In my view, the critic Clive Bell most colorfully and ridiculously describes the separation with that which is above, accessible only to a few as "high art" and that which is below. Developing the concept of “significant form” in order to deal with abstraction in contemporary art, and active within the Bloomsbury group, he writes:
“I have tumbled from the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation to the snug foothills of warm humanity. It is a jolly country. No one need to ashamed of enjoying himself there. Only no one who has ever been on the heights can help feeling a little crestfallen in the cozy valleys. And let no one imagine, because the has made merry in the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can even guess at the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art.”[1]
He does not describe the identity in terms of ethnicity, cultural background and class of those select few he deems capable of climbing the “cold white peaks of art”. The unspoken exclusion of all that does not conform to what is his manner of cultural appreciation, disguised as a universal, appears obvious – following Bourriaud, his position as dominant white male[2] remains implicit and readable only from a postmodern perspective.
Another text that very well makes visible the perversity of the exclusionary process, while identifying clearly the actors in this in terms of gender, class and ethnicity is “Modern Love” by T.C. Boyle[3]. Here, Boyle hilariously overdraws the process by hyperbolizing the fetishisation of an obsession with cleanliness in his parable about high, white “Anglo-Saxon” culture. In this postmodern short story, a white upper class woman (WASP, White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) appears attractive to the main character and narrator. He soon finds that the anthropologist is obsessive about cleanliness and disease; she has the main actor not only go through a physical examination before she allows him to touch her, but also keeps describing horribly detailed, and very obviously to her, perversely enjoyable accounts of filth and diseases she projects onto “others” – in the course of the story, this clearly disturbed female figure makes explicit that these “others” are those whome she ethnically, nationally and culturally excludes from her proximity due to their identity. Predictably, she ultimately excludes the narrator himself from her physical proximity, as he slowly becomes one of the filthy “others”, while, equally predictable, his desire for her body grows as it is thwarted.
A more contemporary piece, the video entitled “Electric Blue”, from 2008 by Albanian artist Adrian Paci, presents the figure of an actor who works through an experience in his native Albania through the film: the narrator in his film is desperate to make a living to provide for his family, and so starts copying porn films and presenting them to the local public. The locals, visually stereotypically "peasant" are shown as sym-pathetic, em-pathetic and yet also pathetic caricatures of all that the projected audience of the exhibition „Seeing is Believing“ (2011, Kunstwerke Berlin) set themselves apart from, just as as the female figure in T.C: Boyles short story sets herself apart from increasingly diseased “others” – and Clive Bell sets himself apart from those who have not attained the “cold, white peaks or art” – are shown laughing happily and full of enjoyment at the films which remain unseen except in excerpts. The narrator describes how he needs to get rid of these copied porn films, and tapes films from recent newscasts on top showing bombings in Iraq and elsewhere. In this film Paci does not apply all the rules of ethical representation, that are in place in contemporary participatory art practices and especially in didactic contexts, and are supposedly necessary, and that are discussed ad nauseam. In this sense it is not a work that can easily be placed in the public, since it would not be very easy to popularize it. Instead he speaks directly to a distinctive (and presumably hypocritical) white cube public, emphasizes the space between a presumably comfortable position as viewer of contemprary art, and the farmers as destitute human beings, who carry traces of hard physical work in the sun on their bodies and are thrilled by the opportunity to view pornography publicly together. [4] My own gaze felt uncomfortable to me here – maybe because the gaze of the viewers of the exhibition are placed where the pornfilms would be.
In the end, snippets of the porn scenes remain visible, interspersing the terse voice of the newscaster describing the action at the war site with the sounds and images of female porn actors faking orgasms. Presented as part of the exhibition “Seeing is Believing” at Kunstwerke in 2011, the show at several places examines representations of masculinities. The orgasmic scenes of the porn actors coincide with scenes of bombs exploding, giving the impression of a conflation. In mediaeval art, images drawn in books were often conflated: this was due to the fact that parchment was hard to come by and very valuable. In the video-piece “Electric Blue”, two narratives of “explosions” are superimposed, suggesting that the viewers enjoy projecting themselves into the position of the elicitor in both cases, while conflating the land of the country being bombed with the body of the female porn actor. The films of bombings used are historical images and call up the question of for what kind of viewing situation they were originally intended.
