This Is Not PoMo

It is somewhat surprising yet altogether enlightening that extensively negative critiques of postmodernism continue unabated at the present date. Certainly it goes without saying that our chronological time is “postmodern” as we negotiate “late modernist” trends in nearly everything cultural, anthropological, technological, philosophical and theological. Yet the critical appraisals of postmodernism, at least in art and culture, seem determined to assert a reactionary position in as much as they call for a “return” to older traditions and definitions. What is not as clear but what I would like to address is that the anxiety provoked by postmodernism reveals a suppression of “new” thought by these critics apparently founded by fear. It appears to be fear of the teleological nature of reflection itself. As the shock of advanced theories on the “social order” and its cultural manifestations has proved unfathomable and threatening to these critics it has surely caused an irruptive transformation in our socio-cultural world as postmodernism becomes both sustained and revelatory.

Case in point is Donald Kuspit’s essay “The Semiotic Anti-Subject”.(1) Well-versed and equally well-published in art criticism, Prof. Kuspit engages in a mean-spirited romp through the basics of PoMo, introducing various mistaken and subjective opinions on what he terms “postmodern art” and artists (including but not limited to Marcel Duchamp, Sherrie Levine and Joseph Kosuth), along the way substantially trashing Rosalind Krauss and Roland Barthes for good measure. The many inconsistencies, misinterpretations and biased opinions present in Prof. Prof. Kuspit’s piece reveal several opportunities for deconstructive reversals as well as elicit sympathy prior to our inquisition. Nevertheless, let us tally them up:

• Ostensibly to define postmodernism, Prof. Kuspit begins his biased and decidedly negative interpretation of postmodern art by comparing it to “Alexandrianism,” by way of Clement Greenberg: “In Alexandrianism, a known art is reduced to a linguistic facade, which is reified into a copy that is appropriated as a look, and as such stripped of its esthetic and expressive implications. . . the moment it is seen as an exercise in language it becomes a hollow ghost in an intellectual hades (sic).”(2)
  

On the contrary, the “façade” of postmodernism (unpacked via poststructuralism à la Barthes and Derrida) allows language to open upon a multiplicity of implications, as well as the “ghosts” of texts relating to other “ghosts.” Further, the use of Greenbergian terminology is selective and misrepresentative, for Prof. Kuspit eliminates Greenberg’s full definition of Alexandrianism as “an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the old masters.”(3) Clearly, PoMo has not ignored the “really important issues” (it often seems to bask in controversy) and has rarely acquiesced to “old masters.” Thus, in these initial paragraphs of his essay Prof. Kuspit misrepresents postmodernism to serve his own subjective points-of-view.

• “For me the denial of depth is the key to postmodernism. It is a rebellious attack against and contemptuous dismissal of the modern belief in depth -- the modern idea that surface is a symbol and symptom of depth, rather than to be taken at face value. Where the modern artist wants people to see the depth behind the surface, the postmodern artist thinks everything you need to know and that can be known is on the surface.”
  

Symbolism has perhaps suggestions of superficiality but in some arts, particularly literature, symbol reverts to allegory and becomes a reinforcement of PoMo’s skepticism(4). “Depth” may still be apparent within the discourse of art as these “surfaces” have been deconstructed via the “archaeology of knowledge”(Foucault). Just as the surface elements within a sentence (its grammatical structure) do not guarantee its meaning, the elements within a work of art do not confirm meaning. However, through techniques learned form linguistic analysis, now transposed to visual “texts” like paintings and photographs, we may elicit a “depth.” It is presumptive of Prof. Kuspit to imply that this has been denied in postmodern art.

• “It [postmodern art] lacks any sense of mental development, and, more crucially from the point of view here, it denies the dynamic unconscious. If the inner world is a derivative extension and construction of linguistic signs then it is more self-conscious than unconscious, and without its own dynamic.”
  

