Good Article for you all! Dean Dass "The Responsibility of the Artist"

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.