy of the cultural Saunders addresses propaganda programme ... she demonstrates how the these questions as she in western Europe. She demonstrates how the then establishes ground- CIA countered the cultural CIA countered the cul- work for the cultural tural agenda of Soviet Cold War by recognizing agenda of Soviet propagan- propaganda by using the establishment of the financial aid and pro- CIA under the National da by using financial aid andpaganda of its own to Security Act of 1947 and propaganda of its own to in- influence beliefs and be- the successive expansion havior – to align the val- of CIA functions to battle fluence beliefs and behavior . ue of free choice with the the Soviets for the minds agenda of the CIA and of men in the Great Game those subsidized by the of manufactured consent (through the self censor- CIA in the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Specifi- ing media). In all, the book effectively investigates cally, she documents how the CIA selected authors the secret agenda of cultural and psychological and selective texts based on criteria of cultural ex- warfare conducted by the CIA and its network as- clusivity. sociates in the multifaceted Congress for Cultural The example of the former editor of ‘Encounter’ Freedom. Dwight MacDonald is insightful, as it reveals that The introductory chapter provides several inter- even the writings of established contributors had connected questions to guide the reader. Inquiry been subject to censoring or rejection. Saunders centers on whether the values of freedom advanced also provides detailed accounts of the CIA selective- by the CIA’s agendas of propaganda and mecha- ly promoting exhibits of fine art and performances
37 NAE MAGAZINE of music. The example here is that of Abstract Ex- sociologists suggest that culture can have effects pressionism, which the CIA and its associates with that reproduce structure and arguably – with in- the Museum of Modern Art had promoted to count- teractively mindful practice – effects that (actually) er other styles of painting that had conveyed aes- change structure. thetic representations of socialist realism. My intention is not to spark debate on a socio- So, the big picture question logical Goldilocks criterion for to cover the catchy title of the Well, who’s gonna specifying exactly how much book: who paid the piper? This structure is appropriate in a is the overarching question to give the money? The book that indeed is best charac- hook the reader from begin- terized as an investigative his- ning to end. The immediate little old lady wearing tory of the cultural Cold War. answer seems to follow from sneakers from Deduke, Yet, a relational sociological Saunders’ direct investigations critique is warranted because of the CIA. For example, the Iowa? Will she give Saunders does cite sociologists Central Intelligence Agency and does mention sociologi- Act of 1949 provides some for- you a million dollars? cal concepts throughout the mal transparency on the initial book. Sociologists are trained expansion in budget, manpower, and operations of to defi ne their concepts in the abstract and then the CIA and Offi ce of Policy Coordination. to make case observations that test their thesis ar- The authorization of the CIA director to spend guments on how the concepts are related. From a funds without accounting for disbursements then sociological perspective, therefore, Saunders could substantiates Saunders’ opening emphasis on the better defi ne the terminology of the classic-mod- intended secrecy of the cultural propaganda pro- ern theorists. Examples might include the dialec- gramme and suggests the informal extent to which tical reasoning of Hegelian idealism (as compared the CIA also had paid the piper covertly. Of course, to the historical materialism of Marx), Weber on as exposed by Saunders, big business interests such bureaucracy and disenchantment, Gramsci on he- as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations also had gemony, and the Italian School of Pareto, Mosca, contributed direct and indirect payments in these and Michels on the composition of elites relative to regards. In my interpretation, however, it is the the masses. Comparative points on liberty might people who paid the piper in the ultimate sense – even address the utilitarian space of John Stuart the people who had produced surplus value in the Mill. Regardless, sociologists by training like to Ford factory system and the people whose taxes see a chapter that elaborates the key concepts and had funded the government. Indeed, the following specifi es how the author draws from the literature quote from the epilogue substantiates this basic to develop the author’s own thesis on the theoret- contention (p. 421): ical relationship that the case descriptions in the “Well, who’s gonna give the money? The little book refute or support. old lady wearing sneakers from Deduke, Iowa? Will The sociologist of perhaps most relevance to dia- she give you a million dollars? Well, I mean, pipe logue on the Cold War is C. Wright Mills. For Mills, dreams! Where will the money come from?” the sociological imagination is the quality of mind The scholarly concern is that Saunders does not to grasp the relations between biography and his- speak suffi ciently on this basic point. Tracing the tory in the wider society. Though focused in the do- money back to the people unavoidably leads to mestic power structure, the ‘Power Elite’ by Mills structural questions of a relational manner. My does relationally address Saunders’ cultural mind- critique here does not detract from the book with ed inquiry as to whether the ideals of freedom had reductionist logic. Again, I think that the strength translated into conditions of un-freedom where of the book is in the detail of covering the intend- people are bound to forces beyond their control. ed secrecy of the CIA to illustrate the importance The power elite – as observed by Mills during the of the cultural and the political. From a sociolog- Cold War of the 1950s – exists in the higher circles of ical perspective, however, scholarship must ex- the primary political, economic, and military insti- plain relationships of culture to structure and to tutions of modern society. Accordingly, interlocked practice. Recognizing conceptual and conditional and interchangeable elites positioned atop these relationships among these factors need not lead institutional hierarchies come from similar social to structural reductionist arguments, as cultural origins of education, maintain informal networks
