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cross-currents in culture volume 2 number 8 summer 1999 free PAGE 2 • VARIANT • VOLUME 2 NUMBER 8 • SUMMER 1999 Contents http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~variant/ Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociological Theory of Culture 3 Brigit Fowler Artschool Jungle 6 Lorna Miller Tales from the Great Unwashed 7 Ian Brotherhood 20th Century Prison Blues 9 An essay informed by four novels Jim Ferguson History of the LMC 12 Clive Bell ‘tun yuh and meck fashion’ 17 — The Container Project Mervin Jarman and Matthew Fuller Comic & Zine Reviews 18 Mark Pawson Byzantine Politics Supplement The Abudction and Trial of Abdullah Ocalan William Clark The Wilson plots 20 Robin Ramsay Variant volume 2 Number 8, Summer 1999 ISSN 0954-8815 Variant is a magazine of cross-currents in cul- Dragsters and Drag Queens, ture: critical thinking, imaginative ideas, inde- pendent media and artistic interventions. Variant is a Society based organisation and Beatification and Beating Off 23 functions with the assistance of subscriptions Simon Herbert and advertising. We welcome contributions in the form of news, reviews, articles, interviews, polemical A Cut and Paste Conversation 24 pieces and artists’ pages. Guidelines for writers are available on request. Renée Turner and Jason E. Bowman Opinions expressed in Variant are those of the writers and not necessarily those of the editors or Variant. All material is copyright Art Activism and Oppositionality 28 (unless stated otherwise) the authors or Essays from AfterImage Variant. Editorial & Advertising Address Ann Vance 1a Shamrock Street, Glasgow G4 9JZ Editors: William Clark & Leigh French Advertising & Distribution: Paula Larkin The First European Seminar Design: Kevin Hobbs Editorial Assistant: Ian Brotherhood on Artist Run Spaces 30 Cover: Lorna Miller t/f +44 (0)141 333 9522 Micz Flor email [email protected] Variant acknowledges SAC support towards the payment of contributors to the magazine. Return to the Far Pavilions 32 Printers: Scottish County Press Daniel Jewesbury Subscriptions Individuals can receive a three issue (one year) subscription to Variant for: UK £5.00, EC £7.00, Elsewhere £10.00 When you care enough Institutions: UK & EC £10.00, Elsewhere £15.00 to be the very best 32 Leigh French VARIANT • VOLUME 2 NUMBER 8 • SUMMER 1999 • PAGE 3 Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory of culture Brigit Fowler Pierre Bourdieu is currently the Professor of of ageing” and two economic logics functioning, Sociology at the Collège de France, Paris. He is one based on a long-run time perspective with someone who has experienced in his own life a risky undertakings, organised around objects that double transition from a pre-capitalist world to a have a long life (“art”), and the other, with the aid capitalist one: initially, in his move from Denguin, of multiple reproduction, organised around low- in the peasant Béarn area of the Pyrenees, to met- risk undertakings with a short-run life (the “com- ropolitan Paris, and once again, after his return mercial” portrait or Boots landscape) (1996:142-6). from the rural South of Algeria, where after being Bourdieu’s relentlessly empirical investigations drafted with the Army he became a self-taught into the taste for modernist works as symbolic anthropologist. goods show that its public are not just drawn from Thus Bourdieu is well-placed to argue that the other artists, but principally from those patrician fundamental element of modernity is the histori- families who have “old money”, often bankers, lib- cal shift towards the greater significance of the eral professionals and higher education teachers economy within the whole society. From being a (1984). Thus, once aesthetically certified by a lead- “thing in itself” the economy becomes a “thing for ing critic and authenticated by the artists’ signa- itself”. In particular, the gift exchange of goods ture, the works of the contemporary avant-garde and labour, which had once been totally organised have moved into the arms of power. “Legitimate around reciprocity, is largely replaced. What is taste” (“good” taste) is far from randomly scat- substituted for it, of course, is the production and tered: it is the possession of an “aristocracy of cul- circulation of commodities, but also the enclosure ture”. Moreover, artistic reputations no longer of a sacred island of Art, where an inversion of have to wait for posthumous recognition (as with commodity values emerge, in such a way that high Manet) or middle age (as with Degas, Monet and sales no longer count as an acceptable measure of other members of the impressionist Batignolles aesthetic value: Group). Certainly, the reverse world of bohemia, The denial of economic interest …finds its favourite established by the first “heroic modernists”, was refuge