An incomplete project? Art and politics after postmodernism

Chris Cutrone

Presented at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, October 26, 2010. Originally published in 491 #2 (November 2010).

What was postmodernism? — Habermas’s critique

Postmodernism challenged the institutionalized modernism of the mid-20th century, offering more radical forms of social discontents and cultural practice. It meant unmasking the values of progress as involving ideologies of the political status-quo, the problems of which were manifest to a new generation in the 1960s. But, more recently, postmodernism itself has begun to age, and reveal its own concerns as those of the post-1960s situation of global capitalism rather than an emancipated End of History.

In 1980, Jürgen Habermas, on the occasion of receiving the Adorno prize in Frankfurt, predicted the exhaustion of postmodernism, characterizing its conservative tendencies 아틸라 토탈워 한글. Habermas called this situation the “incomplete project” of modernity, a set of unresolved problems that have meant the eventual return of history, if not the return of “modernism.” How does Habermas’s note of dissent, from the moment of highest vitality of postmodernism, help us situate the concerns of contemporary art in light of society and politics today?

In his Adorno prize talk, Habermas emphasized the question of the “aesthetic experience . . . drawn into individual life history and . . . ordinary life,” and “not [already] framed by experts’ critical judgments” (12–13). Habermas thinks that such aesthetic experience “does justice to . . . Brecht’s and Benjamin’s interests in how artworks, having lost their aura, could yet be received in illuminating ways,” a “project [that] aims at a differentiated re-linking of modern culture with an everyday praxis that [would be impoverished by mere traditionalism][, a] new connection [that] that can only be established on condition that societal modernization will also be steered in a different direction [than capitalism].” (13). Habermas admitted that “the chances for this today are not very good” (13).

Instead, Habermas points out at that, “The disillusionment with the very failures of those programs that called for the negation of art and philosophy has come to serve as a pretense for conservative positions” (13–14) canon multi-machine driver. This is how Habermas characterized postmodernism, an anti-modernism that was an ideology of the “young conservatives,” namely Foucault and Derrida (among others).

Habermas drew a parallel of the postmodernism of Derrida and Foucault to the “neo-conservatives,” for which he took the Frankfurt School critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno’s former secretary, in their time of exile in the U.S. during WWII, Daniel Bell, as representative. Bell had described the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” as resulting in what he called “antinomian culture,” which produced a nihilistic “culturati” in a “counterfeit” high culture of “multiples,” hedonism for the middle class, and a “pornotopia for the masses.” What Bell, as a self-styled “conservative,” deplored, such as the “conformism” of a liberal “heterodoxy” that became a “prescription in its confusions,” postmodernists celebrated. But they agreed on what Habermas called the destructive aspects of the “negation of art and philosophy,” against which various “hopeless” “Surrealist revolts” had been mounted, as an inevitable result of modernity. Whereas Bell, for instance, explicitly called for the return of religion as a way of staving off the nihilism of modernity, the postmodernists implicitly agreed with the conservative diagnosis of such nihilism, for they explicitly abandoned what Habermas called modernity’s “incomplete project” of enlightenment and emancipation 소닉2. Postmodernism was a form of anti-modernity.

Critical art, liquidated

So, how does art figure in such a project of enlightened emancipation? The scholar of Benjamin and Adorno’s work Susan Buck-Morss wrote, in response to the postmodernist art journal October’s 1996 Visual Culture Questionnaire, that, “[Artists’] work is to sustain the critical moment of aesthetic experience. Our work as critics is to recognize it.” Buck-Morss protested against what she called the “liquidation” of art in the move of “attacking the museum,” “producing subjects for the next stage of global capitalism” by replacing concern with the “critical moment of aesthetic experience” with a discourse that “legitimates culture.” In so doing, Buck-Morss pointed out that failing to properly grasp the social stakes of aesthetic experience resulted in the “virtuality of representation,” ignoring how, for Benjamin and the Surrealists he critically championed “images in the mind motivate the will” and thus have “effect in the realm of deeds.”

Indeed, prominent October journal writer Hal Foster had, in the 1982 essay “Re: Post,” gone so far as to call for going “beyond critique,” really, abandoning it, for in critique Foster found precisely the motor of (deplorable) “modernism,” which he characterized as consciousness of “historical moment” that “advanced a dialectic.” Foster stated unequivocally that critical “self-reflexivity” needed to be abandoned because it (supposedly) “enforces closure.” Foster called the Brechtian terms “defamiliarization” and “estrangement” “quintessentially modernist.” But Foster remained equivocal regarding the matter of art’s potential to “initiate new ways of seeing,” even if he stayed suspicious of “the old imperative of the avant-garde and its language of crisis.”

