I Am for the Equality of Intelligence
Notes on Some Positive Effects of Times of Crisis on Art Criticism

 

44th AICA Congress, Asunción, Paraguay, 7.10.11

 

 

 

 
“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river”—wrote Jorge Luis Borges. Antonio Gramsci famously stated: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Gramsci also argued that although economic crises may not lead to historic transformations of society, which may or may not be constructive, they create a favorable climate for “the dissemination of certain modes of thought,” which nowadays we may call paradigms, épistemes, or simply inquires. With this in mind, today’s “crisis” might be best defined here as a slow and open-ended “testing time,” rather than, for example, a fast and conclusive “emergency event.”

In my presentation I will argue that “times of crisis” can impact art critics positively, for such times demand radical reevaluation and reshaping of the existing methodologies to synchronize them with the current praxis. I will quote numerous art critics to place my arguments in the context of a longer conversation and stress that we art critics form a community. It is, in fact, a conversational character of art criticism that interests me greatly.

Discussions of crisis in relation to modern criticism have had a long history, reaching back to Winckelmann, Goethe, Baudelaire, and Malarmé. I will return here to a more recent example, which as “random” as it is, I my opinion, still serves well to shed light on what we critics are confronted with, which is not a new phenomenon. In “The Crisis of Contemporary Criticism,” an essay written in 1966 for a conference at the University of Texas, the Belgian-born deconstructionist critic and theorist Paul de Man commented on the state of literary criticism:

Congress after congress devoted to the problem of criticism has taken place in France and elsewhere, and they have, in general, been as acrimonious as they are confused. One is tempted to speak of recent developments in Continental criticism in terms of crisis. To confine oneself for the moment to purely outward symptoms, the crisis-aspect of the situation is apparent, for instance, in the incredible swiftness with which often conflicting tendencies succeed each other, condemning the immediate obsolescence what night have appeared as the extreme point of avant-gardism briefly before. Rarely has the dangerous word “new” been used so frequently.

Following other thinkers, such as Friederich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger (to name just three important thinkers), De Man cautioned against the use of the category “new,” seeing it as the result of a predilection for intellectual fashion among critics, rather than as their rigorous reflection on history. After providing a brief overview of the trends in blurring the boundaries between academic disciplines fashionable at that time—including the connection of criticism to the social sciences and linguistics, and to latest interests in the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan—de Man suggested that the symptoms of the then current crisis-like situation had arisen from the fact that theory is often shaped in reaction to “actual institutional and economic interests,” rather than in reaction to the interests of the individual. Examining Western society in the 1960s, he noted the growing presence of the new masses demanding spectacle—a phenomenon that a year later Guy Debord would analyze in his book The Society of the Spectacle (La Société du spectacle)—a spectacle, which serves the interests of the consciousness-shaping industry. Nowadays, these ideas seem to be quite obvious. “But”—let’s remind ourselves, de Man continued on a positive note—“this does not mean that the moment of crisis itself, doomed as it may be, cannot be intensely interesting.”

Treating literary criticism as another form of writing, and therefore questioning its uniqueness, de Man considered criticality as a necessity to self-reflection, which is characteristic of all writings. Hence, “[t]o speak of a crisis of criticism is then,” he argued, “to some degree, redundant,” because such a “crisis” is embedded in the very notion of modern language. In other words, writing demands critical approach to its structure and its intent, regardless of the political or economic circumstances. He stressed, therefore, that the responsibility to remain self-critical lies on individuals, who must avoid being “blind to what takes place within themselves.” I will return to this idea later.

 

The old is dying and the new cannot be born.

The Italian writer and Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote these words in prison in 1930. Perceiving cultural hegemony as a tool for maintaining political power, he questioned the relevance of the traditional intelligentsia (which usually avoids direct interaction with society at large and tend to focus on lofty ideas), and suggested that its place should be taken by an intelligentsia that emerges organically from within the society, a product of the modern and undiscriminating system of education and of dynamic and emphatic discourses related to the real conditions of life. Such a shift should be mentioned here not to suggest the abolition of any ancien régime, but rather to provoke us to rethink our role as critics in the context of the globalization of culture and the arts, which, to a large degree, diluted professionalism in art criticism (anybody can claim to be an art critic). Yet, we can still make difference; in fact, the more critics the better—as long as we keep questioning ourselves.

What kind of social consciousness should contemporary criticism reflect while facing not only global growth, but also widespread instability? How should we evaluate the impact of current developments in technology and science on art? What kind of art reflects the best actual culture and social reality? Which channels of communication do we need to privilege to make our voices heard? Here, we shall also ask ourselves: “What is AICA’s role in redefining art criticism for us all?

