Sad One

One of my most vivid early memories is of a dream I had on the eve of a birthday, which one I can't remember, but if we are to trust geography as a marker, it was certainly before seven and after about four. I was skipping down our building's stairwell in Zhodino (Belarus), and looking down the landing, I could see my grandmother (babushka Anya) dressed in a tidy travel outfit and looking back up at me. I remember being surprised to find her there, as I hadn't been told that she was coming and I knew that she lived far away. This dream is merged in my mind with a memory of the next morning, of it being my birthday and of my walking out of the building into a blinding June sun, out into the world as if for the first time on my own. (Was it the first time?)

Anyway, my grandmother died December 26. She was eighty years old. In my dream, she would have been around 58.

Art historians are taught about the dangers of taking words like "influence" too literally. Who has the active role there? Are artists influenced, or do they choose their references? In the case of children and adults, it is equally complicated. There are so many factors to consider. Adults want to guide, children want to learn. Sometimes the adults fail, other times children push away. It's hard to tell who's leading whom at any one time.

My grandmother was a very strong woman - her father died when she was still young; she trained in surgery and worked while tending a family, like many women of her generation. In person, she liked to tell stories about her life or her grandkids, paid close attention, and could pull you aside to let you in on a secret or ask a pointed question. I'd like to think that the linkage in my mind of her unexpected appearance and my going into the world is not entirely my doing; I'd like to think she had a hand in it as well. I will, of course, miss her. (I am, of course, grateful for her influence.)

Some Stuff I Saw

art for the masses¹

mass communications²

communal living³

1. Ivan Plyusch and Kostya Novikov, Russian Tower
2. Communication devices from the Spetsobekt ZKP "Tagansky"...i.e. communications central in case of nuclear war
3. Three sisters braving the winter

The Shortest Day

Or the longest night. Winter Solstice, y'all.

Art &/or Politics

So, it has been a while, and I'm still working on trying to figure out how I feel about the issue. The issue, broadly, being art and politics. Though this resolves into a number of directions: Should artists make art with a political agenda? Can artists make art without a political agenda? Do we, as art historians (or just viewers) look for political agenda in art? How do we even define political content in a work of art? What is/should be the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and is this the same question as the relationship of art to activism?

To catch you up on where this ball of yarn started:

• I went to see two of the three lectures by Boris Groys, in which he outlined a pseudo-Benjaminian theory of artistic development, updating "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility" (or whatever the translation flavor of the week is) to include digitalization and the internet. He posited that in the battlefield of today's digitalized, wired world, the individual artist has lost position; everyone is now an artist and nobody is a viewer.
• The Kandinsky prize (Russia's baby-Turner) was awarded to the hard-right nationalist Alexei Belyaev-Gintovt, leading to some interesting developments in the local art camps. Some artists, leftist activists, and critics came out vocally against him, protesting the ceremony itself and publishing rebuttals online. Others, including some local critics/art functionaries and some non-Russian members of the jury came out for the winner, through a combination of either outright political support, claiming to have not known his political leanings, or to have ignored them intentionally in favor of his other "aesthetic" merits. A winner of one of the other awards at the ceremony defended her acceptance by saying that, when all's said and done, artists need institional support in the form of materials and studio-space, and rejecting it would mean not doing her primary job of being an artist. A sense of urgency and discussion seems to have overtaken things; people seem to be working together to find ways of making sense of things, responding...
  
• I went to a meeting put together (somewhat hastily) by Chto delat'? and Vpered!, both leftist groups, to discuss the issues surrounding the prize. While everyone (who spoke) at the meeting opposed the prize, there was a range of positions regarding further action/reaction. Some were puzzled why this even mattered: since art is created for a rarefied audience of gallery patrons anyway - protesting the prize does nothing for working conditions or society as a whole. Others defended art as a viable space for critical reflection within society, and therefore still valuable and in need of defending.