In the film „Five Men at Atomic Ground Zero“ (1957) five men in beige military uniforms stand in the middle of a yellowish desert in front of a sign in the front right side saying „Atomic Ground Zero“ and gaze into the sky, where the following occurs:
2KT (kiloton) MB-1 nuclear air-to-air rocket launched from an F-89 Scorpion interceptor. The nuclear missile detonated 10,000 above their heads.[5]
The film stems from a series of films of nuclear explosion tests of the US, that took place until 1963. [6] The sound is of a voice speaking in excited staccato of a witness among the evidently volunteers on location:
The plane is a bright silver spot on the sky...30 sex. 25 sec 20 sec. 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1- (rocket fired) there it goes, the rocket is gone... (lightning) – we felt a heat pulse, a very bright light – it is boiling above us there... (thunder, viewers twitching)- there it is, the ground wave... It is over folks! It did happen, the mountains are vibrating. It is directly above our heads! It worked, it worked!! (laughing hysterically) So good!!
It is a huge fire ball, (...) a perfect, perfect shot... My only regrets right now is, Colonel Bruce, that not all of you could be here with us. I have never seen a cloud like this form an atomic explosion... It was just a wonderful thrill. That rocket at the zero count this thing went off with a white flash, it was just beautiful.
The narrator is in the field, he observes a detonation from close proximity, without a breath of skepticism in relation to those who placed him and his fellow soldiers here. He seems to be happy about this and says explicitly, he wishes he could share the immediacy of the experience with the invisible viewers that are off-stage – with us. We thereby witness the unbelievably self- destructive belief in authority and self-deception of some human beings in the supposed free Western world during the Cold War.
The work Electric Blue places the viewer in proximity to the peasants shown enjoying the show while at the same time, with the artist, placing him/(her) safely apart. The viewers sees „them“ enjoying the spectacle. Within the framework of the story, this was accidental and due to the need for conservation of materials and videotapes, but it – “by chance” - exposes a possible deeper, narrative that has been historically determinant, overused and sucked dry: it conflates the (female) body with the (passive, material) territory that is to be conquered, presents body and earthy material as stuff that is to be dominated violently and blown up/brought to a head, cum (fake makes real cum). There is no external and carefully separated perverted backside to upper class perfection in this work – similar to the way the anthropologist from „modern Love“ is a stand in for modernity with her (ascribed for example by Latour) obsession to separate, cleanliness from dirt, high from low, abstract from representional, objectivity from subjectivity, etc.
Following Bourriaud, “Electric Blue” could be termed postmodern as it brings out critically some of what can be recognized as mark of modern art: the separation into high “universalist” principles of art, freed of time and space, whereby viewers, as belonging to the public of the white cube are addressed and thereby produced, remaining within this logic, low “particular, regional” located further down in the hierarchy. The artist shows us, as white cube public, his own condescendingly drawn origins, it corresponds to Clive Bell’s „warm humanity“.
On the other hand, the work may be considered to be “altermodern”, (Bourriaud) since it proposes a transformation in the narrator through his increasing distance to his roots or origin, or rather, his re-rooting himself among the (post-? alter-?) modern viewers. Butt his remains incomplete. Mimikry? The narrator of the film, Albanian as is the artist, also does not remain locked within his identity, but rather looks back with a criticality verging on the condescending at where he originally was (rooted) (radicant? Rhizome-like?). Grotesquely drawn are the figures of the peasants watching the porn films - while they knew they were being filmed, certainly they had only a vague idea of the way in which they would be watched watching, at least within this narrative[7]. The narration hovers between fiction, confessional and documentary, underlined by the gritty, “bad film quality” signifying a supposed lack of access to technical means and thereby, “authenticity” of the film while at the same putting in doubt that such a concept could ever hold.
