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.