I don't particularly like talking about my project in this space for a whole slew of reasons, one of which is that I have not really figured out its purpose (the space, not the project!) and therefore probably have a number of different kinds of readers.* But insofar as it relates to the thought process that accompanied my experience of the above-mentioned events, the fact that one major part of my project involves assigning political value or a political understanding of aesthetic action has both upped the ante and somewhat paralized my own reaction to these recent events.

In the comments section of the previous post, I tried to make a distinction between works of art as they are experienced by their primary audiences and works of art as they enter what I called "the art world" (by which I meant the system in which art works begin to circulate as commodities). I said that to me, the most interesting part (the primary meaning) remains at the level of physical/temporal experience, prior to the system of circulation in which other (secondary) meanings become assigned. For example, I was interested more in the audience who attended a performance than an audience who read about a performance at an exhibition of documentary materials.

kg objected, saying quite rightly that:

"[...] I very much think that even the most underground, insular and communal of art practices do exist with a larger audience in mind, both geographically and temporally, even if this audience is entirely imagined - and to deny that institutions mediate between the original moment and these audiences is not fair to the work first and foremost..."

Agreed. Artists indeed imagine themselves in a number of contexts/histories/traditions and certainly expect to be received not only by thier immediate circles, but by future audiences for sure. They make decisions based on these expectations, which we as viewers can take into account.

However, this is not the same thing as "institutions mediating between the original moment and these audiences." What I am disagreeing with is a reading of artworks that takes institutional context as the primary location of the artwork's meaning, that an artwork's entry to the market or the art system more generally defines what it is about.

Now, I am not going to defend this position, because I know that it is somewhat mistaken. (To say so would mean that the only kinds of artworks that I can truly experience or glean meaning from are ones made by my friends in their back yards before they've gotten their solo shows at the Guggenheim, which is, of course, not quite right.) But I will try to explain the reason I came to this conclusion in hopes of starting to answer some of the questions posed at the beginning of this post (and, um, my project).

The reason I was so riled up by Groys's talk was, as I may have said, because he seemed to tell a story about art that disregarded the particular effects of artworks on viewers in favor of a bird's eye view of things, where art just seems to occupy positions vis-à-vis mass culture/religion/the internet within some kind of system populated by stupid people with short attention spans. What really got my goat were his absolutely dispassionate comments that 1) the ethical dimensions of art have to do with a pollyanna-ish "let's make the world a better place" planting of trees attitude to what art is, and 2) that Belyaev-Gintovt's winning the prize make sense, since it reflected what was happening in the current, contemporary culture, which is imploding economically, tired of Communism, and turning broadly to nationalistic/fascistic forms as anchors of meaning.

What I felt was missing from both his positions was a feeling that an artwork can have a real effect - positive or negative - on a viewer or a group of viewers (a public). That, for example, people today can still be affected by an artwork at a visceral level (despite the feeding tubes stuck into our spinal cords); or that allowing hate speech or nationalistic or fascist rhetoric to gain such a prominent platform may have an actual effect on viewers. To just speak about the way that the artwork functions within a discursive system or an institutional system the way Groys does allows, it seemed to me, a completely dispassionate reaction to what was far from a neutral event.

Anyway, I know I'm smushing a lot of different ideas together, and the line of reasoning is not exactly linear here. There'll be time for that, I just wanted to lay some of it out while the "corpse is still warm" (to quote BG himself). One other thing I wanted to share, which I ran across today that made me finally sit down and write this all out. (It won't make it any more clear, but it struck me, nonetheless.) It's Toni Morrison's response to being asked about the way certain canonical American authors have depicted blacks. The exchange follows (note the sarcasm):

Interviewer: Haven't you been critical of the way these authors depicted blacks?

Morrison: No! Me, critical? I have been revealing how white writers imagine black people, and some of them are brilliant at it. Faulkner was brilliant at it. Hemingway did it poorly in places and brilliantly elsewhere.