In his most recent book “The Radicant” (2009), Bourriaud argues in favor of a new term, “altermodernism”[8], suggesting that we are in the midst of a new era that is no longer well described by the term postmodernism. The publication is an argument for dealing with the pluralism that is the result of a time in which identity politics have changed: in an era in which, as he says, the most prominent figure is the tourist, the traveler and the migrant, where you are from has become less important than where you are going, identities have become fluid and less determinant.[9] The figure of the radicant replaces the figure of the rhizome (Deleuze) for Bourriaud: it is possible to create new roots in new places, to re-root oneself, to change and learn to adapt.
Bourriaud describes modernism as a type of universalism that rejects anything that does not conform to it. What is the connection here between the “tyranny of good taste”[1] and the tyranny of a type of universalism that is no longer current or possible, and is it possible to avoid the trap of first discerning one of these processes of exclusion but yet reinstituting it in determining that criteria must nonetheless exist? Is the question of the tyranny of good taste as complex as that of the tyranny of colonialism? Does this type of “universalism” remain inherent in a position positing pretending to move beyond it? The argument that there is agreement about the fact that simply doing something ethically admirable does not automatically confer to it - whatever it might be - good art status is applied to reject postcolonial positions, misreading these. The statement can be turned on its head, the result is still the same: just because the content is somehow related to ethics – whether in line with the ethics of the viewer or not - just because there is nothing in the work that does not blasphemously put down various groups of people not white, ableist and male and espousing heteropatriarchy, this does not guarantee that it is horrible artistically. This is a real and true artistic problem worth mulling over much more carefully than many are willing to: this possible artistic quality, even beauty does not easily or in any way exonerate the nonsense. Whether it is looked at from the so-called politically correct point of view or the reactionary, self-termed "politically incorrect" side – either way of reaffirming that there is some sort of general way of agreeing - if not what is good art, then certainly what is not good art - must be discussed and never presupposed, even if what is, at a given time, considered to be not good art is largely determined by what is not discussed – very rarely does an artwork that is not public art receive openly negative criticism that is sustained for any length of argument.( Public art, especially commemorative public art, is often so intensively showered with public, very vocal and negative criticism that these reactions can become the work. This is one aspect of public art that makes it so compelling). Though my own sympathies and ethics generally are firmly located on the side termed (by the right) to be “politically correct” – the side that refuses to be blind to the fact that power is, due to historical circumstances, still unfairly distributed throughout the world and thereby influences ALL production, visibility and criticism of art work – I would tend agree with this general statement. Just because the content is acceptable from an ideological point of view, that does not make it “good art” – just as to most artists and critics since Plato, inversely, what is ethically and ideologically questionable – he calls it “lying” – can not be good art.[2] Bourriaud discusses this further in his introduction in terms of traditional art historical study that has become equally insufficient to describe contemporary phenomena in art practices from around the world. (I realize that I might simply be vainly attempting to place myself in proximity to those that, like Bourriaud,[3] lead a privileged life of running around the world, to museums, to exhibitions spaces, where ethically unproblematic and clean art in terms of content, exclusively "preaches to the converted" mostly upper class citizens or those that aspire to be by imitating them – those who can afford to be part of a system that actively makes some things become visible and others not by funding it. There is the two lovely German words Deutungshoheit and Definitionsmacht that can be useful to describe how this occurs. ) Followers of Bourdieu[4] have amply discussed the process of learning to appreciate art or appear to appreciate art as a mark of distinction. But what constitutes "good art" is not at all interesting without an examination of who determines what this constitutes and how this process is structured.
