right now, i'm teaching both the analects of confucius and the republic of plato, as i often do. i think it's worth saying that both of these texts, and the 'golden ages' of human thought in which they emerged, were characterized by extremely fragmented prolitical situations, situations of wars and struggles between small states in close proximity and quick transition. without having done any very elaborate research to try to back this up, i'm going to say it's my impression that periods like that are characterized by creativity and innovation, whereas periods of well-consolidated large nations or empires have the opposite effect. another case: renaissance italy. really, even to try to understand the political landscape of 15th and 16th century on the italian peninsula is crazy. well you get machiavelli and humanism, michelangelo and leonardo and raphael, etc etc.
the roman period in philosophy is often undervalued for its interest and even its originality, but there is no denying that in many ways they were basically ramifying greek ideas and arts. or once china consolidated into an empire, there was far less creative thought, etc. in some ways the reasons are obvious; i do think that both the greeks and the chinese of the spring and autumn and warring states periods had to grapple with different social/political/aesthetic arrangements in close proximity. and if you don't, i don't think you start asking questions like, what is the best political system? also these big nations think they should be running the arts and philosophies, and characteristically take direct measures to establish an official ideology and crush outliers.
so, i'd say, if you want to make, profess, think, create, etc, you should pursue decentralization of political power everywhere all the time. or try this: the state is a force inimical to human thought and art. the more thorough state power, the less thinking and creating takes place. i say i could show that historically. that would be an argument for anarchism, y'all. and if you are casually contemplating a worldstate as our inevitable future, just let it occur to you that that's sort of the end of philosophy and art.
last week jane irish and i went arthopping in nyc, cutting it a bit short on account of the storm. i finally saw the whitney 2; i see why architecture critics have rolled over for it. however, the frank stella retrospective left me (trying to keep it positive here) indifferent. i'll just skip the polemic and say people are really going to have to take some time to explain to me what is actually worthwhile about stella, especially everything after the '50s. jed perl (in nyrb) and others have entered into an alleged issue that allegedly arises because stella insists that items like this are paintings.
first off, who cares? but second: no, man, words don't mean whatever you want them to mean. that's a sculpture; look it up in the dictionary. fortunately nothing turns on this: the work is what it is whether we call it a painting, a sculpture, a relief, an installation, a watchamacallit, a thingummy, mistah charlie, etc. oh stella, like maybe serra, is in the grand gigantic swaggering dicky ego phase, kind of the last gasp of modernism: he still dares to be meaningless! if that's a painting, it's manspreading like a motherfucker.
but we also saw an amazing exhibition in chelsea of a person who i think is one of the most underrated artists of the last many decades: yoko ono. many still know her as the woman who broke up the beatles or whatever, but i think that if she did, that was a service to the world. but artistically, it is unfair to associate her with 'glass onion'. anyway, the thing reproduces a truly lovely and decent and radical 'conceptual' work from 1966 (in general, yoko is among the earliest and the very best of the conceptualists). in one room there are river pebbles, cushions, and a network of string dangling from wall to wall, something like an eva hesse or faith wilding string piece (i've been thinking about fiber arts).
[eva hesse, from 1969-70]
but people are encouraged to mess with the string, and even though chelsea was pretty darn dead on a mid-jan wednesday, a number of people were ducking around the string like limbo, or retying knots, or tacking string designs to the walls, or writing on the walls, where the penciled lines appeared as extensions of the string.
in the back room was 'mend piece' which is a table with shattered crockery, string, tape and glue.
you sit around with people mending - and people were - then set your mended assemblage on a shelf on the wall. this is first of all a critique of a million aspects of modernism and western art, and also the whole thing was beautiful and poetic and decent, and the gallery spaces so active and spirited and conversational.
a lot of conceptualism is clever or even intellectually deep, though rafts of it are not. i still remember living for decades (no wait, it just seemed like decades) near bruce nauman's neon sign on the baltimore museum, flashing "violence, violins, silence'; conceptual art as hyper-familiar and trivial pun, way up there on top of that building.
that is some lame-ass shit. but yoko's best stuff is not only really very intellectually deep (there is a much more sophisticated critique of the artworld in yoko than in nauman), but it also actually means something, and what it means is something good, something wholesome, something that changes the way you feel in a good way. that itself makes it suspicious as art i suppose. but heavens what are you doing to yourself if you reflexively, much less reflectively, respond to decency with suspicion?
i was in pittsburgh over the weekend and went to the warhol museum. i might state my view of warhol as follows: really it's impossible to do the history of art of the last half century without him; he's foundational. now, on the other hand, i would say that i have experienced the images as sometimes amusing, but not interesting as images; just kind of a trick to very quickly change photos into paintings. it's very repetitive and the swathes of color thrown over the image never struck me aesthetically. (also of course the style of his images is utterly ubiquitous; has been for decades. i don't need to ever actually see one again.)
at any rate, i've heard several people say that they were converted finally to warhol by the museum, which is pretty darn cool, in an old dept store etc. and to a limited extent, that would be true of my experience. i would say, for example, that like a lot of people i was favorably impressed with the pre-pop materials, and they have paintings and drawings going back to the 40s, a fair amount of his fine commercial design, book jackets, and so on. he's very fresh and amusing and he can really draw.
now the weakest floor, by far, is dominated by the celebrity portraits of the 1970s. these are mechanically self-imitative; they lose all the sharpness and freshness and conceptual interest of the early pop images. i'd say that in this period, warhol was continuously fawning on celebrity (for example, that was the tone of interview magazine). the man's values are revealed in all their glittering emptiness, his mediocrity as a draughtsman etc is obvious. just speculating now, but the word 'cocaine' comes unbidden to my brain. it's like the most banal disco music, but you can't really dance to it.
but i will also say this: moving back from the 70s/80s to the 60s makes you realize how sharp those early marilyns and elvises and jackies and maos were. it shows how well he was doing the style of warhol in the 60s, and actually i was more impressed with both the visual and conceptual quality of the earlier work than i would have thought i'd be.
[further notes: the 80s collaborations with basquiat are incoherent. the room of floating silver clouds is wonderful. my favorite work is probably the three-d packaging things: the brillo boxes etc. arthur danto wrote about them obsessively for decades, and i could see how one might (he also held that they killed art forever.)]
people really need to think about the globally transformative power of literature and suchlike. it would be nice to have a realistic assessment of such things, rather than a bunch of obviously false hyperbolic catch-phrases. in particular, people are extremely nostalgic now for modernism, which could be anything from yeats and joyce to allen ginsberg and picasso and de kooning and bob dylan. it is a territory infested by superduper stupendous geniuses, and one vaguely misremembers about it that in it half-cracked egomaniacs remade the entire universe. or maybe everyone's just nostalgic for that moment when they were 17 and some poem mattered.
an excruciating example of all this is an essay by joyce carol oates in the august 13 new york review of books titled "inspiration and obsession in life and literature". it's a very pretentious and yet half-assed journey through plato and wittgenstein, with plenty of yeats and updike and virginia woolf. that the whole thing is pseudo is nailed by the the end bit, which is a compressed little collage of cliches. her readers can be expected to nod along and think that finally someone's saying what they've been thinking; that just shows you the sad decline of the average aging dinner-party where the guests are quasi-intellectuals.
Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depths of art, we would have no shared culture - no collective memory. As if [sic?] memory were destroyed in the human brain, our identities corrode, and we "were" no one - we become merely a shifting succession of impressions attached to no fixed source. As it is, in contemporary society, where so much concentration is focused on social media, insatiable in its fleeting interests, the "stillness and thoughtfulness" of a more permanent art seems threatened. As human beings we crave "meaning" - which only art can provide; but social media provide no meaning, only this succession of fleeting impressions whose underlying principle may simply be to urge us to consume products.
