Wonderful Violence

In Echavarria’s work, it is the ‘deliberateness of artifice’ that Taussig finds interesting, because this act of intentionally exposing the ‘fakeness’ of an artwork highlights the process of its making. In seeing that deliberate arrangement, you want to know not why it is there, but why someone has put it there. Taussig suggests that through naming, the work acquires another meaning which transforms it, mutilates it if you will, and punctures your understanding of it.

This is kind of a wonderful thing, the wonderful being something which is mysterious, unknown, and also surprising. “It is this lure of the unknown, this temptation of exploring the hidden labyrinth, that gives to the wonderful its peculiar fascination” (87). Wonder is a question (as in, I wonder what that means?), the same as an artwork. Interestingly, wonder does not necessarily have a positive connotation: “Wonder, from the Old English wundor, might be cognate with the German Wunde or wound. It would thus suggest a breach in the membrane of awareness, a sudden opening in a man's system of established and expected meanings, a blow as if one were struck or stunned” (85). How close to Taussig’s theory of aesthetic violence comes this notion of wonder as a wound.

Taussig concludes that the mixture of art in/of nature (like mixing fact and fiction, history and myth) is the founding violence of authority. It took me a long time to get my head around this. It isn’t that art causes violence: it’s rather that there is an implicit violence within an artwork that pretends to be natural (or real, or true). Art is not natural. Someone has always arranged it in such a way…

It is through wonder that artist’s can activate political consciousness. Violence is everyday, commonplace. If the artist can heighten the activity of violence to be wonderful, then the audience has a chance to see it anew, to question it, to engage with it, to be wounded by it.

Parsons, Howard L. A Philosophy of Wonder. Philosophy and Phenomenological         Research 30.1 (Sep.1969): pp. 84-101 JSTOR. Web. Accessed 2/5/2011.

“Things live by perishing”*

Clifford’s analysis of salvage ethnography involves the idea that objects have an aura—a kind of history and life, a kind of temporality. By enacting another culture’s passing, such an object confirms the West’s “triumphant present” (228): it stands witness to the past while we guard against the tenuous future.

In fact the object itself aids in our guarding against the certainty of our own eventual end. “The illusory permanence of things, to which we happily succumb in shopping, or in fetishizing pieces of art or in wanting expensive jewelry, thus relieves us, for a time, from a consciousness of time that is always also the consciousness of our own mortality” (Schweizer, 26-27). A lasting thing blinds us to the reality that we too will crumble, and this is especially why we enjoy things torn from their context. Without truly knowing an object’s origin and history, we cannot be sure it hasn’t lasted forever.

On the other hand, seeing our own things collapse reveals, if only for a moment, the unhappy fact of our collective and individual futures: death. “We are the age of our objects and experience our own aging at the same time as theirs” (Sylviane Agacinski quoted in Schweizer, 27). It is unnerving to see the holes start to appear in the sweater you just bought, six years ago. Suddenly that gap of time preserved by the object reveals itself, and exposes that nagging question, how much time left?

*(Rainer Maria Rilke quoted in Schweizer, 25)

Schweizer, Harold. “On Waiting.” London: Routledge, 2008. Print.

If the world is imagined, then do I exist?

If we say that the world, vast and all-encompassing, is imaginary, then we seem to limit ourselves from anything outside of our conceptual capabilities. In other words, we lose sight of what we cannot possibly imagine, there is no longer room for wonder. The world becomes known.

Appadurai’s collective homogenization of ‘our’ imagination—instead of mine, yours, or someone else’s (31)—only furthers that quantification of the known world. If we are collectively responsible for creating this world, rather than you or I individually, we could hardly be surprised at the outcome.

Perhaps this is how he comes to the conclusion that production has become a kind of fetish (42). That idea assumes that there is no longer any meaning in the result of production, which is certainly true if we’ve already got all the answers.

But I suspect that Appadurai isn’t talking about actual imaginary worlds. Anderson wrote that nations are imagined communities (and there is a difference between imagined and imaginary)(Tamir, 423). Appadurai writes: “many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds (and not just imagined communities) and thus are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surrounds them” (33). But I would argue that the focus of power/agency that allows individuals to subvert hegemonic systems has to exist outside of the imagined community, from an active or objective position, as a person doing the imagining. This is why using ‘world’ in place of community is dangerous: it engulfs an individual, and conceals a personal sense of power.

Tamir, Yael. “Review: The Enigma of Nationalism.” World Politics Vol. 47, No. 3 (Apr.,   1995): pp. 418-440. JSTOR. Web. Accessed 3 May 2011.

Presence/Present

Kaprow, Allan. “Just Doing.” TDR 41.3 (Autumn 1997): 101-106. JSTOR. Web. Accessed 21 March 2011.

