This is an upcoming article for the Mid America Print Council Journal - Dean Dass is amazing!
Adorno
opens his Aesthetic Theory, published
posthumously in 1970, with the following sentence: “Today it goes without
saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying, much less without thinking.
Everything about art has become problematic: its inner life, its relation to society,
even its right to exist.”
That’s the first sentence! It’s not easy to talk about art.
But don’t we want to make work that we believe in? Is not our
creative work very important to us, even vital? Don’t we want to work for the
greater good? It may not be so easy. We know that already. What if these are
really complicated questions?
Identity is outflanked. Identity is complicated, compromised,
or merely a social construction. Then authenticity is called into question.
The mirror and the echo, both as formal strategies as well as
themes; the exploration of variant as an inherent property of the medium; the
self-conscious print or printed book; the heightened awareness of failure/the
mistake as an organizing principle; the author in the distance; Google Image
Search as a surprisingly valid research tool; the various social media as new
sites for the “edition”; in all of these ways we find opportunities for printed
images to participate openly and generously in contemporary art.
Contemporary art is already a kind of meta-discipline, open
apparently to all other disciplines. Or we might say any number of disciplines
have collapsed into each other. Sculpture, deep ecology, gardening, landscape
architecture and printmaking now appear, for instance, to be closely related or
even interchangeable fields of research. The return of letterpress, in its
close association with the broadside and the community supported agriculture (CSA),
appears a particularly interesting phenomenon, and provides more evidence for
what I am suggesting. We should speak of the evolution of the democratic
multiple.
It may be that the printed image and its history have
something special to contribute, but we need to be rigorous.
Since the early ‘80s we talked about innovative printmaking
and new directions in printmaking, only to discover Hercules Seghers was
already there in the year 1540.
One of the current euphemisms in place is the hybrid print. Be
careful.
Since authenticity has been put forward as a topic for
discussion, we can only assume a problem. Authenticity is missing; it’s hard to
find. How do we know when we have found it? Where did the question originate?
There must be something lacking in our subject. Or the lack of
authenticity can be used as an accusation. I think it is a particularly
devastating accusation. I am very interested in these questions.
Authenticity is one of the primary themes of our Print Seminar
at Virginia. We just completed a collaborative book project, edition of 20,
entitled “Kale!” where we tried to look critically at this new figure of authenticity.
Somehow, despite that we all now eat kale, the problems of the world just continue.
While ultimately I think the question concerning authenticity is a theological
question, looking a bit narrowly we shall see how print discourse has a
particularly keen opportunity to work on these kinds of questions. The issues
surrounding the history of printed images will provide particular and useful
approaches to understanding both that history as well as the opportunities
inherent in the very concept printed images.
But first, how did we get here? Was it Duchamp’s urinal? Is it
Thomas Kinkaid?
Authenticity is a difficult concept.
Everyone looks for it. I would even say that one of the
premises of modernism in art is a search for authenticity.
Generally we look somewhere else.
Authenticity is always elsewhere. Van Gogh dressed up as a
peasant and went out and painted peasants. He thought that by doing so, and by
subsequently making drawings and paintings that were raw and rough, (like
peasants?!) his life and work would embody those same values, rootedness and a
strong connection to the earth and to life. He wrote these very sentences in
his letters to his brother Theo. So authenticity has something to do with the
creation of meaning. In the savage, the primitive, the natural - all these terms
should be in quotes – van Gogh tried to escape from a tired and worn out civilization.
Later, we see artists looking to Africa for inspiration. Generally, we find European
artists looking to their colonies for renewal. So colonialism is bound up tightly
with this search for renewal and authenticity. There is a paradox here isn’t there?
It is one of the signs of a decadent and exhausted people that they will look always
elsewhere for authenticity. Said Nietzsche.
So we have looked into the exotic. We also looked into the
margins of our own society, and at those marginalized within it. Women and
people of color continue to be among those marginalized. So artists whose
content is about feminism or race have a kind of de facto authenticity built
into their project? Artists whose work emerged out of the former Soviet Union
also have a certain cache in recent years. We’ve also seen art made by schizophrenics
and other kinds of patients put forward as something important, influential,
and real. Folk art, outsider art, and in general self-taught art – all these categories
we’ve seen become major influences. Now we speak of outsiderism. Henry Darger
is one of the most influential artists of our time. The Museum of American Folk
Art is built around Darger’s contribution; he is the centerpiece there. I think
this phenomenon is part of the same search, part of the same longing. In all of
these cases we are merely continuing to make otherness a kind of exoticism. We can
do better.
How did we get here?
We’re at a crime scene. The first question is: what happened.
When we speak of the democratic multiple, of representing the people; when we
talk about an interest in the margins and in the exotic or alien; we are
starting to identify the chief characteristics of the Romantic persona. We are
all still trying to channel William Blake. We could do worse.