38 NAE MAGAZINE of cultural exclusivity, under clouds of war and intermingle in cu- ... a collaborative network that – under conditions in mulative expressions which the situational of wealth, power, and included the CIA, the Rocke- way of life had come to prestige. They together reflect the uneasiness make the decisions on feller Brothers Fund, the Con- of a threatened hu- the public issues that manity hanging from a transcend the plurality gress for Cultural Freedom, cross of iron. of interests in the mid- and the Museum of Modern The comparative rel- dle levels of power and evance to Saunders hold consequence over Art. reveals itself aesthet- the personal troubles ically in the art of the of the relatively powerless people in the fragment- age, as Eisenhower had sanctioned modern art as ed mass society. a pillar of liberty to stand against the tyranny of Saunders could have elaborated comparatively on totalitarianism. Yet, the aesthetic of liberty itself Mills and the Power Elite without succumbing to had translated into an abstract expressionism that political determinism, as theoretical arguments of served the interests of the power elite and the cul- formal logic that relate concepts of culture, reason, tural Avant-guard through a collaborative network and power differ in causal direction and typically that included the CIA, the Rockefeller Brothers conclude with reciprocity of discourse. Either way, Fund, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the comparative points of conversation do follow from Museum of Modern Art. Mills and Saunders. Most notably, Dwight D. Eisen- Detailed by Saunders, this network of association hower exemplifies the character of the power elite – enhanced the image of the United States as a free from the initial interchange of the general becom- society of liberty by promoting the experimental ing president to the final farewell address on the and the abstract over the representational and the influence of the military industrial complex. Eisen- real. The irony, as suggested by the counter-en- hower, however, also spoke with cultural meaning lightenment philosophies of the time, is that the and rhetorical persuasion on the chance for peace ideal of liberty had assumed a negative form and a
39 NAE MAGAZINE positive form – a freedom from and a freedom to – ry to encapsulate the timeless though dynamical- with enlightened reason turning to critical un-rea- ly changing nature of these fundamental relations son on the altar of modern history. Indeed, the art of that have manifested themselves in different forms the age had revealed the basic relation of culture to and expressed themselves in different aesthetics. I power in that the ethic of liberty itself necessitates therefore conclude my review commentary with a an ordering of law and a backing by force to distin- quote in tribute to the final paragraph of thought guish the rights of privilege from universal nature. written out by Saunders in Who Paid the Piper (p. Domestically and internationally, the aesthetic cog- 427): nitions and expressions of the cultural Cold War “Behind the ‘unexamined nostalgia for the “Gold- illustrate that the cultural is political and that the en Days” of American intelligence’ lay a much more political is cultural. devastating truth: the same people who read Dante So, upon reflection, the cultural Cold War finally and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue came to an end with media images of the Berlin Wall recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of dem- coming down – a symbolically meaningful message ocratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, to conclude the piper paying aftermath of World War opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, II that marked the Promethean struggle at the mod- overthrew governments, supported dictatorships, ern apex of human history. We now live in a world of plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of different conditions, as social media facilitates new Pigs disaster. ‘In the name of what?’ asked one critic. forms of networking and neo-liberal finance circu- ‘Not civic virtue, but empire.’ ” lates capital globally. Yet, the sociological imagina- tion remains crucial to relational studies of culture, George Touche' earned his sociology PhD at Texas reason, and power. Catchy-titled books such as: A&M and worked full time as a research associate at ‘Who Rules America?’ by William Domhoff and George HW Bush Presidential institute. ‘Whose Running America?’ by Thomas Dye show how sociologists and political scientists continue Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural to engage in debates on the domestic structures of Cold War wealth, power, and interconnected decision-mak- by Frances Stonor Saunders ing. Further, the literature of international politics and contemporary globalization includes insights to transformations in the cultural flows and power Paperback: 544 pages boundaries of the larger world. Yet, Saunders’ book Publisher: Granta 4 April 2000 focuses at the defining moment in modern histo- ISBN 978-1862073-2-72 In the next Interim Issue of New Art Examiner
Derek Guthrie interviewed by Sam Thorne, Director of the Tate, St Ives (audio available) Roland Gurney, West Cornwall Editor, on Frances Stoner Saunders Tom Mullaney, Chicago Editor, editorial Daniel Nanavati, UK Editor, editorial on a quote about artists and their place in society from Adolph Gottlieb Jonathan Ball, co-founder of the Eden Project, on the Venice Biennale 2015
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