The motive for metaphor, then, is a motive for survival as a species, as a culture, and as individuals.
that is, instagram is the apocalypse. lord knows how or why social media is incompatible with art (i'd say it demonstrably is not), making it impossible to write poetry or paint. perhaps it is itself a set of mediums for art. if you think facebook is incompatible with our survival as a species, as a culture, and as individuals, i think you've lost your marbles, if any. also, what a wretched bit of writing that is.
and if you think the modernist novel is a fundamental source of human memory or meaning, you have very little acquaintance with our species. relax and let the girls take their selfies or whatever. there are a number of threats to human survival (oh, the state, nuclear weapons, capitalism, perhaps climate change). that we haven't produced the next updike (if indeed we haven't) is not among them.
i say this to people all the time: your entertainments, and even your most moving experiences, do not have to be the meaning of everyone's life. even if the human species could survive perfectly well without the modernist novel, or indeed the novel, that does not show that a good novel is not a good thing. what you yourself do doesn't actually have to be the most important or the only important thing to be a valid activity, etc. also, read over what you write or think over what you say, and try to be sure it isn't just obviously false, even if your friends nod along.
if i said what she said, but i said it about philosophy, you might get suspicious that my lament had a certain self-serving quality. but what she says about lit is no more plausible - or in some cases it would be considerably less plausible - than saying the same about the discipline of history, or economics, or psychology, or for that matter seamstressing, or farming, or transportation, or trade, or statecraft, or religion, or residential construction, or etc etc etc. none of these are the only important thing, or the singularly most important thing, and though we lived for millennia without the novel, it's been a long time since we've gotten by without farming.
taking the thing where it goes after that: we are no more (and, to be fair, no less) the story-telling animal than we are the animal that calculates or emits polemics or navigates or plays games.
as people age, they often get disaffected by their grandbabies' culture and crank up the jeremiads and prophecies of doom, based perhaps on no real acquaintance with the alleged horrors being lamented. don't let that be you. the culture has never not been in a disastrous decline toward the end.
another privilege of age (along with gaining the right and responsibility to judge everyone) is that you've seen many moral panics and apocalyptic rants and can do some inductive reasoning: oh, this one's going to be okish too. television was the end of all things good and decent and artistic. so were comic books, for that matter, rock 'n roll, hip hop etc. we came out of them sucking no more or less than always.
one thing i'd say about our cultural moment: people hate to argue, or even disagree. they don't want to argue about politics, or art, or anything else, and the sheer fact that you disagree with someone threatens their self-esteem. now people do still want to insult and berate people but only in the company of other people who agree with themselves. no one wants to have an actual exchange. i am going to be uncomfortable in a world like that, and really it's not a world conducive to philosophy, for example. i do think it's a chickenshit moment: people are scared that they're going to be harmed by a well-turned phrase; if you live in fear of words and ideas, i think you need more grit. i grew up among extremely combative and definite adults, arguing all the time about everything. most of the time, this was good: straight up fun for all concerned, even when they were turning red in the face and exploding with insults. if disagreement is prohibited, we'll merge toward completely unjustified consensus within groups and a total incomprehension and ignorance between them that is the last straw of polarization. people are making themselves stupid cowards on principle. also people are credulous to the point of emptiness within their own little spheres of fake consensus, merely subordinated, and by their own choice. you might think that arguing pulls people apart, while agreement pulls them together. but in politics, this approach is liable to leave us in two camps, bristling with hostility toward one another and totally disabled in communicating with one another. arguing is what keeps a democracy unified.
i do think philosophy is pretty essentially agonistic. many would deny that, or seek to overcome it, or connect it to the male-dominatedness of the profession, etc. but usually people who have thought that a consensus must emerge merely fantasized that everyone would eventually agree with themselves. (i don't know why people would think that women can't argue or are always agreeable or something.) but anyway: plato vs. the sophists and aristotle v plato, right? all those hellenistic schools against one another. empiricists against rationalists, and each against each other. an important source of kierkegaard's philosophy is his loathing of all things hegel. nietzsche against everyone. quine against carnap or austin v ayer. or even: confucius vs. lao tzu and mo tzu, etc. people want the issues to be resolved; i'm especially interested in those i think never will be, which are wide-open contexts for debate. seriously, i just wrote a big old 'system of philosophy' a la schopenhauer or something. do i think that it will set things, or anything, to rest? i hope not, even if i do think (right now, provisionally) that my positions are right. i know my fantasy of owning the future with my philosophy is just that. i'd like to be read, but i'm as happy to read with hostility as with agreement, though i'm happy about that too if i ever get any. but without my extreme rejection of plato, kant, hegel, rorty, etc, the thing wouldn't exist at all.
i bet i have said this before, but my favorite contemporary writer on art, by a good long way, is dave hickey. such a bold and wild and and combative and hilarious writer, and also so sharp and right on many matters. (he doesn't have to be right about everything according to me to be my favorite writer.) i'm teaching his invisible dragon again in my beauty course, though i love some of the essays in air guitar even more.
If I said, "Beauty," they said "The corruption of the market," and I would say, "The corruption of the market?!" After thirty years of frenetic empowerment, during which the venues for contemporary art in the United States evolved from a tiny network of private galleries in New York into this vast, transcontinental sprawl of publicly funded, postmodern iceboxes? During which the ranks of "art professionals" swelled from a handful of dilettantes on the East Side of Manhattan into this massive civil service of Ph.Ds and MFAs administering a monolithic system of interlocking patronage (which, in its constituents, resembles nothing so much as that of France in the early nineteenth century)? During which powerful corporate, governmental, cultural, and academic constituencies vied ruthlessly for power and tax-free dollars, each with its own self-perpetuating agenda and none with any vested interest in the subversive potential of visual pleasure? Under these cultural conditions, artists across this nation are obsessing about the market? Fretting about a handful of picture merchants nibbling canapes in Business Class? Blaming them for any work of art that does not incorporate raw plywood?...
During my informal canvass, I untangled the "reasoning" behind this presumption. Art dealers, I found, "only care about how it looks," while the art professionals employed in our institutions "really care about what it means." Easy enough to say. Yet even if this were true (and I think it is), I can't imagine any but the most demented naif giddlily abandoning an autocrat who monitors appearances for a bureaucrat who monitors your soul.
sorry for no blogging. i'm on a writing project in lisbon, believe it or not, doing an essay for a book on the very wonderful joana vasconcelos.
those giant heels are made from pots and potlids, and are installed here in versailles.
but i am back to blog briefly about the attack on the free speech conference in copenhagen. i fucking hate a totalitarian: anyone who thinks that they should be telling people how to talk or draw or write, or for that matter live. i do not care if you are an islamist, a fascist, a communist: you are all the same. as explicitly as possible you advocate obvious evil. i feel the same though more mildly for more mild versions, like say mainstream left or right politics. try perhaps applying the golden rule or something, or having some kind of rudimentary moral insight, because you are failing in that continually even as you pose as some sort of moralist.