It is the subjectivity of the subject as such that then comes
to define authenticity. “The one true voice” that comes from the inside; it is
both visionary and redemptive. We all believe this. But that means art is a calling;
it’s part of the genius theory of art. But art is an academic discipline. There
are great tensions here. Again, Singerman’s Art Subjects proves to be the
salient text; this text, required reading for all graduate programs, tells the
story of conflict and discovery as studio art practice struggles to become an
academic discipline. Again, we find opportunities and problems. The opportunity
is to continue to participate in the prophetic tradition.
In theory we find real problems. And in practice it is even
more complicated. Some of those terms defining Romanticism now seem a bit
embarrassing. We all will become a shaman like Joseph Beuys? We are the
exemplars and the voice of the people? I do admire Beuys like no other, but…we
need a new Romanticism. Clearly, a relational aesthetic is the latest attempt to
overcome these dilemmas. Or, speaking as a printmaker, a relational aesthetic
is a new attempt to unite the democratic multiple to a socially redemptive
purpose.
Here we find the socialist vision of Käthe Kollwitz coupled
with the utopian hopes of the ‘60s era publication The Whole Earth Catalog.
Today printmakers seem to edition letterpress books and broadsides and grow
kale from their CSAs interchangeably and with equal emphasis on each. The
academic printshop with its compost and community garden located just outside
is becoming ubiquitous.
But if our work simply refers to climate change, poverty or
injustice of any kind, does that mean our work is about those topics? It does
not follow. Or we might say our work is (merely) symbolically effective. We are
in the midst of a phenomenon whereby artists can refer to anything or any
topic; this is the meta-discipline that is art. To refer to a topic is not that
same as actually working in the field or otherwise doing that research. Let’s
do that research.
That might really be collaboration.
But this is a tricky business and I am not convinced art does
any of this very directly.
Or that the most important aspect of art is what it
accomplishes directly. As social action, for instance, as community, on that level
of effectiveness, art lies well below that of history. In its wisdom, however, art
lies well above history. Paul de Man’s comment here suggests a kind of limit to
art and also suggests what art can accomplish, and I want to develop that insight.
(footnote)
“The work of art offers an answer to the question what happens
to the senses, the sensuous, the body, in an age of abstract and instrumental
reason, the age of the commodity form,” the age of irony, the age of brutal
self-interest; that is to say, our age. “The work of art presents a unity of a
sensuous body [and critical thought.]
Art has that kind of concrete, material logic.” (Terry
Eagleton) So artworks are a kind of body.
This imaginative unity is redemptive. Art wants to touch the
world again, it wants the world back, closer, while all about us the world
continues to recede.
This imaginative unity is of the world, not in flight from the
world. In its orientation toward the world the artwork is essentially engaged
and is already social practice. The artwork undermines utility and
instrumentality even as it employs elements of those vocabularies. Art employs
those vocabularies in subversive ways. (Adorno) That is to say, in
nonutilitarian ways.
The unresolved antagonisms of reality reappear in art in the
guise of immanent (innate) problems of artistic form.
(Adorno)
This is what makes the formal resolution of conflict so
inherently satisfying. The formal resolution of conflict is inherently
satisfying. This suggests that the responsibility of the artist is to make sure
there is a lot of conflict in their work, then, to make sure to formally
resolve the conflict. I think that is something one can say in a critique: your
work needs more conflict. (See Adorno’s dissonance.)
So we are already on the inside doing the work that art does.
In her essay “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident”
Julia Kristeva defines the intellectual as one caught up in the very power
structures one would change. That also clearly posits the artist on the inside.
“It is the task of the intellectual, who has inherited those “unproductive”
elements of our modern technocratic society which used to be called the
“humanities”, not just to produce this right to speak and behave in an
individual way in our culture, but to assert its political value.” “You will
have to understand that I am speaking the language of exile…Our present age is
one of exile.”
Kristeva underscores the important posture of art’s
turning away and refusing to play the worldly game. This has long been a
component of artistic behavior. Art is like a plenipotentiary (full expression of
the power and authority) of a type of praxis (practice, set of procedures) that
is better than the prevailing praxis of society, dominated as it is by brutal
self-interest. (utility, instrumental reason) This is what art criticizes.
[Art] gives the lie to the notion that production for production’s sake is necessary,
by opting for a mode of praxis beyond labor. [or utility] Art’s promesse du
bonheur, (promise of happiness) then, has an even more emphatically critical meaning:
it not only expresses the idea that current praxis denies (meaning, fulfillment)
happiness, but also carries the connotation that (meaning, fulfillment)
happiness is something beyond praxis. p.
17-18 Adorno
Art proposes an alternative.
