Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?

To belabor the point: if medieval viewers read the symbolic meaning of a painted lily in a work with a Biblical theme, it was because iconographic codes were constantly relayed, while religious stories were relatively few. In certain late-nineteenth-century English or French genre paintings, as social histories of the period recount, a disheveled-looking peasant girl with flowing locks and a jug from which water pours unchecked would be widely understood to signify the sexual profligacy and availability of attractive female Others. Art has meanwhile freed itself from the specifics of stories (especially of history painting), becoming more and more abstract and formal in its emphases and thus finally able to appeal to a different universality: not that of the universal Church but of an equally imaginary universal culture (ultimately bourgeois culture, but not in its mass forms) and philosophy.

I am confining my attention to Western art history. It is helpful to remember that the relatively young discipline of art history was developed as an aid to connoisseurship and collection and thus can be seen as au fond a system of authentication.

By this I do not intend to ignore the many complicating factors, among them the incommensurability of texts and images, nor to assert that art, in producing images to illustrate and interpret prescribed narratives, can remotely be considered to have followed a clear-cut doctrinal line without interposing idiosyncratic, critical, subversive, or partisan messages, but the gaps between ideas, interpretations, and execution do not constitute a nameable trend.

What has come to be known as the “middle class” (or classes), if this needs clarification, comprised those whose livelihoods derived from ownership of businesses and industries; they were situated in the class structure between the landed aristocracy which was losing political power, and the peasants, artisans, and newly developing urban working class.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is the most prominent theorist of symbolic capital and the production and circulation of symbolic goods; I am looking at “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). This article, a bit fixed in its categories, sketches out the structural logic of separation.

The first application of the term to art is contested, some dating it as late as the Salon des Refusés of 1863.

Forms, rather than being empty shapes, carry centuries of Platonic baggage, most clearly seen in architecture; formal innovation in twentieth-century high modernism, based on both Kant and Hegel, was interpreted as a search for another human dimension.

In his Biographia Literaria (1817), the poet and theorist Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously distinguished between Fancy and Imagination.

John Fekete, The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan (New York: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1977). Especially in Europe but also in the United States, financial panics, proletarian organizing, and political unrest characterized the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Modernism in the other arts has a similar trajectory without, perhaps, the direct legacy or influence of Sovietism or workers’ movements.

The codification of social observation in the nineteenth century that included the birth of sociology and anthropology also spurred as-yet amateur efforts to record social difference and eventually to document social inequality. Before the development of the Leica, which uses movie film, other small, portable cameras included the Ermanox, which had a large lens but required small glass plates for its negatives; it was used, for example, by the muckraking lawyer Erich Salomon.

For example with regard to the blurred line between photography and commercial applications, from home photos to photojournalism (photography for hire), a practice too close to us in time to allow for a reasoned comparison with the long, indeed ancient, history of commissioned paintings and sculptures.

There is generally some tiny space allotted to one or two documentarians, above all for those addressing dire conditions in the global periphery.

Modernist linguistic experiments are beyond my scope here.

This is to overlook the role of that major part of the intellectual class directly engaged in formulating the ideological messages of ruling elites. For one historical perspective on the never-ending debate over the role of intellectuals vis-à-vis class and culture, not to mention the nation-state, see Julien Benda’s 1927 book La Trahison des Clercs (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals; literally: “The Treason of the Learned”), once widely read but now almost quaint.

See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), a work that has greatly influenced other critics—in the United States, notably Benjamin Buchloh. On Bürger’s thesis, I wrote, in “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” (1983), that he had described the activity of the avant-garde as the self-criticism of art as an institution, turning against both “the distribution apparatus on which the work of art depends and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept of autonomy.” I further quoted Bürger: “the intention of the avant-gardists may be defined as the attempt to direct toward the practical the aesthetic experience (which rebels against the praxis of life) that Aestheticism developed. What most strongly conflicts with the means-end rationality of bourgeois society is to become life’s organizing principle.”

Ibid., 53.

Ibid., 53–54.

Allan Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I,” Art News, February 1971; “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part II,” Art News, May 1972; “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part III,” Art in America, January 1974.

Nevertheless, in pop-related subcultures, from punk to heavy metal to their offshoots in skateboarding culture, authenticity is a dimension with great meaning, a necessary demand of any tight-knit group.

Debord was also a member, with Isidore Isou, of the Lettrists, which he similarly abandoned.

Thus the insistence of some university art departments that they were fine arts departments and did not wish to offer, say, graphic arts or other commercial programs and courses (a battle generally lost).

Again channeling Althusser.