We’ve moved on from the category of ‘non-art,’ since now all you need to do to cement a work as art is to claim it, and perhaps justify it a bit. Kaprow writes, “Such appropriations are the traditional strategies that turn life into art…the condition for experimentation: the art is the forgetting of art” (103)--as if “experimental art” is the new expression for non-art.

That idea, of forgetting the white plinth, nicely contrasts Fried’s emphasis of ‘presence’, which is interestingly enacted through non-art, variously referred to as objecthood and literalist art (15, end of section II). An object has presence because it sits before us as nothing other than itself (supposedly, anyway, according to Judd). Its bodily relationship with the viewer highlights the experience: it has a ‘presence’ which Fried supposes anthropomorphizes the object, and also makes it a theatrical event. Yet by anthropomorphizing something, aren’t we now considering it in metaphorical, not literal, terms? It’s a bit of a paradox: as soon as we start imagining the object as something other than what it is, we lose sight of it—it loses its presence for us.

Similarly, by suggesting the theatrical nature of such an object—that the viewer’s experience is the most important thing—Fried also explicitly states the superfluity of such an object (18, end of section V). In that case, it literally does not need to be present. But here there is a problem of ownership, which is highlighted when Fried, discussing Smith’s experience of the turnpike, writes, “the situation established by Smith’s presence is in each case felt by him to be his” (15, section V). Without the object, ownership of the experience is transferred to the ‘beholder’ (in this case, Smith) who defines its meaning. Fried argues that because Smith is thus the subject of the experience, the experience itself is like the object (16, end of V). He is wrong: an artwork—object or theatre performance—are authored.  The author only ‘dies’ once the work is realized. Turning it around to say that the object is unnecessary since the experience of it belongs to the audience doesn’t work: that is another paradox of presence.

It brings us back to the idea of non-art, or of forgetting art in order to make it. Perhaps Fried’s contradictions come from the conflation of all kinds of experiences into one hollow category. Does experience refer to being or doing? Presence seems to imply the former—connoting a kind of calmness, or stillness, which may be why Fried wants to attach it to objects—but in actual fact it is the major condition for the latter—in this case presence becomes a kind of activity, presence of mind, “attention to the normally unnoticed” (Kaprow, 104). Somehow, that seems useful for thinking about both the audience and the artist. It seems to me like a work of art is one when both are present.

Attitude and infection

Groys, Boris. “Education by Infection”. Art School: Propositions for the 21^st Century. Ed. Steven Madoff. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2009. 26-32. Print.

  

De Duve presents an analysis of art education in negative terms; he calls his article a ‘diagnosis’ without a cure—art education is diseased. What is the problem? His model of current pedagogy (attitude-practice-deconstruction) is based on the modernist one (creativity-medium-invention), and it therefore inherits those intrinsic paradoxes (the myth of creativity, the problem of invention legitimated by the uncertain future, and the use of medium to contain skill). It is even worse than the modernist model though, because, according to de Duve, the contemporary ‘after-image’ is empty; it is mired in suspicion and disillusionment, and is so general that it can lead nowhere.

But I’m not convinced that this is really a problem. Boris Groys follows a similar (though much shorter and more pleasant to read) path through art education. He even uses the same diseased/infection metaphor, but to a much happier end: his essay borrows from Malevich an idea that art/life is a ‘permanent source of infection that endangers the health of students’ nervous systems’ (28). These infections are necessary to the growth of the artist, and the art school is the best place to adapt to the new infections. “Now, as ever before, education suspends the student in an environment that is meant to isolate him or her, to be exclusively a site of learning and analysis, of experimentation exempted from the urgencies of the outside world” (27): therefore, as Groys argues, the student is constantly exposed to new infections but that “offers the best conditions for breeding the bacilli of art” (29).

The best thing about the essay is that the disease is not a problem but a necessity, and it is the way that the artist/student responds to the disease that will determine the outcome, which could be good or bad. One implication is that de Duve’s conception of ‘attitude’ is not really flat or empty, but actually kind of useful. For example, de Duve implies that attitude is just the same as the myth of creativity—this is a mindless name change which tries to escape the paradox of everyone-is-an-artist. But ‘attitude’ reflects a kind of self-awareness to that paradox, and also affirms the intentions of the artist (which creativity, in its ‘infancy,’ cannot). Groys hints at it with a brief mention of sincerity in art—not that we should be sincere, because sincerity “means precisely to remain repetitive, to reproduce one’s own already existing taste, to deal with one’s own already existing identity,”(29), but that we might approach art by opening to different/other/new possibilities. Is this not attitude? If, as de Duve himself defines it, attitude is indeed a stance, then at least it affirms the artist’s position of autonomy and responsibility for his/her production. The myth of creativity is actually irrelevant, because attitude is something altogether different—it is more powerful, less naïve, but not at all redundant.

The same might be argued for the rest of de Duve’s ‘empty’ model—that it might be more useful than he supposes. After all, how did we get to this conclusion? A little bit of suspicion (or maybe attitude) plus deconstruction, which I’ve practiced.