i don't quite tell my mother this - she comes from straight party members - but baby, this is an easy mistake not to make. i don't care if the communist party is the basic alternative to fascism, or for that matter vice versa: you are just making an obvious howler in the most flamboyant possible fashion. your heart, whatever you may think, is not in the right place. give up the desire to subordinate and the desire to be subordinated and we might become a species that deserves to survive. if not, not. (fifty shades of grey might be a shitty novel and film, but it is a good allegory of human political history: a basic explanation of our situation.) also, while you're at it, stop pretending that the realization of your desire to subordinate or to be subordinated is the alternative to us being isolated individuals and so lonely and stuff, that you subordinating me or vice versa is the creation of a shared group identity. or putting it another way, what about the collective? because this argument is gross. it's ill. it couldn't be more obviously disingenuous. we'll come together because we are together and want to be together.
but joana vasconcelos's work is anti-totalitarian; i'll be writing about that.
i had quite an amazing time at the art institute of chicago, talking about "the art all around us" at the 'lived practice symposium'. it is an astonishing museum, but the painting i come back to york springs pa remembering is this crucifixion by zurbaran.
this is one of those things that just cannot be shown on the screen: it is monumental in scale, for one thing. i do think zurbaran is a bit undervalued, and even the card at the aic really suggests that he's derivative of caravaggio. alright, obviously caravaggio is in there, as he was for rembrandt, say. but that does not look like a caravaggio: zurbaran extremely is a distinctive and original stylist, though there are many elements in the vocabulary. the spiritual atmosphere is entirely unlike caravaggio. the drapery is very distinctive and graphic and just virtuosic. i prefer him to his contemporary velazquez. the still lifes of zurbaran are real treasures too, and don't look like anyone else's.
it really is too bad about the left, and the phrase 'neoliberal capitalism' is always a symptom of the fact that someone has, on principle, repudiated intellection. here's anthony alofsin, reviewing the international architecture biennale in venice fot the times literary supplement (oct 24). i think he's representing the views of rem koolhaas, who put the show together (this would be ironic given koolhaas's client list). 'Neo-liberalism has eroded the moral mission of architecture, sending the art from the public to the private sector.' sentences like that are so uncontroversial to alofsin's audience that they almost don't hear them as they slide by. 'public' obviously always just means 'state'. the assertion would be that architecture built for governments has been so much better than that built for other sorts of entities. could rem koolhaas or anthony alofsin really stare squarely at the utterly repulsive oppressive brutalism characteristic of more or less every government through the 20th century, and think that the state is the only legit client? nice pentagon, man, and auschwitz was a masterpiece. the greatest art is a concrete bunker, with a concrete plaza outside bestridden by a colossus of the mighty leader. the 'public' architecture of the twentieth century, i assert, was by a good long way the worst architecture ever built anywhere by anybody, with the very worst reasons to exist, good as nothing but a target, improved aesthetically by every act of vandalism. i think the implication of this approach is that not only should the state build more and more, it should be the only builder. i do not understand how you would stroll down this road without realizing that what you're advocating is ugly, evil and the complete destruction of your own profession. really it's as though you have never looked at anything, replacing your eyes with a set of slogans chanted in unison. maybe that's not what's best for art, overall.
so, leftish people. why are you leftish? because you believe in justice. because you believe in equality. because people shouldn't own people, and stuff. absolutely. exactly. alright, now you've got to start generating programs to pursue such goals which aren't obviously destructive of them. that is really how bad the mistake has been: the practical measures advocated to solve these problems have made them much worse, over and over again, obviously. to free people you advocate generating the most thorough mechanisms of oppression and elitism the world has ever known. so, stop placing quite so much emphasis on epistemic solidarity, on all saying the same things together, and start thinking independently about what you really want to achieve and what might realistically be expected to help bring that about. the first move cannot be to constitute a power capable of achieving justice and equality, for such a power has the opposite effect, always, every single time it has been tried, and by definition. it starts on the road to equality by imposing irresistible hierarchy. there is no reason to make this mistake, no excuse for making this mistake, even when everyone around you is making it together. the first step in helping people and stuff will be to dedelusion yourself.
who were the most important artists of the 20th century, and what were the most important art forms? oh you can advocate for, maybe, james joyce, or picasso, or pollock, or henry moore, or mies van der rohe, or something. here are my candidates: louis armstrong, muddy waters, hank williams, grandmaster flash, bill monroe, bob marley, fela kuti, thomas dorsey, eminem, aretha. popular music was the dominant art form of the century: the one with the biggest audiences and the actual effects. also, it was the source of century's greatest beauties and most pointed challenges to various conceptions of beauty. you can pretend that novels re-articulate lives, but i bet you and your friends could almost tell the story of your lives in songs. maybe it's hard to compare hank williams to schoenberg, much less picasso, but hank's music was so very much better, so very much more important to so many more people, so comparatively human, so democratic, so vastly more beautiful, moving, and challenging. so more true.
the government of japan has arrested an artist for distributing a template of her vagina for 3-d printing purposes. that really improves the art, i want to say, or makes megumi igarashi's point for her. and i'll say this about government officials: it's not their fault that they are uncomprehending idiots, imaginationless dolts, idiot fuckwads who think for no reason at all that they should tell you what to do with your vagina. it's neurological, or would be if they had a neurology. the best part about government officials is that they all die eventually, and we can all comfort ourselves with the knowledge that they all die meaningless. also, this will make igarashi an international art star, though i have to say that, as big a fan as i am of the vagina, i think it has been, as it were, thoroughly explored in the art of the last few decades, which often bears an uncanny resemblance to gynecology.
the last graph of the guardian piece is priceless:
Igarashi has said she is on a mission to “demystify” female genitalia in Japan, a country where thousands flock to an officially sanctioned annual penis festival in Kawasaki every April.
i think philip kennicott of the washpost is one of the best critics working in the mainstream press. here's a really rather rich and surprising review of the 9/11 museum. the range is part of what i like: so it's actually a broad piece on contemporary museums, which have moved to a model where they construct the experience as a narrative, which among other things might be too directive with regard to the experience of museum-goers. also it works through the question of where the culture is on 9.11 and the war on terror etc: in other words, there's a lot of good context.
to my way of thinking, the idea of mourning 9/11 is utterly polluted by the fact that it was used as an occasion to complete the transformation of the united states government into a profoundly authoritarian system: the end of anything i would recognize as the american experiment. we're still blahblahing about the supreme court or the bill of rights, or we still effortlessly call ourselves a democracy, comparing others unfavorably to ourselves. but try to picture what jefferson or tom paine would say about a government engaged in universal surveillance of its own citizens, a government that practices indefinite secret detention, torture, and so on. that is what i would mourn at ground zero. those deaths turned into a mere tool for the consolidation of abusive power. it wasn't al qaeda that accomplished that: it was american politicians and citizens quaking in fear. they showed that, though they've got the missiles, they are pussies, all day every day.
just an elaboration of the entry below, to get bloggin again. i say that picassos are almost impossible actually to see, so swathed is the boy in mystical hooha and pseudo-ecsatatic aesthetic claptrap. all you can really do in response to a painting by picasso is groan like a lover or a victim. sometimes the reputation just replaces the work. when you dis picasso you dis yoursef, because you can't not like it without disqualifying yourself from the artworld. that is a very difficult environment in which to resist a consensus, which is actually what makes the basic reputation flimsy as hell because critically unexamined, untested for decades, merely enforced.
in any artform, it is obvious that if being overrated is a matter of having a larege ratio of prestige to achievement then the most overrated artists are likely to be among the very most celebrated, except in cases where their achievement is astronomical. but what i'm saying is that the achievement part becomes well-nigh inassessable; you can't even express a negative assessment in public, but after awhile, an extremely positive assessment is something you perform by rote, perhaps each time even reflecting that you actually are not feeling it at all, but thinking as well vaguely that you ought to. but you oughtn't if you don't. if you were really looking for astronomically bad overrated scores, infinity to 1 or whatever, you should look for them among the very most myth-enshrouded, consensus-great figures.