Many artists have productively commented on the fact that art museums seem to have taken on the social function of what in the past, churches did: in terms of a type of educational democratizing process, museums are attempting to market to the general public hat it is good for them to view art: people dress up for visiting them, there is a strong push to get everybody to go to a museum, block buster shows, such as the “MoMA ist der Star” exhibition that took place in Berlin in 2004, draw crowds from all wakes of life, and people behave in a certain way in museums, with a certain reverence and awe. I have explored this in past projects, and variously exhibited the results. There is nothing wrong in my mind with democratizing the art appreciation process, making art available to as many people as possible; I think this is imperative. But there is something wrong with art appreciation itself: it fails miserably once it becomes getting people to revere art in a certain manner. I believe viewing art should be much more about disagreeing than about agreeing, about figuring out what makes us see things differently than what makes us see the same, and to foster intensive discussion and exchange about this.
[1] Jules Lubbock: The Tyranny of Good Taste: the Politics of Architecture in Great Britain, 1550- 1960. London, 1995.
[2] See Plato’s Republic, book II, in: Art and its Significance, An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory, Stephen Ross, New York 1984: P.11, ff.
[3] Ralph Findeisen, Semionauten, Leinen Los! artnet, Mai 2009.
[4]Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. In English: New York, 1984.
The work by Adrian Paci seems to suggest that this re-rooting oneself in a new location can not occur without an orientation along social stratification by swearing off of parts of ones own past in the constructed narration. He thereby presents himself as half „cleansed“ and „disinfected“, and tries to hide the supposedly illegally procurred porn films, presenting art knowledge, in order to take a seat among the presumably distinctive contemporary white cube public. It is doubtful that the viewer constructed in this way will be transformed in the same way, so that the viewer remains trapped in a modernist (anthropologist) gaze – perhaps viewing altermodernism unfolding. Latour suggests in „Were were never modern“ that it might be appropriate to apply modern anthropological viewpoints, that so far separated cleanly , between natural sciences and social sciences, but applies these together on „other“ places, to ourselves. He says: „Kein Anthropologe erforscht uns in dieser Weise. Und es ist geradezu unmöglich, mit unserer Kultur, oder soll ich sagen Natur/Kultur zu verfahren, wie es anderswo, mit den anderen, möglich ist. Warum? Weil wir modern sind. Bei uns gibt es kein nahtloses Gewebe mehr. Die Kontinuität der Analysen ist nicht mehr möglich. Für die traditionellen Anthropologen gibt es, kann es und darf es keine Anthropologie der modernen Welt geben.“
Und: „Unter dem Schutz der kritischen Dreiteilung fühlen sie sich autorisiert, bei den so genannten Vormodernen die Kontinuität zwischen den Kollektiven herzustellen. Den Mut, in der Fremde zu vereinheitlichen, haben sie nur, weil sie bei sich zu Hause tren- nen.“ (Seite 15)58
In 1975 Joseph Kosuth described the difficulty of anthropologists, to comprehend themselves from the point of view of anthropologists and at the same time, called for it, whereby he placed a different focal point than Latour. He scientific away from anthropology due to ist aspiration to objectivation, which confirms the own lack of participation as predeterminant and described in contrast to that art as theoretical-objectified[10] practice: ..the anthropoligist is concerned with trying to obtain fluency in another culture. But the artist attemtps to obtain fluency in his own culture. For the artist, obtaining cul- tural fluency is a dialectical process which, simply put, consists of attempting to affect the culture while he is simultaneously learning from (and seeking acceptance of) that same culture which is affecting him.
What follows from these differences is that culture becomes studied nature in relation to science, whereby art as a tendency becomes the objectified „other“.
The reason one has traditionally not considered the art historian or critic as artist is that because of Modernism (Scientism) the critic and art historian have always main- tained a position outside of praxis (the attempt to find objectivity has necessitated that) but in so doing they made culture nature.[11]
This appears to be fairly obvious when seen in relation to the idea that art tends to be represented as female/soft in relation to hard natural or engineering sciences (and is correspondingly under financed) – depending on what interests are to be pushed through.