The crisis of criticism — driving art underground

But the concern, for Foster, as with the other leading October writers (such as Rosalind Krauss and Douglas Crimp), was reduced, from social problems, to problematizing art: (in Crimp’s words) “on the museum’s ruins.” But the museum is still standing. The question is whether it still houses art. As Buck-Morss pointed out, the museum is the “very institution that sustains the illusion that art exists.” What this means is that, disenchanted with art, the “realm of deeds,” in which “images in the mind motivate the will,” abandoned by the critics, is ceded instead to the “advertising industry.” The museum, lacking a critical response, is not overcome as an institution of invidious power, but, instead of sustaining the socially necessary “illusion” that “art exists,” however domesticated, becomes an embodiment of the power of kitsch, that is, predigested and denatured aesthetic experience, to affirm the status-quo: high-class trash. Art becomes precisely what the postmodernists thought it was. The museum has not faced the crisis of meaning the postmodernists wished of it, only the meaning has become shallower 이니셜d 5기. In Adorno’s terms, the museum has become an advertising for itself, but the use of its experience has become occulted, in favor of its exchange-value: the feeling of the worth of the price of the ticket. But the experience of art is still (potentially) there, if unrecognized.

For Buck-Morss, there is indeed a crisis — of (lack of) recognition. Criticism, and hence consciousness of aesthetic experience objectified in artistic practices, was in crisis in postmodernism. Critical theory ceased to be critical — and thus became affirmative, even if it was confused about this. This was the result, in Habermas’s terms, of the “postmodernist” turning away from the “incomplete project” of modern art’s critical response to social modernity: a conservative result, by default, even if under the “pretense” that it was progressive or even radical.

Against such postmodernist abdication and thus affirmation of existing “culture,” Buck-Morss called for approaching art “emblematically and symptomatically, in terms of the most fundamental questions of social life,” “bringing to consciousness what was before only dimly perceived, so that it becomes available for critical reflection.” Otherwise, Buck-Morss warned that “tomorrow’s artists may opt to go underground,” and “do their work esoterically, while employed as producers of visual culture.” We might also say that there is the option of continuing to make “art,” but without recognition of its stakes by critics, impaired by a discourse of “visual culture” and supposed “institutional” critique or opposition — that is, an institutionalized opposition to the institution (such as effected by the October writers, who have since entered the canon of academicism, for instance in the academic art of the postmodernist art school) 하나님의 은혜. This outcome represses, or drives “underground,” the concerns of artists regarding aesthetic experience, which, according to Habermas and Buck-Morss, following Benjamin and Brecht, are potentially “vital” and “fundamental” to “questions of social life.”

“Relational” aesthetics

The question of the more recent phenomenon of “relational aesthetics” needs to be addressed in such terms, for “relational aesthetics” claims to be about mobilizing attention to the aesthetic experience of the social for critical ends, in society as well as art.

Several important critical accounts of relational aesthetics have been attempted. Claire Bishop has addressed the problem of relational aesthetics raising the social at the expense of recognition of social antagonisms. Stewart Martin has questioned the relational aesthetics opposition of the social to the (autonomous) art object of traditional (modernist) aesthetics. But Martin has also interrogated the hypostatization of the social, whether considered either as a relatively unproblematic value in itself or as a zone of antagonism, as in Bishop’s criticism. Additionally, Martin has addressed shared problems of the late paradigmatic but opposed attempts on the Left to politicize aesthetics by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou Gta4 free. Martin has deployed a sophisticated understanding of Marx and Adorno on the commodity form towards these ends. Thus it becomes possible for Martin to address relational aesthetics practices’ “naïve mimesis or aestheticization of novel forms of capitalist exploitation,” in treating art as a “form of social exchange” that advocates an “inter-subjective art of conviviality” (370–371), as well as address the potential political stakes of various approaches to art. — Conversely, it becomes possible for Martin to address what he calls the otherwise naturalized “commodity form of the political” (372).

Martin is concerned to be able to preserve a social-critical approach to what he calls the “arty non-art of late capitalist culture.” It is necessary, according to Martin, to avoid the “Hegelian trap” of “harmonious rapprochement,” through a dialectic of “anti-art and pure art,” resulting in an “artification of the world” that however “breaks” with attempts to “critique bourgeois culture.” Instead, Martin recalls Adorno’s recognition that art’s “autonomy,” its simultaneously “anti-social” and “non-subjective” or “objective” aspect, was inherent both in its commodity character and in its “resistance to commodification,” through “immanent critique or self-criticism” (373). It is this aspect of art, common to both “anti-art” and “pure art,” that, for Martin, “relational” aesthetics, with its emphasis on the supposedly “inter-subjective” character of the social, occludes.