the repulsive painting below just sold for $30 million. it's another picture of a brutal fascist massacre. no wait! it's holiday-makers frolicking on a beach. it always occurs to me that people are just pretending to think picasso is a super-important super-genius. indeed, it seems like maybe they are only pretending to look at his paintings at all; it is really hard for me to keep my head facing in the right direction and my eyes open, while every fiber of my being is going 'blech'.
we survived the era of evolutionary aesthetics only to land in the era of neuroaesthetics. i would like to point out a couple of things, and then you evaluate whether they are compatible with these approaches. the idea of a distinctively "aesthetic experience" originates in the 18th century in europe. the distinction of the fine arts from the crafts or from religion or from science - picking out, say, painting, sculpture, poetry, music or movement of certain kinds, etc - as a distinctive sphere of human activity, comes from the same period. neither idea is conceptually defensible; the distinctions between fine and popular art, between art and craft, between art and religious ritual, between aesthetic experiences and other sorts of experiences, have never been rendered coherent. class distinctions are all over these concepts.
i have argued these points in a series of books, etc., but i will just enter this challenge: show me a distinct concept of aesthetic experience or pleasure in any thinker or any diary etc etc - show me the concepts you are detecting in the brain - anywhere in human culture before, let us say, the works of shaftesbury. show me a clear expression of any of the basic concepts you are using emerging from any culture besides western culture. then you might want to deal with the conceptual problems with these ideas, the many critiques of them by serious thinkers (oh, i don't know, go sample george dickie's myth of the aesthetic attitude), their total collapse within art itself in the post-modern era (there's a reason the writer of that piece goes to de kooning, in modernism's last gasp).
now this is a problem that is all over neuro-anything: the people doing it are good at scanning brains, terrible at pressing critically on the concepts they start by deploying. they don't even really think they need a coherent taxonomy, or a historic sense, or a clarification of basic terms. they freeze momentary cultural configurations into our neurons and thus biologize their own prejudices. but all the work is done by the initial set of assumptions, and the empirical portion is hardly even relevant to the resulting loop in which they find whatever they brought. they take their political or aesthetic or ethical assumptions and stamp a big red "SCIENCE" on them, which is intended to flummox or silence you with authority or prestige.
one problem - or the big conceptual problem - is the idea that the mind is the brain. (i say this as a materialist.) you will not understand something like art except by moving outside the body, into social systems embedded in a wider environment. however we may describe, let's say, the experience of beauty, we cannot account for it in terms of neurological states, but in terms of those states embedded in an organism, embedded in social systems including languages, embedded in a physical environment. the research model is fundamentally wrong about the nature of the material it is studying.
Avant-garde art is a battle for the visible future. Modern art movements always tried to show what art would look like next, but also what the world would be like in a transformed tomorrow, in which we would see things differently and hence be ourselves remade.
This is one thing that makes art a political battleground, and nowhere has the combat been more excruciating than with regard to the Futurists, a group of poets, painters, sculptors, and designers active in Italy especially in the 1910s and '20s, currently getting blockbuster treatment at the Guggenheim. For a hundred years, their artistic achievement has been obscured by their politics, because figures such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo, and Umberto Boccioni were connected to one extent or another with the fascism of Mussolini.
Italian Futurism: Reconstructing the Universe provides an occasion to consider again the relations between apparently distinct dimensions of value - the aesthetic and the political, beauty and justice, painting and war.
Vitruvius designed buildings for Augustus, and wrote fawning tributes to him. Michelangelo worked for the papacy at perhaps its most corrupt moment. Jacques-Louis David painted for Napoleon. Kazimir Malevich made art for a time in the mode approved by Stalin, with the patronage of the Soviet state. Critics and casual appreciators of art are constantly confronted by the question of whether an artist's politics is relevant to the assessment of the work, and, if so, how.
These days, we have little at stake in the political battles of the early Roman Emperors or the Borgia popes, but the charge of fascism still packs a wallop. Indeed, Vladimir Putin is lobbing it at the new government of Ukraine like a concussion grenade, while Hillary Clinton and many others compare Russia's actions in Crimea to Hitler's approach in the lead-up to World War II. And perhaps the fascism of the Futurists - a very complicated matter - still affects assessment of their work.
"There is not a single painting in the Guggenheim exhibition that I find entirely satisfying" Jed Perl writes in the New Republic (February 24). Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker (March 3) asserts that Futurism is "the most neglected canonical movement in modern art - because it is also the most embarrassing."
I think these critics undervalue the aesthetic quality and the historical significance of the work. Futurism yielded some of the first abstract paintings and sculptures in the Western tradition, and some of the most beautiful and challenging; the paintings of Balla and Russolo compare favorably in many respects to the images produced by their contemporaries the Cubists, for example. Where Cubist works are static, muted, contemplative, the Futurists worked with intense colors and extremely dynamic and unstable compositions. And their self-consciousness as a movement, their claim to represent the future, their relentless innovation, and their quasi-political manifestos were imitated by the cohorts that followed, such as the Dadaists, Suprematists, and Surrealists.
In this and other ways, the Futurists are an essence of modernism, and they presented themselves as the champions of every aspect of their own present: the industrial factory, the machine, rapid transport, flight, and, most notoriously, war. As Marinetti famously said in 1909 in the first Futurist manifesto (included in the <website of the Guggenheim show>), "a roaring automobile . . . is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace".
(russolo, "dynamism of a car", 1912)
The Guggenheim show is full of work that has held up extremely well in terms of visual pleasure and aesthetic challenge, and also as absorbing commentary on the emerging modern world. Works such as Balla's hilarious and disturbing "Numbers in Love" (1920-23) and Benedetta's "Speeding Motorboat" (1923-24) are as various and as radical as contemporary work by Matisse or Picasso, and are at least as successful in developing new abstract vocabularies. And appreciating them in a museum does not indoctrinate the average viewer into fascist ideology. Paintings, even good ones, are not capitulation machines. Unlike most dictators, they don't club you over the head or throw you into an internment facility; they invite you to interpret. What mix of skepticism and appreciation you bring to bear, that's up to you. Paintings present a minimal threat profile.
(balla, "numbers in love")
The Futurist project was, putting it mildly, politically problematic, but the politics also had an element of over-the-top comedy that has featured in the avant-garde ever since. It crystallized one response to the radical changes occurring early in the twentieth century by trying in spite of everything to affirm them. The Futurists wanted to learn to love the machine. That's one reason why the images, as in "Speeding Motorboat", are often beautiful, with a sort of beauty not seen in art before. At a moment when artists were still trying to escape to Tahiti or paint water lilies and bowls of fruit, Futurism made people reflect on the aesthetic possibilities of the technological landscape, and hence changed the way people experienced their world.
The boldness of the Futurists' art was matched by the carelessness and of their politics. As Marinetti wrote: "We intend to glorify war - the only hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman."
Repulsive, but also a mere hyperbolic provocation. The audience was supposed to be outraged, and, remarkably, it is outraged still. Marinetti's politics is a theatrical gesture, like a lyric by death metal band. He had no coherent political position, just a strategy of transgression and provocation that artists have been employing in one form or another ever since. It is not so far from Marinetti to Damien Hirst's diamond skulls and quartered animals.
But perhaps Marinetti's poetry of steel, speed, and death also shows something about one of the ways Europe slid into the world wars, a sort of moral unseriousness and aestheticism that led some people into real evil. It shows something, too, about the terrible alienation from modernity that the artists tried to erase by affirmation; the work is a measure of what it tried to overcome.