Obviously, one’s perception of one’s “inner world” is impossible given that we have limited access to the unconscious.(5) Thus, it does not follow that this is proof of the “denial” of one’s “dynamic unconscious.” Our “self-conscious” apprehension of an “inner world” is manifested to us through the social-cultural construction of “linguistic signs” and definitely has its own dynamic in our interpretive self-conscious examinations of, for example, pleasure versus anxiety, (6)

• “The idea that "everything [in art] is done by docilely submitting to the arrival of the 'unconscious'," as Redon wrote, so that the semi-consciously constructed surface of art is "suggestive" of the unconscious depths of the "subjective world," which has its "own logic,"(7) dies with postmodernism. So does the subjective world. The "emotions" that Baudelaire thought supplied "the particular element in each manifestation" of beauty(8) die with postmodernism. So does beauty.”
  

The putative “logic” of the artist’s subjectivity and submission to the “unconscious” is indeed suspect in postmodernism but PoMo cannot destroy the “subjective world.” Redon’s capitulation to the all-consuming power of the unconscious is clearly a modernist view that has been rejected by PoMo. That the “surface” of an artwork can “suggest” (other) meanings, however, is an idea that is still very much in play. The belief that “beauty” has “definition” outside of the language we use to describe it reflects a logocentricism that Derrida and postmodernism refute. Neither Baudelaire’s “manifestations” nor “beauty” itself are dead, however, as poststructuralism holds that experience has a semiotic structure. Prof. Kuspit’s accusation that beauty “dies” at the hands of PoMo reflects an oft-held supposition that the search and representation of “beauty” and all of its manifestations have been abandoned in postmodern art. This misrepresentation successfully inflames the public’s hatred of postmodern art as it incorrectly depicts PoMo artists as nihilistic destroyers of “beauty.” As afterthoughts by Prof. Kuspit, these comments are chief among several subjective and unsubstantiated “judgments” that are a disservice to his attempt to define postmodernism.

• Prof. Kuspit’s designation of “the semiotic psychosis” of postmodern art concerns “the denial of any link between the linguistic sign and subjective reality.”
  

This is a misinterpretation: PoMo’s “denial” is more accurately of the link between a sign and its meaning which is seen to be an arbitrary relationship. However, the “play between signs” still links us to possible “realities,” both subjective and objective.

• “More particularly, in semiotic psychosis the linguistic sign is removed from and elevated above the context it makes emotional sense in, and from which, in a sense, it emerges, and to which, in a sense, it continues to refer long after it has become part of common sense.”
  

Again, misinterpreted. The contextuality of the linguistic sign was never denied in postmodernism, rather, it is through the sign’s application within a text that we determine how “meaning” is contextual. In this “hermeneutic circle,” details may be understood by the whole just as the whole may be understood by the details. Contextuality is therefore emphasized.

• “This radical decontextualization in effect isolates the linguistic sign as a transcendent absolute, a kind of Ding an sich standing above all the human contexts in which it might appear.”
  

A most blatant misrepresentation: Derrida denied the “transcendental signified” as evidence of man’s belief in “truths” that exist independent of the language we use to express them. Moreover, to cast the sign as “a transcendent absolute” reveals Prof. Kuspit’s muddied understanding of poststructuralism. “Every new signified is, Derrida cruelly reminds, also a signifier, and so on ad infinitum. . . There is no such thing as what Derrida and Derridans (sic) choose to label the ‘transcendental signified’ which the idealists ask us to believe in: a meaning outside language altogether.”(10) Even Kant acknowledged that we are “utterly ignorant of the noumenal realm” and that we are unable to attain such transcendent knowledge.(11)

• “Semiotic psychosis is clearly an example of omnipotence of thought. Without its emotional context, the sign loses its fundamental human meaning -- broadly speaking, its function as an expression of human nature.”
  

Another misrepresentation: Prof. Kuspit confuses “emotional context” with the contextuality of linguistic analysis. Whether or not language can be a valid expression of so-called “human nature” has certainly been questioned in postmodernism. Exactly how that qualifies as “omnipotence of thought” remains unclear, however. Perhaps he meant to characterize PoMo as exemplary of the “independence” of thought from the language we use to express it?