Historical temporality of artworks not linear succession

John Roberts, in his recovery of Adorno, has focused as well on the “asocial” aspect of art as the potential source of its critical value. Roberts recovers the key idea, from Benjamin and Adorno, of artworks’ “pre-history” and “after-life” in history, in order to introduce the problem of the historical temporality of the experience of works of art, which is not reducible to their immediate aesthetic experience or the thoughts and feelings of the artists who produced them Download The Sea Expedition Octonnut. Works of art are “objective” in that they are non-identical with themselves, in the sense of non-identity in time. In Adorno’s terms, artworks have a “historical nucleus,” a “truth-content” revealed only as a function of transformations in history. According to Benjamin, this is how artworks can gain stature and power with time.

The example Roberts uses is the late, delayed reception of early 20th century avant-garde artworks in the 1960s, which inspired artists. This is a very different account from the notion, common in postmodernist criticism, of artists rebelling against the preceding styles and art criticism and historical discourses of abstract expressionism. Artists may have remained innocent of the cloistered disputes of the art critics and historians, though their works were used as evidence in these disputes; and they may have remained more sympathetic to abstract expressionism as art than the postmodernist critics were. The pendulum-swing or grandfather-rule accounts of the vicissitudes of history are inadequate to the non-linear temporality Roberts highlights.

Roberts discusses works of art as forms of “deferred action” in history, with which artists and viewers engage in new forms of art production and reception, which belie notions of successions of styles traditional to art history Download turbo recall. This allows works of art to be understood as embodiments of objectified experience that change as a function of historical transformations, as potentially informing a proliferation of experiences unfolding in history, rather than, as Foster, for example, feared, forms of “closure.”

Neo-avant garde or neo-modernist?

It is important that neither Habermas (nor Bell) nor Buck-Morss accepted the idea that gained traction in the 1970s of a division between modernist and avant-garde art. For neither did Benjamin or Adorno. (Peter Bürger’s influential study, Theory of the Avant-Garde, was, importantly, a critique of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory on this score.)

What Martin calls the “dialectic” of “anti-art” and “pure art” has continued, though not necessarily in terms of opposed camps, but rather in what Adorno recognized as the necessary element of the non-artistic in artworks. Now that postmodernism has been exhausted as a trend in criticism (as seen by significant reversals on the part of its standard-bearers such as Foster), it becomes possible to recognize how postmodernism reacted inadequately and problematically to this dialectic, conflating realms of art and social life, and thus repressed it, obscuring its operations from proper recognition.

The emergence of “relational” aesthetics in the 1990s marked the exhaustion of postmodernism, as both its culmination and its negation (it is significant that Foster was hostile, calling it a mere “arty party”), but also a terminal phase of the recrudescence of the problem of the social and of politics, long wandering lost through the postmodernist desert of the 1970s and ’80s, during which Adorno, for example, could only be received as an old-fashioned modernist Download Windows Capture Tool. But, since the 1990s, critics and theorists have found it increasingly necessary to reconsider Adorno.

Today, which may be considered a post-postmodernist moment, art practices can be broadly grouped into two seemingly unrelated tendencies, neo-avant garde (such as in relational aesthetics) and neo-modernist (in the revival of the traditional plastic arts of objects such as painting and sculpture). The task would be to understand what these apparently independent tendencies in art have in common as phenomena of history, the society and politics with which art practices are bound up. Postmodernist art criticism has made it impossible to properly grasp such shared history of the present, hence its exhaustion today, leaving current art unrecognized.

But, in the midst of the high era of postmodernist criticism, Habermas sounded an important note of dissent and warning against this trend, reminding of what postmodernism left aside in terms of society and politics. For it is with respect to society and political ideology that art remained potentially vital and necessary, if under-recognized as such. In his Adorno prize talk, Habermas raised the problem of art as an exemplary task for the “critical intellectual.” This is because, as more recent critics such as Bishop, Martin and Roberts have noted, art, in its dialectical transformations, allows for the recognition of history, the present as historical, revealing not only the history of art, but of modern capitalist society and its unfulfilled forms of discontent, as registered in aesthetic experience download the fm2019 editor. | §

Sources

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997).