What is really dying?—probably nothing important. It is easy to link the ongoing changes in the role of art criticism to technological transformations and economic factors and their impact on how we practice our profession. The proliferation of online publications has created a virtual database that is highly useful, but also both extremely vast and largely inaccurate, because anyone can publish on the Internet—with the visibility of those postings directly linked to the financial resources of the institution or person who posts them. As one of my Facebook friends wrote to me recently: “There is a jungle out there, with millions of speedy bloggers eager to share their instant thoughts with anyone who is willing to go to their sites.” Millions of speedy bloggers is not necessary bad.

No doubt the rapid growth in digital technologies and science in recent years has produced faster channels of communication than have ever existed before. As a result of these, the printing press is in decline—not only because it can hardly sustain the fast-growing challenge from online publications, but in large part because of the miscalculations of publishers, who have often chosen to compete with the online publications by shortening the length of articles, and by making them more information-oriented, less analytical and, often, less intellectually rigorous. Similarly, publishing houses around the world have responded to the “crisis” by demanding that the authors make their books “more accessible” and shorter, offering, instead, coffee-table design, which clearly cannot supplement the lack of serious content. Responding to the “crisis,” (or shall we call it “disorientation”?) newspapers and art magazines now skillfully blend articles with advertisements—to satisfy their advertisers, who are fewer but wealthier. Dying therefore are, above all, old methods of reacting to the “crisis” by implementing various short cuts in production, which result in a weakening of the intellectual quality of writings—hence the loss of the readership.

Who are the new masses interested in art and art criticism? While the proliferation of biennial exhibitions and art fairs has caused the so-called art world to expand, it has also resulted in a loss of local specificity of art in different regions. Art promoted by those spectacular art events looks homogenous, whereas art produced locally, with no international stamp of approval keeps being marginalized. The Russian artist Ilya Kabakov compared the art world to a peculiar family: “The family moves just like flies. Completely free, flying through the air, organizing its exhibitions no matter where. In South Africa, or in South America, or in Norway, or in Iceland.” His “family” recalls in fact, Plato’s community constantly moving in unison (as opposed to the “poetic” and democratic society. In such a fast moving global art world, we witness growing bureaucratization and commercialization of art production and dissemination, which has resulted in a transfer of power from artists and critics to gallerists and curators, and it is the latter who determine what the “new” in art stands for nowadays and present it to the new “masses” in motion. But, are they really new masses, or perhaps it is just a larger group of followers that have little to do with an average viewer?

The art critic is yet again forced to reexamine his or her role vis-à-vis his or her audience, or he or she will be further marginalized. For a long time, art criticism was perceived as a form of “privileged consciousness,” an insight into the art, which required special skills and, hopefully, an artistic sensibility. The old art critic, whether he or she was a professional or a dilettante, once performed a regulatory, introspective and proscriptive function for the circulation and reception of art. That erudite has already been largely replaced by a fast moving, semi-professional critic-curator-art agent, who pursues a career that might or might not last longer than few years, depending on the rapidity of the success of his/her program. Art criticism practiced by those individuals wearing multiple hats, according to the American critic and artist Peter Plagens, has become “a subdivision of the entertainment industry.”

It is easy to be pessimistic, or skeptical. Assessing the current state of art criticism, James Elkins lamented its decline in What Happened to Art Criticism? in these words: “In worldwide crisis … dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural crisis… [art criticism is] dying… massively produced, and massively ignored.” His apocalyptic voice has joined the voices of others, who have already proclaimed an end to art and an end to history. But art and art critic are not dead, not yet.

Art criticism faces the challenge from new forms of communication, but to simply condemn modern technology as destructive to critical thinking is itself to exercise a sort of intellectual laziness. After all, as de Man argued: “unmediated expression is a philosophical impossibility.” As recent events in different parts of the world, such as the “Arab Spring” and the “occupation” of Wall Street by young demonstrators outraged by the greed of the bankers, have demonstrated, newly developed social media can provide effective means for public mobilization against the domination of prevailing systems of power, including that of the so-called “culture industry,” which is increasingly in the hands of large corporations and governments. With the growing political, economic and military instability of the current world, technology, when used in a conscious fashion, can become a powerful tool for dissemination of ideas and provide a new platform to activism; it is easily available to both artists and art critics.

The highly unstable political and economic situation in the world has already stimulated heated debates on its future direction for the world. “Communism: A New Beginning?” was the provocative title of a symposium co-organized by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek that recently took place at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Lately, Badiou has been proposing the “communist hypothesis” as a response to having our lives taken over by the “primary fear” (instead of the more self-reflective “fear of the fear”) that governs nowadays. Obviously, he does not propose a return to Soviet-style Communism, or to any specific type of old-style Marxism, but rather that we embrace the old ideology of collective action on its most fundamental level—to respect the rights of the individual. Žižek has predicted that, “The long night of the left is coming to a close,” after several decades of being silenced by various right-wing demagogues. Let’s hope so. Unfortunately, the hermetic, highly specific language uses by the participants in the conference did not help to make the experience “communal.”