Interviewer: How so?

Morrison: In not using black characters, but using the aesthetic of blacks and anarchy, as sexual license, as deviance. In his last book, The Garden of Eden, Hemingway's heroine is getting blacker and blacker. The woman who is going mad tells her husband, I want to be your little African queen. The novel gets its charge that way: Her white white hair and her black, black skin...almost like a Man Ray photograph.

Mark Twain talked about racial ideology in the most powerful, eloquent, and instructive way I have ever read. Edgar Allan Poe did not. He loved white supremacy and the planter class, and he wanted to be a gentleman, and he endorsed all of that. He didn't contest it or critique it.

What is exciting about American literature is that business of how writers say things under, beneath, and around their stories. Think of Pudd'nhead Wilson and all these inversions of what race is, how sometimes nobody can tell, or the thrill of discovery?

Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! spends the entire book tracing race and you can't find it. No one can see it, even the character who is black can't see it. I did this lecture for my students that took me forever, which was tracking all the moments of withheld, partial, or disinformation, when a racial fact or clue sort of comes out but doesn't quite arrive. I just wanted to chart it. I listed its appearance, disguise, and disappearance on every page - I mean every phrase! Everything, and I delivered this thing to my class. They all fell asleep!

But I was so fascinated, technically. Do you know how hard it is to withhold that kind of information but hinting, pointing all of the time? And then to reveal it in order to say that it is not the point anyway? It is technically just astonishing. As a reader you have been forced to hunt for a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing. The insanity of racism.

So the structure is the argument. Not what this one says or that one says...it is the structure of the book, and you are there hunting this black thing that is nowhere to be found and yet makes all the difference. No one has done anything quite like that ever. So, when I critique, what I am saying is, I don't care if Faulkner is a racist or not; I don't personally care but I am fascinated by what it means to write like this.

(Paris Review interview, 1993)

Amazing, right? The key for me is when she says "a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing. The insanity of racism" - that she finds politics in a peculiar aesthetic structure is brilliant. That's kind of where I was trying to go; Belyaev-Govnovt (as he was called at the Vpered!/Chto delat'? meeting) was clearly of secondary importance here.

Man Ray, Juliet and Margaret Nieman, 1945

*So if you are here for cooking, tattoos, or chimps on ice updates, you may guiltlessly stop reading now. Oh, oops, too late...

Groys Talks

For those of you who are interested, here are my notes from the first of three lectures by Boris Groys at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art.

Two disclaimers: 1) while Groys's lecturing style is very clear and lends itself well to notation, his lecture was in Russian, while my notes are in English. This means that there will inevitably be some omissions and mistranslations. I'll post a link to the audiotape if/when I get one. 2) While I find the general topic timely and interesting, Groys irritates me quite a bit by what he does with it. My at times irritated commentary is in square brackets.

And finally, I cannot help but feel that Groys's missing the mark on the state of art today (his utter cynicism and lack of historical memory) has something to do with the recent awarding of the prestigious Kandinsky prize to the ultranationalist/fascist artist, Alexei Belyaev-Gintov. (That link is in Russian, but I feel like the images speak for themselves.) In particular, there is something very odd about 1) the prize being sponsored by Deutsche Bank and 2) the strangely pussy-footed reporting the choice is getting in the English-language press. (Thanks for the link, kg.) Groys (being in my mind a Western critic), the mostly-Western panel of judges who voted on the Kandinsky prize, and the Bloomberg coverage of the whole thing, seem - as kg noted - blind to the gravity of the situation. They all seem to be playing around, refusing to take seriously the unmistakably chilling pitch of the words spoken loud and clear. ("Мы все вернем назад!" - We will return everything to the way it was!)

[Disgrace.]

I'm running to the second lecture now, but more on this later. As I said to kg, there is plenty of blame to go around. For now, I'm laying it squarely in the hands of the art world.