Daniel Bell, “Foreword: 1978,” The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), xi–xxix.

Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 69–82.

Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004), 51–79.

Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum (February 2006), 179–185.

Susan Buck-Morss, Response to the Visual Culture Questionnaire, October 77 (Summer 1996), 29–31.

Hal Foster, “Re:Post,” Art after Modernism, ed. Brian Wallis (Boston: David R. Godine, 1992), 189–201.

Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity — An Incomplete Project,” The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 3–15.

Stewart Martin, “Critique of Relational Aesthetics,” Third Text 21.4 (July 2007), 369–386.

John Roberts, “Avant-gardes after Avant-gardism,” Chto Delat? / What is to be Done? 17 (August 2007).

John Roberts, “Art after Deskilling,” Historical Materialism 18.2 (2010), 77–96.

Chris Cutrone

Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )

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Art and politics

The politics of the culture industry: art today

Chris Cutrone

Presented at the Platypus Affiliated Society public forum on “The Politics of the Culture Industry: Art Today” with panelists Stephen Eisenman (Northwestern University) and Claire Pentecost (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), School of the Art Institute of Chicago, April 27, 2010.

The German Marxist critical social theorist and practicing musician and composer Theodor W. Adorno, in his 1932 essay on “The Social Situation Music,” observed that the “contradictions and flaws which cut through present-day society” are traced in the “clearest possible lines” through art, and that, “at the same time,” art is “separated from this same society by the deepest of all flaws produced by this society itself” (Adorno, Essays on Music, 391). He pointed out that art finds itself in the same position as “social theory,” tasked with provoking recognition (393). Art, like theory, must “decide whether and how the entrance into social reality might be made” (393) 갤럭시 순정 펌웨어 다운로드.

Susan Buck-Morss, in her response to the October art journal’s 1996 “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” wrote that “the role of artists is to sustain the critical moment of aesthetic experience; the role of critics is to recognize this.”  In saying so, Buck-Morss cut against almost 20 years at that point of “postmodernism,” which was concerned, as Hal Foster, one of the principal writers for October, who we recently interviewed in The Platypus Review, argued in the early 1980s, to get out from under the constraints of modernism by moving “beyond critique.”  Buck-Morss argued, to the contrary, that what was needed was precisely critique and not merely discourses whose role is to “legitimate culture.”  Without this, Buck-Morss argued, artists might “opt to go underground” and express the critical content of aesthetic experience only “esoterically,” as producers for the culture industry. This has indeed happened.

The topic of “culture industry” is notoriously difficult and so is easily misconstrued. One common way of misapprehending Adorno’s critique of the culture industry is to address it only in terms of concrete institutions. It is misunderstood that art outside Hollywood, museums, or the art market’s galleries is somehow outside, resistant to or otherwise opposed to the culture industry Download internet video. But, for Adorno, the culture industry, a term he used as an alternative to the more misleading categories of mass or popular culture, was the cultural guise of capital. The culture industry was a concept meant by Adorno to grasp the overall social context for cultural production, and was inclusive of both the industrially distributed products of the emphatic “industry” and of the most hermetically produced and experienced works of art. The stakes of Adorno’s critique were the stakes of aesthetic experience in modern society, the forms of subjectivity that Adorno considered social in nature, and thus characteristic of the historical moment of capital Download the movie Nacho Libre. The politics of aesthetic experience was thus engaged by Adorno.

Walter Benjamin famously wrote, at the end of his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” that whereas fascism aestheticized politics, communism responded by politicizing art. Earlier, in his 1934 essay “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin wrote that not only poverty but the struggle against poverty could be turned into an object of aesthetic contemplation. Benjamin wrote that art that doesn’t teach artists teaches no one, and that only work of good aesthetic quality could be of good, emancipatory political tendency 취업 이력서. Benjamin is usually interpreted on the “Left” in ways that deprecate the aesthetic in favor of the political. But a further and different interpretation than is usually offered on the “Left” of Benjamin’s point — and Adorno’s following him, regarding the culture industry — is that the problem with both art and politics is that the essential dialectic of art and politics, in which it becomes possible to have a political critique of aesthetic experience and an aesthetic critique of politics, has been forgotten and thus repressed.

This is an era of bad art because of bad politics, and bad politics due to bad art. Good art would involve not only the critique of bad art but of bad politics; good politics would involve not only the critique of bad politics but of bad art. For bad art is bad politics, and bad politics is bad art.