We are no longer so distracted by the politics of the 17th century Spanish court that we cannot appreciate the power of Velázquez's paintings of it. That the political positions have become historical artifacts has enabled us to detect aesthetic qualities that might have been concealed when war was raging. We cannot fail to see the Futurists through the lens of the world wars and the Holocaust. But the totalitarian ideologies of the era have faded into history. We confront new, post-modern totalitarianisms.
Many avant-garde movements were roughly connected with Marxism or "international socialism" (for example, the Mexican muralist tradition of Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros), and modern art ended up being associated primarily with the left, though there were many tendencies throughout. In art criticism, the left was dominant, and its critics tended to delete the Futurists even as their own heroes often emulated them. But though people are still, for propaganda purposes, calling each other fascists or communists, I'm not sure there are any real fascists or communists left except among historical re-enactors, any more than there are any Whigs or Blanquists.
We live in the actual, as opposed to the Futurist, future. The way of thinking about European politics characteristic of the era of the Futurists, from fascism on the right to communism on the left, didn't make it into the time we now inhabit.
Every work of art, every artist, every movement, is a place where aesthetics and politics intersect and interact. But neither dimension of value is reducible to the other. Beautiful injustice, if there is such a thing, isn't any more just than ugly injustice. Perhaps we should detach the Futurists (and for that matter the Mexican muralists) from their political positions to some extent, in order to experience the quality of the things they made and the ways they crystallized their situation.
On the other hand, perhaps the works of Michelangelo or Velázquez have been too de-politicized. We see the Sistine Ceiling as a sort of eternal form of beauty, without always being sufficiently attentive to the ways that politics, among other factors, affected how it looks and what it meant, to the artist, his patrons, and the audience. Some greeted it as the greatest of human achievements. Others reviled it as a symbol of idolatry, oppression, and institutional corruption.
Like a Futurist masterpiece, the Sistine ceiling is a political thing. And like the Sistine ceiling, a Futurist masterpiece is also quite a bit more than that.
there's an italian futurist blockbuster at the guggenheim, and everyone's reviewing. "There is not a single painting in the Guggenheim exhibition that I find entirely satisfying", jed perl wites in the new republic. peter schjeldahl in the new yorker (march 3) describes it as "the most neglected canonical movement in modern art - because it is also the most embarrassing", and he describes umberto boccioni as "its one great artist". fascism is the big problem. but as these critics and others also acknowledge, futurism is central to the history of avant-garde modernism: typical, really, except for the rightwing instead of leftwing lean (the comparable contemporary nyc avant-gardists were emma-goldman anarchists, for example).
but i disagree with the negative assessments, and i think they still reflect the politics of the critics. i'll just pick out giacomo balla as one of the first abstractionists and one of the very best. here's an example ("street light", 1909(!)).
i say that compares very favorably, both as to radicalness and as to formal interest, to what the fauvists or soon the cubists were producing.
and here is a sculpture from 1914.
the politics surely have lost their sting, receded into history as an interesting background fact rather than a dispositive aesthetic refutation. futurism is an almost desperate attempt to affirm modernity, affirm the machine, affirm motion (well, and war). but for precisely that reason it is a symptom and index of the alienation it tries to erase or overcome: or in other words, a paradigmatic response to its moment which reveals that moment from many angles at once. the beauty does emerge from the affirmation, and it contrasts with the ugliness and stasis of cubism, for example, even when it looks pretty similar. then if you're revealing the beauty of technology and even war: well, that is extremely problematic. but it is extremely absorbing: a really rich context of interpretation. also it is a real, or the real, avant-garde: radical, forward-looking, way way early for how it looks, extremely influential even on all the artists who repudiated it and pretended not to have been absorbed by it. in some ways the dadaists and surrealists with their manifestos etc were imitators.
so look i'm an anarchist and all, and in some ways, say arthur dove or marsden hartley are doing similar work. but it has not held up as well visually i think, not even close (only o'keeffe). i like caravaggio. how worried am i about his positive attitude to the counter-reformation? oh not very; definitely not making me not like the paintings. all those dudes who painted for monster-kings: holbein, say. or all them commies throughout modernism; i don't think that's better than messing with mussolini in 1912.
dwight garner can be so, so good. here's a line: "You turn each page the way a rat hits the little lever for another pellet of crack." so, lucian freud, 'probably-the-most-important-painter-of-the-late-etc-period,' was certainly a grotesque monster. really some lovely moments:
A boxer when young, Freud loved to thump or head-butt his fellow Britons. One of his daughters recalls, “Dad used to hit taxi drivers and punched people in the street if he didn’t like the look of them.”
Freud leapt on women (and occasionally men) throughout his life as if he were a flying squirrel in paint-flecked work boots.
In Mr. Greig’s account, he could be a sadist. “He became quite vicious, really hurt breasts and things,” a lover comments. He liked anal sex with women, an acquaintance reports, because it was redolent of utter domination.
now, am i going to use such things to bash the art of lucian freud? that would be so typical! because i've never seen what all the fuss was about. but here's what i think is disturbing: i think this stuff is actually part of why he is regarded as 'the most important painter.' by 1973 we were running out of gigantic modernist art heroes; picasso must have been off someplace expiring. pop and conceptualism and whatever were cool and all, but they didn't give you the painter-god: the modernist colossus who re-makes the visible world. so people yearned, and they yearn still. well, as this makes perfectly clear, it is a masochist yearning: utter domination is the mark of genius, expressed in an anal assault or in a masterpiece.
the bacon/freud mini-renaissance in england was like a late efflorescence, a last gasp, because for one thing england never quite got on top of modernism and drove it at all, really: the bloomsbury group were as much late-blooming aesthetes as figures of high modernism (clive bell or roger fry's art criticism appeared merely quaint in paris even as it was written, i should think). they came late, partly because of that. these two guys were like modernism's last chance, the great white hope in a sea of post-modern crap. i'm sure people wanted to build a revival around them, but i think it just petered out. let's add henry moore, maybe. really modernism unfolded at different rates and of course different looks in different places: teens and after and earlier in some parts of europe; 40s/50s in new york/ca; 60s/70 in england. by then, they might have been the only vital fresh forces still doing that with a good conscience.
at all these moments, a basic driving idea of late romanticism/modernism is that you can't judge art morally, that great art is above morality = l'art pour l'art. that was, among other things, an argument against censorship. so that's good. but however, it gets slightly extended, which is where it goes horribly wrong: it apparently entails in the wrong hands that the great artist is outside morality. so, we think we are finding these monster-gods, like they're a quasi-natural phenomenon; genius just seizes them, another reason that they are above our petty little moral rules about sexually assaulting people or whatever it may be. but we are also teaching everyone that to be a genius, you'd better start acting like an unbelievable asshole. and then, though garner doesn't exactly do this right there, we actually accept them as geniuses in part due to their assholery: the bigger the asshole, the bigger the genius. then you get these myths in which it is next to impossible even to see the actual artistic achievement, if any, so stupefyingly do they radiate domination that all you do is acquiesce. we created, insisted upon, constructed, the monsters who are, you know, doing us.