Prof. Kuspit then proceeds with a tangential attack of that “advocate of linguistic boredom in art,” Rosalind Krauss. He suggests that Krauss theorizes “impersonally” about art and does not “spontaneously and personally feel it.” Ms. Krauss may be guilty of crafting arcane (possibly elitist) theories of art, well supported by her meticulous comprehension of Saussure’s structuralism, Barthes’ poststructuralism and Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories, but most certainly she has a “feeling” for art. Prof. Kuspit’s subjective anti-semiotics come to full focus in his generous suspicions of Krauss’s articulate criticality. Time will not permit more detail but it has to do with the search for the Golden Fleece.

Prof. Kuspit mercifully wraps up with this final alarming point:

• “In both cases, as in all postmodern art, the authentic is turned into the inauthentic by being treated as no more than a linguistic sign of something that does not exist -- the authentic self, authentic art -- except as a sociolinguistic mirage. It is because of the absence of any belief in let alone idea of the authentic that postmodern art is boring and depressing.”
  

If I may forgo the accepted chronology of postmodern art, I want to introduce an artwork to provide a better appreciation of this “sociolinguistic mirage” through a distinction between resemblance and similitude. In 1926, Magritte painted Ceci n’est pas une pipe [reproduced above] and much later Michel Foucault’s little book appeared, wherein Foucault stated the obvious about the sentence, as well as the painting:

“Each element of “this is not a pipe” could hold an apparently negative discourse – because it denies, along with resemblance, the assertion of reality resemblance conveys – but one that is basically affirmative: the affirmation of the simulacrum, affirmation of the element within the network of the similar.”(12)

As an affirmation of the elements within the “network” of representation, Magritte’s painting wonderfully expresses the sociolinguistic structure of art nearly forty years before “continental philosophy.” When Foucault does address it, he clarifies that resemblance “presupposes a primary reference that prescribes and classes” the copied image at the service of representation. This referent is missing in similitude, as the “similar develops in series that have neither beginning nor end.”(13) The word “referent,” used in semiotics for the “extra-linguistic objects” designated by a sign, also engenders the endless repetition and emptiness of artworks of “mechanical reproduction.”

As PoMo has shown no respect for binary oppositions like “authentic-inauthentic,” it seems redundant to state that both concepts are defined by their difference from the other, i.e., authenticity determined by its difference from inauthenticity. It follows then that postmodern art that engages in “play” with inauthenticity must first conceptually grasp authenticity. Thus, PoMo is not guilty of “absence of belief in” authenticity, as Benjamin’s essay still resonates in conceptual photography circles. Duchamp’s readymades, Sherrie Levine’s copies and Joseph Kosuth’s definitions emanate from a postmodern awareness, attraction and passion for the sociolinguistic structures underlying images and texts. These artists and their great art cannot be summarily dismissed through misinterpretation, misrepresentation and subjective judgments like “postmodern art is boring and depressing.”

__________________________________________________

1. Lecture delivered at University of Southern California’s School of Fine Arts on April 10, 2000.

2. This and all subsequent quotations from the essay are at Artnet.com.

3. For more on Greenberg’s Alexandrianism, see his “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”.

4. “In postmodernist allegorical narratives, like those written by John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, scepticism is taken so far as to put into question the culturally constructed nature of subjectivity itself. In such narratives as Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, far from acting as a hermeneutic authority, subjectivity is shown to be an intertextual construct incapable of revealing anything but that which is already known. In the absence of any external authority, the allegorical protagonist is unable to determine whether meaning is projected or perceived. The modern ‘crisis of belief’, in postmodernist allegories, renders unknowable the national destiny that has been Europe’s allegorical legacy to the New World.” – From Allegory in America: From Puritanism to Postmodernism by Deborah L. Madsen.

5. According to the modernist credo, the unconscious is available to us in limited fashion through dreams, hypnosis and art.