The voices of the left include those of other scholars and critics, who are deeply dissatisfied with the current state of affairs in the world, its intellectual climate included, but who do not simply proclaim the end of the old in its totality. Still, the number of those vocal scholars and critics appears to shrink, while the new ones are slow to emerge. The Japanese philosopher Takeshi Umehara perceptively linked those transformations with the intellectual wellbeing of global society when he wrote in the 1990s that the “complete failure of Marxism and the spectacular disintegration of the Soviet Union are only the predecessors of the collapse of Western liberalism, the main current of modernity. Far from being an alternative to Marxism and the dominant ideology at the end of history, liberalism will be the next domino to fall.” Badiou was more specific when he argued that the democratization of the world that came after the fall of the Berlin Wall, instead of bringing more freedom has resulted in the further economic and political polarization of West from East, and North from South. Thus, to remain optimistic, we should consider our new role to be that of preventing “old” liberalism from dying, instead of worrying that “the debate about the ‘crisis in criticism’” might turn into “a proxy for a real political debate” or become purely philosophical.

 

Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river

These words appear in Borges’s “New Refutation of Time” (“Nueva refutacion del tiempo”) included in Other Inquisitions (Otras inquisiciones) published in 1952. The sentence belongs to a longer thought, which I will quote entirely to preserve the beauty of the Argentinean writer’s prose, because such a beauty of writing is often absent in art criticism (As art criticism becomes more and more “mechanical,” I want to stress our responsibility to the language itself as an important component of our profession. As Oscar Wilde famously argued, the critic must be an artist to be a good critic): “Our fate (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.” Is it really “unfortunate” that Borges was only Borges? Obviously, it isn’t and that is not how his words should be read. In the sentences I just quoted, the writer simply places a self-reflective mirror in front of himself (“fear of the fear), in order to avoid being blind to what takes place within him, and to be suspicious of his own authority and realistic about his ignorance.

Following de Man’s “deconstructive” approach to the then current interests among critics, we might argue that subsequent academic fashions keep expanding our horizons, yet they leave us partially dissatisfied, not because they are false or incomplete, not even because they often sound like the “old” rewritten in another scholarly jargon, but rather because they might blind to what takes place within ourselves. While examining the “theoretical production” (Hal Foster’s expression), we should remain cautious with dividing critics from scholars, practitioners from theoreticians. As the American critic Ben Davis observes “the debate about the ‘crisis in criticism’ seems a proxy for a real political debate: popular types defend some kind of humanist vision of the individual imagination against the art-theory bureaucrats; theory-heads clamor for art that has a didactic value, that doesn’t capitulate to popular wisdom, that takes a stand. This, it should be noted, is one of the all-time classic false oppositions.” This type of a common sense, pragmatic arguing is necessary for keeping us focus on real issues, but surprisingly it is “locked” in its exclusive focus on the local situation and local critics in the United States, while poking en passant at various French thinkers, from Michel Foucault to Jacques Rancière.

Let’s recall just a few of recent academic fashions here, to remind ourselves that they are not novel, but belong to a long tradition of universal critical thinking that attempts to anchor art in the present day, and as such might be viewed as a latest examples of collective dramaturgy of translations about the externality (rather than internality) of our experience. In fact, one might argue the successive fashions, often hermetic and “unreadable,” have proven de Man to be right in his assessment of the impact of academic discourse on our modes of thinking, which lately—in times of crisis—have been perceptively scrutinized and reevaluated.

For instance, let’s take Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics” of the late 1990s, a point of view that considers artistic activities to be a game, assigns an active role to the viewer and suggests the conversational aspects of art, while reducing the presence of the work itself to something of a “pretext” or a prop. By questioning newness as a valid criterion for art, Bourriaud followed in the footsteps of such writers as Guy Debord (“the spectacle”) and Jean Baudrillard, whose concept of “hyperreality” relies on a premise that modern man can no longer tell what reality is because he has become lost in a world of “simulacra,” images and signs created and presented as “real” by the mass media.

Going further back in time, some have argued that “hyperreality” is also nothing new; for instance, in the 18th century Bishop Berkeley had theorized that everything that individuals know about objects or events is their perception of it, a perception placed in their minds by God. Thus, Baudrillard simply replaced God with the mass media. One could also extend such a reading of reality to the non-religious Platonic notion of the cave. Confronted with the limitations of such a view of reality, even Baudrillard became skeptical of his own vision of it, when he asked: “What are you doing after the orgy?,” suggesting to move on.