in the domain of art and culture, the site of [a] premised on the ascetic disavowal of the market pure [form of] consumption, of money, of course, but and a self-denying pursuit of artistic values alone state-certified education by means of the mecha- also of time convertible into money.The world of art, a (1996). Thus Flaubert, for example, could be nisms of critical discrimination (via representa- sacred island systematically and ostentatiously opposed recognised as truly epoch-making in his refusal to tion in the National Gallery, Oxford anthologies, to the profane world of production, a sanctuary for make a “pyramid structure” —to present a cumu- etc.). Yet the secret of such disproportionate suc- gratuitous, disinterested activity in a universe given over lative narrative order —and in his insistence on a cess in school for the sons and daughters of the to money and self-interest, offers, like theology in a past perspectivist treatment in his novels (e.g. Madame dominant class was that they alone possessed, via epoch, an imaginary anthropology obtained by the Bovary). Equally, Manet and Redon refused to use family visits to museums and libraries, a domestic denial of all the negations really brought about by the a painting to “say something” and aimed to “liber- culture that trained them to penetrate the acade- economy (1977). ate themselves from the writer”, that is, from any mic mysteries of the school curriculum. Thus Bourdieu himself is particularly concerned “gloss or exegesis” (1996:136-7). Bourdieu’s The State Nobility showed that only 32 with the fate of art in late capitalist society, argu- Such ascetic withdrawal is now no longer an % students of the great grandes écoles (the topmost ing that the sociological study of culture is the adequate description of contemporary artists. rung of French higher education) came from the sociology of religion of our time. Adorno and the Instead, the longer-term investment of their exper- subordinate classes, while earlier research on the theorists of the Frankfurt School saw painters imental effort is increasingly a guarantee of the universities revealed that in 1964 only 6% of the such as Kandinsky as adopting a language of form art-market’s eventual recognition, a recognition children of workers (or peasants) were enrolled. which was out of reach of the commercial “culture which often now comes to the young and which industry”, not least because of the epiphanies ensures rewards considerably greater than those Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice offered within their works and their two-dimen- the commercial market hands out to the mass of Bourdieu is becoming synonymous with a “holy sional grasp of social realities. But Bourdieu force- illustrators and designers “selling their souls” in trinity” of concepts: habitus, capital and field. fully proposes a disturbing, new, demystifying standardised activities1. The self-presentation of There are dangers in stripping these from their stance. He asks whether the avant-garde might the artist as devoid of monetary interests is mean- conceptual moorings in his other, wider, theories, not have become set in an entirely different con- while preserved by the convenient alchemy of the but I will risk these to show how these “trade- text once the structures of the modern art market art-dealer. For the gallery-owner (or dealer), by mark” ideas operate. I will then apply them espe- had been established. Thus when the leading concerning him/herself uniquely with the vulgar cially to the art-world, and show how a exponents of the various modernisms became world of money, frees the creative figure from its Bourdieusian perspective refuses a charismatic highly-valued in the art market and their works grips and thus arranges the transmutation of the theory of the isolated artist and resists the inter- came to be used to prove that their owners had “a artistic philosopher’s stone into gold. In this pretation of pure disinterestedness on the part of spiritual soul”, a fundamental “misrecognition” respect, the artist is aided by the School, in the both public and artists. I shall suggest that occurred. role of the critic. The critic provides explanations Bourdieu represents a powerful analysis of the Increasingly, a hagiographic approach to “the of the nature of his/her art to a whole professional high culture of modernism but that his social the- artist as saint” has emerged. With it, any attempt field which thus consecrates and authorises her ory also contains certain problematic omissions. to introduce a scientific study of art and its social (1996:169). Bourdieu aims to avoid the oppositions based relations are denounced as reductionist. But such There is also another reason for the changed on privilege and prejudice that resonate through an approach, taken seriously,

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