6. See Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny”.

7. Quoted in John Rewald, Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin, New York, 1961, 25.

8. Quoted in Jonathan Mayne, ed., The Mirror of Art, New York, 1956, 129.

9. Quoted in Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, 1968, 546.

10. Sturrock, John. Structuralism, Oxford, 2003, 125.

11. Kant: Experience and Reality.

12. Foucault, Michel. This Is Not A Pipe, Berkeley, 1982, 47.

13. Ibid., 44.

By Proxy

My proposal for the Daily Constitutional Summer Issue No. 6 (BY PROXY) will consist of a single page document created specifically for the issue and presented as a contest for readers. The page “site” would need to be either the interior of the front or rear cover (or the rear cover itself) as paper stock would need to be glossy finish for dry erase marker.

My original text is represented in my “bisected process” so that only 50% of the text will be legible. (Examples are here.) Accompanying information provided in the foreword to the BY PROXY issue would invite readers to “decipher” the text by filling in the missing portion of my bisected sentences. The use of dry erase markers is encouraged to facilitate erasure and “corrections.” The first reader to submit a complete and correct decoding of the original text transcription would be the “winner” of a “prize” that can be determined by the Daily Constitutional.*

This magazine specific work continues my text-based and interactive explorations. It is conceived for multiple “players” who perform individual transcriptions and the required decoding actions in a “private” yet competitive format that mimics the “participatory” nature of the art experience. The success of the piece is dependent upon individual experience and person-to-person communication, and its contextual meaning exists as multiple points-of-view by an “invisible” audience.


* This work is conceived as a Limited Edition, consisting of 1999 unsigned and unnumbered prints, plus 1 signed and numbered edition to be given to the first Collaborator to complete the work. For complete rules and a listing of where to find BY PROXY in Basel, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Victoria and Wilmington, visit Daily Constitutional.


Image: By Proxy (2008); limited edition print in book; 6"x8";
© Copyright by Mark Cameron Boyd.

Sublime Pie

My 101 Conceptual Art Ideas project has drawn protests suggesting that “it is the fartherest(sic) thing from being a true artist” and furthermore that “leaving food at different places all over Washington, D.C.” is not art. Time constraints will not permit me a precise examination of exactly what being a “true artist” entails, but I am inclined to consider both the nature of “street” or “guerrilla” artworks and the usage of food in art. My consideration of these topics has at least as much to do with educating critics of my “diary” project (as well as readers of this site) as it does to briefly engage the possibilities for postconceptual work. Understanding that one’s opinions on art, particularly concerning conceptual “street” art, may be partly based on subjective points of view, I endeavor as always to expand the public’s grasp of difficult work through their education about contemporary art through theory and art historical precedence.

First, why food?

Food has played an important role in quite a few artworks as artists explored food not just as subjects for “representation” but as material worthy of use in expression. Artworks made by Daniel Spoerri in the 1960’s consist of remains of meals attached to a support which was then hung horizontally as his “picture-trap.”(1) Spoerri later opened a gallery called “Eat Art” in Dusseldorf where he engaged the “status” of art as a consumptive item as well as questioning the nature of how art attempts the preservation of “a moment of life,” a goal that Spoerri emphatically rejects as he “rips it away from the flow of existence, to make it into a useless, lifeless object.”(2)

We might also enumerate Joseph Beuys (fat, cheese and chocolate), Dieter Roth (chocolate sculpture, gorgonzola paintings and “sausages” made with shredded newspapers and novels mixed with fat), Rirkrit Tiravanija (Thai cuisine as “art”) and Janine Antoni (self-portrait busts of gnawed chocolate) as artists who incorporate food as material for their art objects.(3)

Food as art has a rich historic presence in art history and continues unabated. Be that as it may, my use of food in 101 Conceptual Art Ideas differs somewhat. My approach to the “site” where art occurs is clearly brought to bear through my placement of food “objects” in the public setting. Potentially more intellectually rigorous than the choice of food as art material is the idea that this art “occurs” outside of the existing institutionalized sites of validation, i.e., museums, galleries, art schools. Truly, the guerrilla tendencies of movements like Fluxus, conceptual art and Arte Povera not only predict this investigation by later artists but they have created a new “site” for validation – the discourse about art itself.