In the United States, linking art to lofty theory still might be associated with formalism, with Rosalind Krauss remaining one of its most vocal proponents. One might view her so-called “method” as sort of a doctrine of aesthetic privilege—which in fact is an offspring of Greenbergian doctrine of purity of the artistic medium itself and echoes Kantianism. As one young American critic observed, in her methodology Krauss pushed the responsibility for artistic meaning toward the written, at the expense of the conditions in which the written is written. Her totalizing “method” has been, in fact, a favorite subject of criticism for postmodern critics, such as Nicholas Mirzoeff, whose concept of “Visual Culture” has already produced an intellectual dizziness in the United States and elsewhere.

“Visual culture”—Mirzoeff writes—“is concerned with visual events in which information, it means our pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology.” He argues that “observing” is not “understanding.” Observing belongs to culture (or rather leisure), understanding to history. Needless to say, this believe in a kind of contemporary flâneurie puts too much emphasis on the unavoidability of the impact of technology, making the viewer a largely passive recipient of its stimuli, pleasure (perhaps in a Kantian sense) being the principal one. Yet, in principle Mirzoeff denies the aesthetic condition to be sensory. What Mirzoeff “dematerializes” the most successfully is the presence of a neutral, homogenous identity, replacing it with a plethora of smaller ones—these once thought of as aspects of “the Other”—in a postmodernist manner.

Fortunately, views of historical passivity of the viewer have already been successfully challenged by writers such as Rancière, whose concept of the “emancipated spectator” questions the idea that looking and knowing are two different things. Let’s recall what the French philosopher argued for in his 2004 lecture, a few years ago extended into a book. “The master [let’s replaced “master” with “critic” here] cannot ignore”—writes Rancière —“that the so-called ‘ignorant’ who is in front of him knows in fact a lot of things, that he has learnt on its own, by looking and listening around him, by figuring out the meaning of what he has seen and heard, repeating what he has heard and known by chance, comparing what he discovers with what he already knew and so on.” If he or she wants to become a member of the emancipated community—he or she needs to become a “storyteller” or a “translator,” or both as I am attempting to do here.

Needless to say, in the consumer-driven society we live in academic discourse keep evolving quickly, one exclusive theory being replaced by another, making time feel like a river passing by. But how much those theories change our fundamental understanding of our role as art critics—and our understanding of art—how much they pass through us, remains an open question. How much do those theories demand from us to reexamine what takes place within ourselves? It demands a “reappropriation of Time.”

If I had to name one thing that I believe we must not allow to die, I would say it is personal responsibility vis-à-vis ourselves, individuals as part of a living collective and of history. To reexamine the meaning of such a personal responsibility and mutual recognition, we might need to return to a passionate, even opinionated, and informed approach to writing about art. As Elkins suggested, by doing so we might be able to reinstate “criticism important enough to count as history, and vice versa.” History might be defined here as a conscious inquiry (or ἱστορία in Greek, “inaccurately” told by Herodotus, which passed into Latin to become “history”) that allows one see himself or herself in the context of a longer view of the transformations of society and the critical reflections they generate. History can be (hi)story.

Without producing another totalizing approach to art criticism in such a short presentation, I would like to suggest a model that might be worth considering: this would be one that stresses the unity of art and life, rather than art as a reflection of an impotent relationship with mass culture that relies on technology, read economy. In this model, art would represent an active engagement with society perceived as a thoughtful collective organism, which acknowledges the value of “the equality of intelligence.” It is phenomenon, related to the knowable world of the senses—rather than noumenon, related to the unknowable world of ideas—that fosters the commonality of our experience and by doing so, also allows the art critic communicate with the existing audience in a active fashion, and hopefully gain a new public.

Such a “popular” (as opposed to “bureaucratic”) and sensory (for the use of multiple senses is what we seem to be loosing in the electronic age) approach to writing criticism—as partial and fragile as it might be—can make art critics’ words matter again, rather than ceding control over their meaning to others, be they art magazines, museums, galleries, or advertisers. As a result as such a resistance, “[t]he political consequences of the axiom, ‘there is only one world’,”—we shall repeat after Badiou—“will work to consolidate what is universal in identities,” which constitutes true globalism.

Perhaps the most appropriate way to finish this presentation is to return to the inconclusive words from Paul de Man’s essay, which I reference in this presentation: “This is not the endpoint, the telos [“purpose” or “goal”] but the starting point, the arché [“origin,” “first cause,” “power” and “sovereignty”] of literature” … art criticism included. To put it simply, we art critics still have job to be done.

 

© Marek Bartelik. New York, October 2011

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