also, the modernist babygod is a psychological anomaly of some sort: diagnosable, dude. so, they're suicidally depressed (van gogh), they're extreme substance abusers (don't get me started), they're literally paranoid schizophrnenics like john nash or whatever. so it does come in various flavors: tormented little toulouse-lautrec! the young doomed poet who radiates sexual heat like a furnace, say verlaine, and who suffers simultaneously with all maladies. the sadist hyper-masculine godling (picasso, hemingway, de kooning, beckett) is only one such flavor, and maybe the important thing is just to be bent: your symptoms: they are your talent. madness lets you see what conventional people miss. but the sadist godling is also a central bit: i think the dominance and submission relation is central to the experience of art on and off, but never more than here. as kierkegaard might say, the actual artistic genius might just as likely be indistinguishable from a grocer or an accountant. at any rate, don't let this make you think that going mad or simulating madness or shooting all the heroin you can find will in itself enhance your craft.
really you're under full anal assault right there in the museum, at least once you accept the critical apparatus, the decades of praise that make resistance socially impractical.
yes, i'm up at nytimes.com on arthur danto today. ole danto, quine, and rorty - yeah i can feel them right here with me, on this silver eagle rolling through the night.
i do love the history of painting very much. but i cannot tell you how tired i am of sentences like this (first sentence of a tls review by jack flam of t.j. clark's new book): "No artist has remade the visible world in a more radical way than Picasso." it's the classic modernist, look-there-goes-god-with-his-floozy superjive that has taken on by endless insufferable repetition the triviality of a cliche. but if you thought about it for a moment you'd see that it was completely insane. no one remakes the visible world by pushing paint around: picasso operated entirely in every respect within the existing visible world, and the only way he changed it at all was by literally physically re-arranging it, a highly localized effect. of course, this whole idea is based on the actually psychotic notion that the visible world is a subjective artifact, and that if you see it differently you've changed it globally. by this logic, for example, you could transform the visible world by putting on a pair of sunglasses; you don't have to stare at another cubist thingummy and then try to see the world that way, which - excuse me - does not work anyway. you destroy the visible world every time you blink, you god-like fuck. this whole idea was based on literally worshiping artists as world-creators. dude. do you actually know any artists? we did not create this world; this world created us.
the idea that picasso re-made the world is either an extremely hyperbolic figure of speech to capture your enthusiasm for what he actually did do - a kind of groan of ecstasy rather than an assertion - or it really represents a completely supernatural belief system, as wacky as any superstition you could readily name.
returning to the art-historical level from the very origin of the cosmos: it's routine to say that the purpose of cubism (for example) is to 're-make the way we see the world' or 're-make the visible world' (these phrases being regarded falsely as synonymous). but this just can't be right. if you lose a sense of the distance between cubist pictures and ordinary visual experience, you have certainly lost a sense of what was ever radical or interesting about them. they do kind of challenge your visual assumptions...at least about paintings. but you can't possibly understand it as a challenge if you don't see the contrast between cubism and realism of various sorts. nor has the world shown any sign of re-configuring itself in imitation of cubist pictures, though such pictures have become so commonplace that they've lost their power to surprise. i think the best you could say about the dora maar, above, is that it's funny, an exploration of the outer reaches of caricature.
you actually completely miss the humor once you take the approach of 'creatah, destroyah, bulbous bubbah'. we need to keep these people with us, retain them as members of our very own species. i do think picasso played with his reception, unveiled the very bathos of his godhead, which is admirable: he really did produce many jokes.
i have to say that the continuing infestation of the academy with marxist theory is a sad thing in a number of respects. one respect is this: there just seem to be no emerging or creative or even responsive modes of leftism; y'all need something new. zizek shows this on the upper intellectual end, for example.
so, communicating with some colleagues about let's say arts education, i quoted friedrich schiller to the effect that art is a form of play. one thing i got back: well, that sort of romantic individualism was just capitalist ideology. i think the idea that you're going to dismiss someone like friedrich schiller as a bourgeois ideologist is just sad. really, however, everyone y'all disagree with is a bourgeois individualist, just like this was 18fucking70.
first of all, the history of individualism of various sorts (and actually i would not necessarily call schiller an individualist) is, as i have been arguing for many years, pretty damn complex. the brand that ends you up at thoreau or kierkegaard, for example, starts in religious, not economic life; the basic idea is that the individual conscience is important, which i think you can only deny at the cost of nightmares. but the marxist interpretation would make the spiritual and political dimensions illusory: all of this, protestantism, republicanism, and capitalism, are just capitalism. i'm just going to baldly assert that you need to ditch the idea that only economy is real. the religious, cultural, aesthetic, and economic developments are all intertwined, and none is the only real thing. if you're looking at vermeer, the quakers, schiller, milton etc and all you can say is 'bourgeois', then you are being very primitive and missing a lot of great stuff.
anyway, the 'bourgeois' crap has got to go. first of all, every damn person making the accusation is herself bourgeois by her own acccount, and i guess trance-channeling the proletariat. however, if you were trance-channeling the proletariat in the states - and if these categories made sense anymore at all - you'd be flying 'don't tread on me' and stockpiling ammunition. you can trance-channel them because, unlike them, you know what they think and what their interests are. stop right there, tear down your intellectual structure, and start again from scratch.
second, to say of a doctrine or a figure or a painting that it is bourgeois: is that supposed to be some kind of refutation, or bear on its truth or its quality? one right answer would be: so what? wake me up when you have an argument. well, the bourgeoisie will be left on the slag heap of history (not; marxism has been left on the slag heap of history, however). but even if it was, that just does not bear on its truth. i mean, on your own account, we're in 'late capitalism' (just keep wishing, y'all). does the persistence of capitalism (well, that's how y'all see it yourselves) show that bourgeois ideas are true after all or something?
anyway, dismissing someone's politics - much less northern european and north american intellectual, aesthetic, religious, and political history from 1517 to 1848 - as bourgeois, is sad and really not attentive to the material in any way and irrelevant to its truth or value. and of course the idea that, for example, the concept of individual rights is bourgeois is really just an extraordinarlly empty and irrelevant justification for silencing people, taking their stuff, interning them, or executing them: i suppose on behalf of the proletariat. if your first move is: well, really, you have no rights; that's just bourgeois ideology: ask yourself: what do they want to do with the claim that you have no rights: why is that an important claim to them? the answer, i believe, is that they want to violate individuals in every possible way on the journey to collective identity.
anyway, the whole structure of thought is a meat cleaver: it's irrational; it's irrelevant; it's crude; it's false; and if history has demonstrated anything, it's that it's extremely dangerous. and it's so bourgeois.
it's true. i'm stoned today. i actually don't think that experts can reliably detect the hand of pollock; that got a bit screwed up in the editing. sometimes it's funny but people can't quite seem to believe that i am actually asserting what i seem to be asserting. not that they disapprove, necessarily, or even disagree. it's just that it doesn't quite register. i seem to be somewhat hostile to both modernism and post-modernism, which would make me a reactionary of the early 19th century, i guess, or at any rate, ready for something else. but i am more hostile to modernism. picasso: creator and destroyer (you doink): or, maybe just a person who put paint on canvas. anyway, at least postmodernism has many playful moments, many anti-pretentious moments, and is open: there are many things you could do or be as an artist. no one can be what modernism held all great artists were.
in the june 20 new york review of books, there is a devastating portrayal of the activities of the andy warhol foundation and the 'andy warhol art authentication board'. the basic accusation is that members of these interlocked organizations were in a position to profit from authenticating and discrediting works, and that this has very much affected their various decisions. [the piece isn't up yet on their site and will likely be behind a paywall when it is.]