Which is a key component of my “diary” project, the “site” of art defined through an intervention into the public sphere; again a “tradition” rife among modernists and conceptualists alike. For example, Daniel Buren’s vertical striped posters placed guerrilla-style on the streets and walls of Paris, or any number of time-based “actions” by artists like Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry or Allan Kaprow.

But does the placement of objects in a city street guarantee its apprehension as “art?” This the sort of thorny issue that returns us to the definition of art itself, which is precisely why the aforementioned artists (and many others, including Duchamp, Klein, Piper, Burden, Acconci, etc.) began to push the envelope regarding art’s “definition.” Street art also critiques the very nature of art as a commodity by questioning the “exchange” value of the art object, as many of these “artworks” were dematerialized through theory (Klein’s “invisible pictorial sensibility”), are subsumed within the artists (“body works”), or became evaporated temporally or spatially (Barry’s gas works, Weiner’s flare residue). Such actions and artists presaged coming suspicions about institutional validation as being complicit with the marketing impulse of the art world. However, chiefly these works enable us to find new “meanings” and new “definitions” for art by challenging us, provoking us and, yes, even shocking us into a renewed sense of perception.

Ralph Rugoff’s critique of Maria Nordman yields yet another reading of street art. Nordman works in urban sites and her use of street ambiance including sound, sunlight and the “chance presence of local pedestrians” creates what Rugoff calls “accidental encounters.”(4) Besides the idea that “accidental encounters” with artful objects on city streets make art accessible to viewers who normally never set foot in an art gallery, street art is much more:

“Projects like Nordman’s represent the culmination of a century-long concern with dissolving the boundaries between the work of art and its larger environment - a vein of interest that essentially reverses the strategy of collage: rather than incorporating worldly fragments, the artwork is incorporated into its surrounding milieu, embracing a dissolution of identity that, once again, recalls the mechanisms of the Sublime.”(5)

Which is why I see my “spiral jelly” and “corner pie” as art. I ought to mention that there are at the minimum at least two other subtexts to the idea behind a “sublime pie.” But that would spoil the “art” part which has to do with your discovery of the concept. I will tell you that only one food work has been actualized so far. But as Weiner and Lewitt both said, the idea need not be made to be “art.”


Image: Conceptual Art Idea #8 (Corner Pie); lemon meringue pie (destroyed); placed at 17th & G Street, Washington, D.C.; 4/23/08; © Copyright 2008 by Mark Cameron Boyd.

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1. Galloway, David. “Out of the frying pan, into the galleries,” International Herald Tribune, Feb. 14, 2004.

2. Hatch, John. “On the Various Trappings of Daniel Spoerri,” ArtMargins.com, Mar. 28, 2003.

3. See also this forum on The Egullet Society for Culinary Arts and Letters.

4. Rugoff, Ralph. “Touched By Your Presence,” Frieze Magazine, Issue 50, January-February 2000.

5. Op. cit.

SUMMER 2008

My Art Anonymous donation was purchased and the collector found this when he opened it:

“101 Conceptual Art Ideas is an on-going project whereby the Artist (Mark Cameron Boyd) posts ideas randomly on 101 Conceptual Art Ideas at his discretion. The owner of this “diary” will receive email notifications when new ideas are posted on-line. These emails should be printed-out and pasted into the “diary” in chronological order.”

And I launched Channel MCB on YouTube to document performances, installations and archival footage.

UPCOMING:
Daily Constitutional Issue 6, “By Proxy” and “Song for Europe” at The Athenaeum in Alexandria, opening 8/16/2008.

End of Art Theory (as if)

Administrator’s Note: Andrej Ujhazy is a BFA major at Corcoran College of Art + Design. He sent me the following essay via email and I post it here with my reply.