The “culture wars” are embedded in a broader attempt to delegitimize and demonize social identities, mores, and behaviors whose public expression was associated with the social movements of the 1960s, especially in relation to questions of difference.

This is not the place to argue the importance of the new social movements of the 1960s and beyond, beyond my passing attention to feminism, above; rather, here I am simply pointing to the ability of art institutions and the market to strip work of its resonance. As is easily observable, the term “political art” is reserved for work that is seen to dwell on analysis or critique of the state, wage labor, economic relations, and so on, with relations to sexuality and sex work always excepted.

Recall my earlier remarks about both the academicization of art education and the function of art history, a function now also parceled out to art reviewing/criticism.

A favorite slogan of the period was “There is no outside.” Another, more popularly recognizable slogan might be “Think different,” a slogan that attempts to harness images of powerful leaders of social movements or “pioneers” of scientific revolutions for the service of commodity branding, thus suggesting motion “outside the box” while attempting never to leave it. See the above remarks on Bürger and the theory of the avant-garde.

See Brian Holmes, “The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique” (2001), →, or at →, and numerous other sites; Holmes added a brief forward to its publication at eipcp (european institute for progressive cultural policies), →.

Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). The relative invisibility of Readings’ book seems traceable to his sudden death just before the book was released, making him unavailable for book tours and comment.

David Harvey, “University, Inc.,” review of The University in Ruins, by Bill Readings,” The Atlantic (October 1998). Available online at →. Nothing could be more indicative of the post-Fordist conditions of intellectual labor and the readying of workers for the knowledge industry than the struggle over the U.S.’ premier public university, the University of California system, the birthplace of the “multiversity” as envisioned by Clark Kerr in the development of the UC Master Plan at the start of the 1960s. State public universities, it should be recalled, were instituted to produce homegrown professional elites; but remarkably enough, as the bellwether California system was undergoing covert and overt privatization and being squeezed mightily by the state government’s near insolvency, the system’s president blithely opined that higher education is a twentieth-century issue, whereas people today are more interested in health care, and humorously likened the university to a cemetery (Deborah Solomon, “Big Man on Campus: Questions for Mark Yudoff, New York Times Magazine, September 24, 2009, →). The plan for the California system seems to be to reduce the number of California residents attending in favor of out-of-staters and international students, whose tuition costs are much higher. For further comparison, it seems that California now spends more than any other state on incarceration but is forty-eighth in its expenditure on education.

Readings, The University in Ruins, 50.

Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e), 2003), also available online at →. I have imported this discussion of Virno’s work from an online essay of mine on left-leaning political blogs in the United States.

Ibid, 66–67.

See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).

Here I will not take up the question of museums’ curatorial responses to this moment of crisis in respect to their definition and role in the twenty-first century. I can only observe that some elite museums have apparently identified a need to offer a more high-end set of experiences, in order to set them apart from the rest of our burgeoning, highly corporatized “experience economy.” At present the main thrust of that effort to regain primacy seems to center on the elevation of the most under-commodified form, performance art, the form best positioned to provide museum-goers with embodied and nonnarrative experiences (and so far decidedly removed from the world of the everyday or of “politics” but situated firmly in the realm of the aesthetic).

Since writing this, I have read Chin-Tao Wu’s “Biennials Without Borders?”—in New Left Review 57 (May/June 2009): 107–115—which has excellent graphs and analyses supporting similar points. Wu analyzes the particular pattern of selection of artists from countries on the global “peripheries.”

The 11th Istanbul Biennial ran from September through November, 2009, under the curatorship of a Zagreb-based collective known as What, How, and for Whom (WHW), whose members are Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović. Formed in 1999, the group has run the city-owned Gallery Nova since 2003. The title of this biennial, drawn from a song by Bertolt Brecht, is “What Keeps Mankind Alive?”

The full version of the letter can be found online at →.

Important sites of concerted public demonstrations against neoliberal economic organizations and internationally sanctioned state domination and repression.

But they may well be offered flyers.

The Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair (where this paper was first presented) is an outpost of the Bologna Art Fair.

I experience some disquiet in the realization that, as in so much else, the return of the collective has lingering over it not just the workers’ councils of council communism (not to mention Freud’s primal horde) but the quality circles of Toyota’s re-engineering of car production in the 1970s.

It is wise not to settle back into the image-symbolic realm; street actions and public engagement are basic requirements of contemporary citizenship. If the interval between the appearance of new forms of resistance and incorporation is growing ever shorter, so is the cycle of invention, and the pool of people involved is manifestly much, much larger.