whether it's corrupt or not, this whole situation is a remarkable emblem of a central fact about art in this period. postmodern artists, of whom warhol is perhaps the best and central example, attacked many of the basic teachings (or, dogmas) of modernism: the great individual genius, for example, and the concept of originality. warhol's entire set of techniques and the nature of his images were completely incompatible with modernism: he was the opposite of a picasso or a pollock. but half a century into post-modernism, the art market and the museum system have hardly changed at all, and indeed most ordinary viewers of art still believe all the teachings of modernism.
with regard to these institutions, the post-modern era never happened at all. so, the authentication board stamps warhols as originals or not. this makes hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of difference in their value. the stuff they're working through is tens of thousands of images. for the most part, these items were never touched by warhol except to add a signature, if that. both prints and 'original paintings' were instead more or less designed by him and executed in various shops around town, which warhol didn't even bother to visit. then various prints and paintings were executed that he didn't sign, or where it's not clear who authorized what when.
what is and is not an original warhol, in the art authentication board's definition, depends on what warhol was 'aware' of as they were being made: mere awareness is what is analogous, in warhol, to the hand of pollock. now, in my view, the hand of pollock is harder to distinguish from the hand of, say, a copyist, than such institutions like to pretend. but discerning the direction of warhol's momentary awareness in 1973 from here is really a job for an expert, a true connoisseur, or possibly an omniscient deity. and of course, many of warhol's works appropriated images from elsewhere: warhol swiped them from popular culture in the first place. the whole thing could be interpreted as a pointed demonstration that 'originality' is over or pointless in the era of mass media.
and yet the entire discourse and institutional context that would be appropriate to, or at was least developed in relation to, a van gogh or a matisse or a picasso, are just reproduced by the warhol foundation, authentication board, museum, etc. it's frigging absurd, like you were trying to account for the latest results in physics using the intellectual equipment of medieval theology. or it's even worse than that because warhol was actually attacking the system of thought he is now completely absorbed into. if your goal is to preserve warhol's legacy, forget this whole idea entirely. if your mission is monetize warhol to the maximum possible degree, just keep right on.
there are, i am going to say, two reasons why, even if modernism died in actual art, it just kept going in the art market and museum system as though nothing had ever happened. first of all, modernism is extremely, extremely commercially excellent. get rid of the idea of originality and genius; ok, now try to sell that sucker for tens of millions of dollars. don't be silly. honestly, a reproduction of a warhol or an image of it on a screen is basically just as a good as an 'orginal,' and for that matter is just as original. in virtue of what, precisely, would you distinguish them? is it that the original was brushed at a distance of some miles by andy warhol's coked-up awareness? warhols were extremely, pointedly 'works of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.' so the aura has to be imposed or invented, or is just a matter of let's pretend. and really, the difference is negligible even to its extreme proponents, having to do merely with warhol's awareness of the object, which means he was aware generally, say, that a hundred prints were made somewhere in brooklyn, e.g. this would be silly except for the $$$$.
and also, whole generations of art appreciators were trained in modernist dogma, and the claim of arts institutions to various forms of state or foundation support depend on it completely. you go to the museum to gasp at the stunning works of incomparable or super-human geniuses: incomprehensibly great figures that are infinitely more exalted and more important than the mere humans staring at their paintings. that's why an ordinary person staring at a picasso can experience transcendence of their pitiful lives. they need something higher, something seraphic. also they need us experts to tell them what is the product of genius, because admittedly it's not detectible on a visual inspection without a gigantic machinery of hooha, or expertise. you are really really going to need the hooha when the appreciators are staring at a warhol elvis, a lichtenstein comic strip, or a jenny holzer text. you've got some splainin to do, but all you've got is the van gogh schtick. hope people don't notice the difference, i guess, or that no one has enough self-confidence actually to say aloud what everyone is thinking. you might want to make sure they feel disqualified, to start with. shut up and gape, bitch; we'll tell you what to think and what to feel.
so the whole institutional economics of art - public or private - depends on what rosalind krauss called 'the originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths.' it doesn't matter what you do: if you are an important artist, these institutions will portray you and market you as an original genius. the canvas on which you have someone in bangladesh stencil 'this is not a work of original genius' will be authenticated as a work of original genius and held to be more valuable than the economy of bangladesh as a whole.
it's odd, but the ideology of modernism seemed to be anti-capitalist, and the genius floats above commerce like a seraph. likewise one reason people loathed post-modernism was because it seemed to make its peace with commodification, advertising, and so on. this is a laugh. i think you'd be better off reading modernism as a symptom of capitalism and post-modernism as a critique of it. this is obvious, and can't be more clearly demonstrated than in this case.
so maybe actual artists and people who were trying to understand what they were doing came to think that modernism was just a bunch of bizarre and destructive fictions. and then maybe they even came back to it, or left the critique itself behind as boring, after decades. but the art market and the museum system never budged one iota. and though people might criticize the particular decisions and the venality of the andy warhol industry, it is amazingly effective in making an extreme anti-picasso into a picasso and stacking cash to the moon.
cornell tells me we can't expect a paperback of political aesthetics anytime soon, so i'm putting the pdf of the proofs up onlne. i really think this is my best book.
obviously, i've been working on a chart of the interplay of gender, orientation, and aesthetics. in a positive moment in my aesthetic critique of girls and gay men, i said we love y'all anyway, in part because of the differences. now let me try to say a bit more about why, and how i'm thinking about this.
first you get the disclaimer: everything is at an absurdly general level; like, for example, david halperin, i'm trying to describe a cultural imaginary; no person occupies any point in the taxonomy with perfect centrality - and that goes for male and female as well as gay and straight and the various clusters of taste. also every interstice is occupied. i'm identifying an aesthetic coalition of straight women and gay men, and i'm saying that this alliance accounts for a lot of the way things look and sound in popular culture; i suppose one could sum it up like this: a celebration of artifice, an apotheosis of appearance, an orientation toward spectacle. but then just to portray the other side, where i was trying to pair lesbians and straight men, as the wholesale outlet of reality or sincerity or something would just be begging the question in favor of what i'm calling 'our side'. because, true, the appearance/reality split itself needs all sorts of examination. but one way it needs it is precisely as a gendered and orientated pair. it's a complementary system, a yin yang. you can't have one without the other. but i could also say: we're classical, you're baroque. you're rococo, we're neo-classical. you're impressionist, we're cubist. you're pop, we're minimalist.
look i think all these things arise in a system of complements, but then you've got to put them in action in time, like art movements, which they also literally are; they merge and diverge, divide within and coalesce across; the situation at a given time is complex and it's in the middle of reconfiguration. without touching the biology or genetics at all, the way male and female and straight and gay function makes them, i think obviously, interdependent and unstable. the center can be seen in all the sexual and erotic and aesthetic pairings, all the ways people in different groups are drawn to each other and repelled by each other, all the places and ways they merge and segregate themselves from each other, and each other from themselves: psychologically, linguistically, musically, visually, sexually.
the distinction between straight women and straight men - the immense venus/mars differences that supposedly make us incomprehensible to each other - are of course also the center of heterosexual erotics. right? we want to be incomprehensible to each other, and hence be ourselves. this really is actually symbolized in the yin yang, for example: it's a fucking cosmology of difference. and within heterosexuality, the differences become more and more intense because they are the center of the erotic lives of both sorts of people: men get manlier and drive trucks and watch sports, women get girlier and wear frills and makeup and stuff. they drink chardonnay and gossip or whatever. yo we despise that. we can't stand that shit. but what it means to be heterosexual is to emphasize the differentiation and want precisely people who drink creamy lattes and have closets full of incomprehensible grooming products. we are conniving to make ourselves so different that we can't communicate, and so different that we can't not want, can't not be for one another what the other lacks. then again, precisely because of wanting, we are drawn into proximity. we get to know each other. we want to be friends. we are frustrated that we can't communicate. we try. we oscillate toward similarity, and of course we are massively the same as embodied human beings and as part of the same culture or system of identities, even if our bodies and cultures are a bit different too. we try to approach our heterosexual relationships homosocially.