Dear Mark,

I am opting to once again form my essay into that of an email. Looking beyond the novelty of it, I find it to be a more accurate form of communication for my intentions. The voice is unambiguously mine, and the audience is also quite specific. Quite simply, it's easier for me to write to you without the anxiety of implying any expertise that I am not sure I have achieved yet that I find to be implicit in a more academic essay--missing the point is more ok in an email. Or less embarrassing, maybe.

I'm not in a panic, as I have my thoughts, and I know where I want to go with them. However, there is an unavoidable sense of urgency as well, a sense that inaction now will not be good. The situation I am finding myself in may perhaps serve as a metaphor of sorts for the circumstances of "post conceptual art":

"It's getting late, everything's set, what to do?"

The task at hand as outlined in the course goals is to "...decide whether [Post-Conceptualist] art practice is adequate for our time, or if it represents only a metonymic avant garde."

As I understand semiotic theory, post structuralism and other "decentralizing" theories, the notion that one thing is more adequate than another [or that it's 'only' metonymic] is not valid anymore, as meaning is essentially an arbitrary practice, so a potentially stubborn advocate of a specific reading could in fact influence the future of the text through mere diligence and volume. Or rather that there isn't a single ideology, thus negating any notion of accuracy in defining what accounts for a single 'time.' This is largely the problem I have with seriously pursuing any academic inquiry.

Your exchange with Ms.Heartney being an example for the problematic situation of theory (and therefore post conceptual art that relies upon it.) Given that both you and Ms.Heartney are established as operating within the "Art World" both interpretations of Prince are therefore 'accurate,' and any further discourse over the disagreement is irrelevant to the work being discussed; both are now part of the catalog. Both interpretations imbue it with meaning, albeit a different one. Isn't this precisely the nature of what Post Structural theory implies? A multiplicity of valid readings, each corresponding to a separate, though not necessarily independent ideology. And if this is the case, how do I determine the relative value. The entirety of the situation is impossible to understand, and anything outside would be presumption and negate the effort entirely by again being arbitrary.

I don't want to announce a crisis, as I don't think I'm allowed to given my still growing/uneven appetite for theory, but it all does leave me nervous sensing some potential for where further ontological inquiry may lead. A state where theory isn't so much critical, but more an empty exercise; a whimsical refining of an unconscious system--it seems at times in critiques, talking about art, and in classroom settings that exercising the discourse is more important than what is actually being said. As I understand semiotics, the theory seems to reinforce this very idea of privileging mode against content, or rather destabilizing content through the mode. In other words it's important to create any meaning, regardless of what it is, because there exists no exact or effective way to inform anyone as to what it ought to be.

And this issue as before overshadows any concern I may have over the state of art. In writing this, I am again torn between fulfilling what I know to be very clear instructions--reporting on what I know in a certain format--and actually acting on what it is that I know, that is that reporting what I know is inherently problematic if not impossible. I'm stuck in a gesture that is a bit of a paradox, or not a paradox, but just a bad place to be/I shot myself in the foot.

I know that this paper is itself subject to itself and that anything I stand my weight behind will thusly be reinforced, and so if I stand my weight behind a proposition that undermines my stance, where do I land?

Speaking with my father this morning, I explained my dilemma, to which he replied that this is a part of the humanities, where there is no clear authority, where the governing body isn't married to a constant as with 'positivist' and 'empirical' fields [I don't like these words on a personal note]. It's another way of saying it, but we've talked about this in class before, and the point I may have missed making then that I repeat now is that given that this is the case, that there is no foundation to hold on to when writing about subjective views, that this is a responsibility that I am incapable of fulfilling: if this can be good why not that just because, too.

I don't know when I know what I am talking about makes sense and when it doesn't. I practice no taste because that is the least 'aggressive' stance to have. Or it is aggressive but once removed from the sort of territorial 'aesthetically pleasing' sentiments that only 'push' art in sheer number, not in quality, if quality exists. No taste, the non position, this is a place I like to be, a place where I am neither on any side nor against any side, on both and on neither. It makes sense.

