One way of looking at ready-made objects (and especially the kind of conceptual, 21st-century practices around those objects, that Krauss and Bois analyze in “Formless: A User’s Guide), is to see the object as a post-formal re-invention; in other words, in a world where, as we discussed last week, the narrative of studios, canvas assembly, and gallery display (or notation, rehearsal, and performance; or filming, editing, and distributing) do not structure the work of art a priori, the force of those narratives dissipates, and the force of the non-narrative, individuated subjects and objects within those narratives, ascends. Being post-“form”, in that tentative sense, is not to assert that media and form do not matter, on the contrary: the object-ness of modern photography and installation work could be described as an acknowledgment or a suspicion that media is all that matters. Media can no longer be the invisible/unthinkable background force, the unspoken ideology, in which begin academic discussions of the digital, the artistic, the new vs. the derivative; technique: color, timbre, line, time, structure, semiosis… instead, the object comes forward, the everyday comes forward. These abstractions begin from a kind of productive cultural naivete, that we can let go of the language of beauty that art-narratives produce, and replace it with another language, in much the same way that modernists Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger thought they could perform musical biopsies on rural American villiages, replacing their penchant for traditional melodies and beats, with free-floating non-traditional structures.
(Skip this paragraph: The first time I drafted plans for this seminar I called it Diedia Aredia and Nedia Media 203, because it began to feel to me that students in this program have flurried about in a giant “media imaginary”, drawing their rhetorics and positions from an endless re-thinking of media coherence, taking what they want from reference to the everyday and the “possible,” but mostly just shrugging their shoulders at language, narrative, and ideology.)
When the everyday is the locus of art experience, culture’s traditionally firm influence on methodology, its insistence that this is the way of art, and not that, is neutralized: culture’s status as the Lacanian symbolic is neutralized, and the artist takes the immanent right to replace one object with another, and shape experience through that infinite re-replacement (rather than with the technique of the object’s determination and production), as though the symbolic were purely arbitrary.
That modernist naivete—the one where our cultural superegos (our entrenched morals of narrative and aesthetic, and as much our constructions of race, gender…) are neutralized—requires the artist to opt out of the ‘sacred rites’ that have formed and informed the core of artistic production in pre-industrial societies; it also requires her to opt out of the culture industry that appropriates all aesthetic in global/late capitalism (cf. Dorrine Kondo’s imagination of identity through fashion as theater). However, if the modern project to dislodge the symbolic is unsuccessful, this quickly turns paradoxical: in the popular imagination, the modern artist is frequently accused of having ‘opted-out’, not only of technique, but of art. What fills the gap—?—is the putative subject of our next dialogue. We discussed Thomas Kincade a few weeks ago, in the context of Benjamin’s work; maybe Kincade’s role in restoring both the sacred and the aesthetic is more clear after Krauss, Bois, and Kondo. But neo-romanticism and the reactionary turn of the canvas, the symphony or opera, the oratorial stage, can’t be the only material response to a “symbolic” empowered by something so large as late capitalism.
May 5
Enter the other half of the equation: the one where, instead of challenging the ritual of media and the primacy of received narratives, the artist redoubles her investment in them, making their contextualization and their positioning in cultural dialogues her only labor, where her task is not to make the object, not to replace or situate it, but to interpret it: the artist’s role in post-modernity may be to give us what Jameson calls a “cognitive map” of the symbolic realm, a mapping and re-mapping of the symbols that are persistently deployed there. To think this through, let’s start with one of the classic interpretations of the post-modern condition, in
Jameson, Frederic (1984). “Post-modernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism.” Originally in the New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August): 52-92. For a more developed re-thinking of these terms, also see the Introduction (available via preview on Google) to Jameon’s 1991 book of the same name, from Duke University press.
To comprehend the hopelessly Romantic POSSIBLE in all of this, let’s also return to Zizek’s Fragile Absolute, Chapters 3 & 4: “Coke as objet petit a” and “From Tragique to moque-comique” (London/New York: Verso, 2000). In our discussion we will of course re-cap 1 & 2.
Optional additional reading—
I can’t help but include Hovey Burgess’ (1974) brief and late-modern query into “The Classification of Circus Techniques” in Drama Review: TDR Vol. 18 No. 1, 65-70. (Note that the title of 18/1 is “Popular Entertainments”, invoking a conscious separation of the popular, and the functional, from the orientation of a mid-70s journal toward high art.)
Garoian, Charles R (2001). “Performing the Museum.” In Studies in Art Education. Vol. 42 No. 3, 234-248.
May 12
Foster, Hal (1996). “[Chapter 5:] The Return of the Real.” In The Return of the Real. Boston: MIT Press.)
Birringer, Johannes. “Installations and the Participant User.” In Performance, Technology & Science. New York: PAJ Publications, 2008. Read in conjunction with documentation of Intimate Transactions, from the Australia-based Transmute Collective; also consider reading Birringer’s Introduction in this volume.