but and so, i don't think there's any objective normative weight in the eroticization of difference: sameness can also be eroticized (and every nuance in between). so we might call that homonormativity or, you know, yinyin or yangyang. well, guess what: heterosexual men and women are the same in that we are heterosexuals, and gay men and women are both gay. so this dimension is not just in play within gay and lesbian groups. now, as, say, lesbians emerge into a kind of erotic solidarity, straight men are migrating to similar symbol systems and erotic configurations, and vice versa: or as the hets push out they enter into an erotics of identification with the homos of the other gender, scattering outliers throughout the journey. one thing i'm trying not to do here is make the het categories fundamental; or to define the homo categories as parasitic on the het categories: i do think in their contemporary configuration they are mutually simultaneously caused, and inconceivable except as a whole system.
the thing is almost an erotic vortex or tornado, in which people are pulled in all sorts of directions by identifications and by disidentifications or disavowals. so the fact that i'm not female, and that i signal that with an entire repertoire - the way i move, the way i dress or groom, the way i adorn my environment, and so on - just is also the fact that i'm male: a complete aesthetic arsenal, but one that only makes sense in relation to its complements. and then the fact that i'm straight: well, that makes use of the same stuff. and so does the fact that you're not a straight woman. and then, with a tilde, that you're not a lesbian; then, that you're a gay man; then, with a tilde, that i'm a straight man, and so on, on each whirl picking up more debris, the whole thing changing shape as it spins.
pretty soon, you have, for example, the diva thing and all its doubly complex longings for the same and for the different. look one thing a diva is likely to be is a sex symbol among heterosexual men: the diva manifests various flavors of extreme femininity. and gay and straight men end up appreciating beyonce from different angles, but certainly erotically both ways round. if, say, lesbians at a certain point distinguish themselves from straight women by identifying with masculinity, then part of masculintiy is precisely eroticizing femininity: voila, lipstick. or if gay men are disavowing heterosexuality by disavowing masculinity or identifying as feminine, then part of being feminine is eroticizing masculinity: pretty soon you've got muscle-bound dudes with mustaches everywhere, more masculine than me by a ways.
but then these pairs might also put the eroticization of differences at an ironic distance, might put them in play, might be too conscious of them to regard them as natural, might see them as erotic resources rather than unbridgeable gaps. and that might be something you could teach us: to stop regarding our own sexuality as natural etc, or to not regard it as only natural, to see that it too is at least in part a performance, and put us in a position where performances of straightmaleness could be critiqued by straight males from different angles, or to see even paradigmatic enactments of masculinity as vulenrable to aesthetic and other sorts of critique. a muscley straight guy with a mustache might re-think his look and come to think of it as intentional. meanwhile, the hets are yearning across the gap and trying to keep the other side's interest or loyalty, and you've got straight women in business suits and metrosexuals. even in a very simplified picture of sameness difference/sameness sameness, there is a constantly volatile swirl of possibilities within all the groups and between them.
there are many oppressions in this unfolding situation, long histories of oppressions that are also eroticized, as dominance and submission, for example. alright? but still we do not want to be without the thing, because then we'd stop wanting, and also become incomprehensible to ourselves. and there are also many liberations, many zones of liberation, many stonewalls. all sorts of loves and all sorts of beauties are opened up as possibilities in the midst of the storm; it's the longings opening up within and across that make the beauty possible or give rise to it or even are it. the het male beauty of a michael jordan or a v-8 engine, the gay beauty of a judy garland or the exact right outfit. and it would not be crazy to look at these as both homo as well as hetero-erotic, as expressing solidarity and difference at once, or the erotics of identification and the erotics of distinction. there might even be transpositions over time as an expressions of yearnings-across.
what you actually want to do with these identities is not destroy or overcome them: no one really has that power even if they are sheer or mere cultural constructions. what you want to do is play with them. we need to try to reduce some of the weight, or some of the power of these systems to configure hatreds even as we try to hold on to the ways they configure loves: hatreds of the same and hatreds of the different. for these are also systems of exclusion, of course, or that's just to say the same thing again. what you want to try to do is increase the pleasure of them and decrease the pain, and i say the best place to focus and celebrate is the art, taking art at its broadest possible sweep, from body presentation to food to music to scent to interior design to cityscape. this is where the play of differences is relatively harmless, but profound. you can't have the identities without exclusions or at least judgments of taste that more or less condemn what is in contrast. but a question is: to what extent can you have these judgments without contemplating destruction? we often actually do pretty well at that, and straight guys in particular need to do it better without abandoning ourselves.
so one thing i am not going to do is just try to disown my male straightness. rather i am actually going to celebrate its aesthetic. we have given a lot of great stuff to the world, and we are, in our own way, extremely aesthetically oriented, or if you could take the oppression out, what you'd have left would be all kinds of interesting symbols and gestures, including all these signifiers of sincerity and authenticity and simplicity, hard work and self-discipline. you might think those are oppressive ideas; you don't actually want to be without them though. that's how we want to be seen, how we dress, how we want to think, how we want to talk.
i think the oppression has been taken out of this aesthetic repertoire at least to this extent: gay male/straight female aesthetics dominates our culture, even if it's still for the most part (apparently! straight men might always be gay men passing) straight men in congress or the board room. now, i say that our various aesthetic expressions and principles constitute a contribution and that you love us for it. and we don't want to lose it partly because of course you do want it. need it, i believe. and of course these categories play out in the tornado in a complex and equivocal way: we become self-deluded in our dedication to the simple truth, and y'all come out of the closet or delight to dress fashionably as an expression of the truth that should not be hidden. bruce springsteen - dressed simply, workin hard all night - might be as much of a gender/orientation re-enactor as rupaul, but might be less conscious of it.
and then i will say, albeit with some grudgingness because i do have the aesthetics i do have, that y'all have made all sorts of contributions too. and even if they were correctly described as frivolity or play or appearance or pop or hedonism or melodrama or spectacle: well, who the hell wants to live without those things in the world, right? anyway, even if i tried to withdraw from them, the withdrawal is defined by their presence. but i don't withdraw: i distinguish myself from them and i eroticize them, see? but looking at it the other way round: hedonism is not sufficient for anyone's liberation. liberation requires hard work, and you want to liberate yourself into something true or meaningful. on the other hand, folks like me seem to be somewhat pleasure or play-deprived. you need anger, but we're perhaps too angry. sheer insulation or ever-growing polarization are unfortunate, but they also intensify the yearnings that end up in new syntheses.
in short, we should really love each other. secretly or not, we do. we certainly need each other and depend on each other and want each other. we should stay different and we should yearn and try to appreciate. we should slum in each other's bars from time to time, and smile, etc. right? i think if you let these things play with you and play with them, the system might become more liquid or improvisational or multi-dimensional. but really who knows? it might even get more extremely differentiated or simplified, which could be interesting too if it doesn't freeze. but you want to start thinking of the gender/sexuality square as an immense set of aesthetic resources, which are also ways to be.
so, y'all think you can dance. could jerome robbins or rudolf nureyev improvise a great dance while you were trying to kick his ass? didn't have the stones, baby. but my people can do that. and we go a step further too: we dance while we kick your ass. we kick your ass by dancing.
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