What doesn't make any sense to me is the critical stance, the one that asserts and prescribes one idea superior to another with some certainty. The idea of a better future is irresponsible and naive, and anything that works to invent a potentiality that hasn't an organ for evaluating or even inferring the outcome prior to is not anything to bother with. If I can't know what is best or even just better, how do I continue assuming I do?

I have been thinking of an allegorical story/an extended metaphor for some time now that I would think would be appropriate:

Consider a train station. You are waiting. There is an old arcade machine nearby with a single life remaining. You may choose to go and play this game to the best of your ability, not knowing much about the 'rules.' You may or may not do well with the apparent scoring mechanism within the game. However that only matters if you use the scoring mechanism to be that by which you gauge success. If instead you decide that it isn't the score but rather the speed of completion that is important, the game changes. Then you may also consider that you could invent an infinite number of other scenarios by which to gauge the success to the point of dismissing "the game" altogether and rather investigating the machine that the game is being produced by, and the level of insight gained to be the value of success. And the entire time, there is the thought that this game is not actually with any purpose because it is only a distraction while waiting for the train.

This is what bothers me. Even critical discourse is still not beyond being marginalized by the vastness of existence. This venture to discover what is happening, what is important, if it can be important, all of this can be negated by a simple switch of attention, a shift of focus to another entirely valid field of inquiry, that is instead of figuring out if Martin Creed is or is not a challenging post conceptual artist, I could simply enjoy his work, or enjoy a sandwich, and nothing would be wrong or the matter with that.

It is not that I don't enjoy reading theory, and thinking theory, and researching theory more. It's that beyond its own activity, I see no value to its practice, no way to know its value. And I don't even know if I enjoy it. I think I do, but it's not so clear often enough as everything else.

Sincerely,
Andrej


Dear Andrej,

It truly gives me great pleasure to post your “essay/email” so that we may engage a bit longer in a discursive search for “meaning” and the use of criticality in consideration of art. Moreover, your grasp of semiotics, poststructuralism and the fragility of language inspire my response to you; certainly, given the current popular view of Postmodernism, your respect for these issues is evident and encouraging.

My use of metonymy with respect to postconceptualism was to show that (some) postconceptualists’ (P-Cons) have a fondness for adapting stylistic elements of conceptual art to “stand-in” for its more substantive theories. The role of metonymy as “master trope” is a suspicious substitution or at the very least a weaker analogy particularly with regard to previous conceptual art theory. Its usage by the P-Cons signals their problematic relationship to historicity and provokes a critical reassessment of their work. My intention was to question the validity of a “stylistic” conceptualism or as Joseph Kosuth calls it, “SCA.”(1) This critique is meant to bring our focus to bear on the methodology of the P-Cons and their “studied ignorance.” And although “academic,” I would hesitate to equate it with an “empty exercise.”

It may indeed be true in our “de-centered,” postmodernist world that “meaning” is an “arbitrary practice.” Further still, the privileging of one “reading” over another is suspect within the rigors of poststructuralist critique. However, the essence of what one attempts within the confines of a limited purvey of language is precisely the issue, as it is after all the attempt that matters.

If we acknowledge that ultimate “meaning” might be infinitely deferred, in any case, within that premise resides an active discursivity that allows criticality to open. That is to say, that our discourse is not so much an exegesis as a “practice” within the “system of representation” of language. This is but one of the remarkably liberating values of poststructuralism that continue to infuse Po-Mo with workable theories with which we valiantly can contradict and counter-attack the narrow-minded vapidity of traditionalists, nihilists and Neo-Cons.

As for my previous “Art World” disagreement with Ms. Heartney, it may better serve us to project our differing viewpoints as a formula. For instance, her view of Richard Prince’s Girlfriends series saw it as (either) “social commentary or sleaze.”(2) My position is “we might view it as both”(3). Thus, our “interpretations” represented, respectively, as formulaic propositions - “A or B may/may not=Prince” and “A+B may/may not=Prince” - are cast not as opposing views but actually have a connatural relationship. This relationship has to do with the pursuit of “meaning” through discourse and essentially reflects “a multiplicity of valid readings,” which perhaps does not help us with “relative value” but may whet our appetite for its apprehension.