Paci seems to suggest that this separation within the framework of contemporary art, in spite of all attempts to soften these up, continues to be maintained, whereby a part of his artistic achievement can be found in the distanced, ironic tone, in the evident oscillating between believability and represented authenticity, in playing to his audience’s conceptions of authenticity.
[2]In his celebrated work The Damned of the World (1961), Frantz Fanon held that the absolute weapon of the colonialists consisted in imposing their image on those of the subjected people. It would be necessary, say his disciples today, to substitute a veritable historic pluralism for the history of dominant “dead white males”. Nicolas Bourriaud, in: Plug In, Zug, Fine Arts Unternehmen, 2004. The 80 page book was published on the occasion of the exhibition by the same name at FUTURA Gallery Prague, with works by Eija –Liisa Ahtila, Pavel Braila, Mircea Cantor, Phil Collins, Jimmie Durham, Lisa Glauer, Anna Jermolaewa, Renzo Martens, Susan Morrie, Khalil Rabah, and Jalal Toufic. The project was curated by Mario Rizzi.
[4] Aus „Hobby, das Magazin der Technik“ ist dieser mit dem Anthropologenblick verwandte „Tourist Gaze“ bekannt, der dadurch das andern (othering) der Anderen, hier das andern „der Afrikaner“ konstruiert, siehe zum Beispiel: N.3, 1962, S. 17: „An eine Rückkehr in den Busch denkt im allgemei- nen keiner, denn der Afrikaner, der einmal in einer Stadt wohnt, empfindet eine unsagbare Verachtung für alle jene, die noch im Busch wie ihre Väter leben.“ Die herablassende Sprechweise „der Busch, der Afrikaner“ ist im 21sten Jahrhunder auch in populären Medien nicht mehr so ausgeprägt, wenn auch rassistische Terminologie in den Bundesrepublikanischen Medien weiterhin verwendet wird..
[6] William J. Broad, The Bomb Chronicles. 13, 09. 2010, The New York Times.
[7] Zu meiner Arbeit mit dem Material Muttermilch wurde ich oft gefragt, ob die Milchspende- rinnen wussten, wozu die Milch benutzt wird, ob ich sie in irgendeiner Weise aufgeklärt hatte. Ich habe mich an keiner Stelle herablassend über „echte“ Milchspender_innen – zu denen ich selbst, wie Paci’s Figur, gehörte - geäußert oder sie so dargestellt, nur die „Bügelnde“ ist als eine ambivalente, stereotype oder auch komische Figur „aus der Vergangenheit“ die bis heute nachweislich nicht nur durch die Psyche der zeitgenössischen Presse geistert, und Identitäts- stiftend funktioniert, gebaut. Andererseits ist die Stillzeit in einer post- oder alter-modernen Welt die eher nicht daran ausgerichtet ist, das Stillen zu ermöglichen, für viele Frauen auch voller absurder Situationen und unfreiwilliger oder auch freiwilliger Komik, und auch darüber kann man sich in Stillgruppen ganz ausgezeichnet auslassen.
[8] “And today, modernism amounts to a form of complicity with colonialism and Eurocentrism. Let us bet on a modernity which, far from absurdly duplicating that of the last century, would be specific to our epoch and would echo its problematics: an ‘altermodernity’, if we dare coin the term, whose defining issues and features this book seems to sketch out.” Nicolas Bourriaud in: The Radicant, New York, 2009, p. 19.
[9] “And yet the immigrant, the exile, the tourist and the urban wanderer are the dominant figures of contemporary culture” Nicolas Bourriaud in: The Radicant, New York, 2009, p. 51.
[10] Im Sinne Bourdieu’s „teilnehmende Obkektivierung“, wie sie in „Schwierige Interdisziplinarität“ beschrieben wird. Pierre Bourdieu, Schwierige Interdisziplinarität: Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Geschichtswissenschaft. Münster, 2004.
[11] Joseph Kosuth, Artist as Anthropologist, 1975 (extracts) reprinted in The Everyday: Docu- ments of Contemporary Art edited by Stephen Johnstone. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2008. S. 182.