When Benjamin called for politicizing art, this did not mean for him suspending the aesthetic but rather inquiring into and critiquing the political stakes of aesthetic experience 퍼니게임. What would it mean to critique and problematize, and thus politicize, the aesthetic experience of bad politics as bad art, and bad art as bad politics?  It means challenging established patterns of feeling and thinking that constitute our subjectivity, whether for the experience of art or participation in politics. For what Benjamin was concerned with, along with Adorno following him, was the transformation of the subject for both art and politics. By giving up on addressing questions and problems of aesthetic form, a deeper engagement with problematic forms of politics is abdicated. For both aesthetics and politics involve social forms, even and perhaps especially when such social forms seem to take place only within the hermetic realm of private aesthetic experience Download Oracle 11g r2. The abjection of the aesthetic in postmodernism is a form of political repression — a repressive form of politics.

Fredric Jameson, in his 1991 book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, wrote that,

It is . . . necessary to add about the “media” that it . . . failed to come into being; it did not, finally, become identical with its own “concept,” as Hegel liked to say, and can thus be counted among innumerable “unfinished projects” of the modern and the postmodern. . . . What we have now, what we call “media” is not that, or not yet that, as might be demonstrated by one of its more revealing episodes. In modern North American history, of course, the assassination of John F 릭앤모티 시즌3 다운로드. Kennedy was a unique event, not least because it was a unique collective (and media, communicational) experience, which trained people to read such events in a new way. . . .

[T]he projection of a new collective experience of reception . . . this event was something like the coming of age of the whole media culture. . . . Suddenly, and for a brief moment (which, however, lasted several long days), television showed what it could really do and what it really meant — a prodigious new display of synchronicity and a communicational situation 영어 에세이. . . . Yet this inaugural event . . . gave what we call a Utopian glimpse into some collective communicational “festival” whose ultimate logic and promise is incompatible with our mode of production. . . .

No wonder, then, that the small screen longs for yet another chance at rebirth by way of unexpected violence; no wonder also that its truncated afterlife is available for new semiotic combinations and prosthetic symbioses of all kinds, of which the marriage to the market has been the most elegant and socially successful.

Media populism, however, suggests a deeper social determinant, at one and the same time more abstract and more concrete, and a feature of whose essential materialism can be measured by its scandalousness for the mind, which avoids it or hides it away like plumbing samsung apps 다운로드. (355–356)

The event of “unexpected violence” that gave the media yet another chance at rebirth was, of course, the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attack — also, as media art.

A subsequent, recent work of art that recalls the 9/11 attack is (the School of the Art Institute alumnus) Paul Chan’s 2005 video installation 1st Light.

[Watch Paul Chan, 1st Light.]

The morning of the 9/11 attack, I moved through my day in a disjointed, out-of-body way, floating in an unreal reality, a timeless time, under an absolutely clear blue sky without a plane anywhere to be seen, a dream-world impelled by a real nightmare Terraria 1.3.4. All the while I trembled like the nervously frenetic flickering or vibrating electrical lines in the sky of Chan’s video.

Chan has described his work as “light and the lack of light — light struck through” referring to its use of silhouette imagery.[1] Chan said he was “wary” of its “hypnotic” effect (225). His interviewer, Adam Phillips, observed the paradox that viewers “looked into it as though it had tremendous depths. Which of course it does” (225). Chan commented, in response to Phillips’s question about how the “relationship between . . . political activism and art . . . would no longer be of any interest,” that those asking such questions “don’t know that they’re uncomfortable talking about art . . . because there’s no quick and easy and right solution to it” (227). But Chan concluded that art is “a shared conflict in which [he] want[s] to invest as much time as possible, because [he] [doesn’t] know what other form provides the opportunity, the challenge, to reimagine the contradictions in such a way” (227).

Chan’s piece captures well what his interviewer called the “anti-redemptive” but “gentle” trauma — of the 9/11 attack (225). Chan’s work is a good representation of us, as we are. But (how) does it present potential possibilities for how we could and indeed should be?  How, if redemption is ruled out of court, along with any notion of freedom that goes beyond “mistakes,” or the “failure” to be “like everyone else,” in which, as Chan put it, “things [can] become light. They can move in a way in which they were not originally intended to move” (224), like so much debris of a terror attack?

The question is whether and how work such as Chan’s makes available, for critique, this feeling, or merely exemplifies it, in a readily readable way, for its viewers. What is the politics of endlessly contemplating ourselves in such a suspended manner, and how could practices of art challenge such politics? | §

1. Paul Chan interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adam Phillips, in Utopias: Whitechapel Gallery Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Richard Noble (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 224–227.