Yes, all this discursivity may seem like an “empty exercise” but at the risk of sounding facetious it certainly keeps one busy. Obviously, there is no point-of-view that cannot be “disproved” through linguistic dexterity or rhetoric but these discussions breathe life into our intellectual capacity for art and at least reveal the possibility of gaining some knowledge of it.

Ideas like the destabilization of content are “very” postconceptual and “valid” for P-Con pursuit, and the relationship of poststructuralism to the visual arts opens up unfathomable possibilities (at least to me). Which makes your comment that it is “important to create any meaning, regardless of what it is, because there exists no exact or effective way to inform anyone as to what it ought to be” extremely relevant to our continual discussion of “meaning.” The creation of any meaning arrives at the service of the “constructed-ness” of the language we use, hence the crisis which you hesitate to announce. Indeed, it is a crisis - of mode pitted against content, methodologies versus ideologies. We are left with the negligence of history, a mistrust of meta-languages and meta-narratives, forever chasing distinctions and definitions yet shackled to a fragile articulation through writing and speech.

You represent your position as one of “no taste, the non position.” Obviously then, you are in opposition to this “territorial” aestheticism to which you refer. This is not unique but just another assertion of “one idea superior to another with some certainty.” Forgive my linguistic jousting but I am only trying to make it clear(er) to you that your own keen criticality has already opened an intellectual investigation into the nature of art theory – through its relation to language, art history and all this endless discourse about it.

I have been carrying around an essay by Victor Burgin all semester, not knowing when I might reference it, and that day has come. Your essay encourages me that you have the mind with which to pursue these theoretical issues. However, I urge you to avoid the ubiquitous “jaded-ness” that often ingratiates itself with your generation; for instance, in comparing Martin Creed to a “culinary enjoyment” (“aesthetically” pleasing) you express a decidedly “pre-modernist” approach in comparative judgments. It was then that I thought of the Burgin essay, which I cite at length below, as he provides us with a lucid and thoroughly wrought personification of the various modernisms:

“But if the expression ‘post-modernism’ is to take on anything other more than such a merely tautological meaning then we have to look beyond the self-defined boundaries of the ‘art world’ – Art – to the more general cultural/political/intellectual epistemological upheavals of the post-war period. If, for expository convenience, and in the manner of allegory, we were to ‘personify’ a figure of ‘pre-modernism’ then it would be characterized by the self-knowing, punctual, subject of humanism, ‘expressing’ itself, and/or its world (a world simply there, as ‘reality’) via a transparent language. ‘Modernism’ came in with the social, political, and technological revolutions of the early twentieth century and is to be characterized by an existentially uneasy subject speaking of a world of ‘relativity’ and ‘uncertainty’ while uncomfortably aware of the conventional nature of language. The ‘post-modernist’ subject must live with the fact that not only are its languages ‘arbitrary’ but it is itself an ‘effect of language’, a precipitate of the very symbolic order of which the humanist subject supposed itself to be the master. ‘Must live with’, but nevertheless may live ‘as if’ its conditions were other than it is; may live ‘as if’ its condition were other than it is; may live ‘as if’ the grand narrative(4) of humanist history, ‘the greatest story ever told’, were not yet, long ago, over – over at the turn of the century, with Marx, Freud, and Saussure; over with nuclear weaponry and micro-chip technology; over, in the second half of the twentieth century, with the ever-increasing political consciousness of women and the ‘third world’.”(5)

Best,
MCB


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1. Wollen, Peter. “Global Conceptualism and North American Art” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, New York, 1999, 79.

2. Heartney, Eleanor. “The Strategist,” Art in America, March 2008, 151.

3. “Prince of Thieves”.

4. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. La Condition Postmoderne, Les Editions de Minuit, 1979.

5. Burgin, Victor. “The Absence of Presence: Conceptualism and Postmodernisms” in The End of Art Theory, Great Britain, 1986, 49.