Ambivalence as a Tool, Part I
This text is a draft of an unpublished essay written after the first year of Caesura. As it never came into a cohesive whole, I will present it now in three parts.
Something unexpected happened within the first year of Caesura: a little online writing project that sought to develop an art criticism in the context of its absence had secured its raison d’être with the overwhelming sense that art criticism was everywhere, but it was not doing its job properly; it was not performing the role of critique. The days of powerful, relevant art criticism are long gone. But, as the Brechtian maxim says, we should not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones. Yet the sprawling of art everywhere — the increased production and presentation of contemporary art — has made it impossible for art critics to keep up. It has also made the tasks of critique more necessary, precisely at the time when it’s the least desirable. But is it necessary? Or even desirable at all — and really possible — for a critique of art to have a significant role anymore?
According to popular opinion, the most respected forms of art criticism are offered on the pages of the New Yorker, New York Times, and The Guardian. But these publications’ art writing is terribly complacent, unchallenging, and affirmative of given notions of art accepted by a public that is petty-bourgeois, neo-liberal, and ultimately conservative. The scandals around the 2016 election have exposed mainstream media’s undeniable adoption of fake news and reports in a desperate (often hysterical) attempt to delegitimize Donald Trump, an undeniably white, male, conservative, capitalist, crass moderate Republican. Since the emergence of newspaper journalism, it has been known that mainstream media — especially the highest exponents of journalism’s professional and ethical standards — could never be truly objective. (The “new journalism” of the 60s and 70s exploited this weakness by adopting literary techniques that allowed them to explore their subjects from a subjective, often participatory and personalised, point of view.) In 2017, a crisis in journalism was undeniably ahead of us. a The nature of the crisis is more about substance, purpose, and social value than the financial crisis the internet brought about in the print medium; it is therefore even more pressing to reflect one of the medium’s cousins, art criticism, which has been affected by the developments in mainstream journalism. I see this is an opportunity to re-explore the crisis of art criticism against those who consider it beating a dead horse.
In our first roundtable we set out to “consider the various ways in which the problems of culture are not merely the problems of art, but the ways in which art is thought about.” In the midst of this, we pursued reviews of art and mass culture, combined with late criticism essays that allowed us to confront these problems more in depth, with a self-awareness that reviews provided a limited form to explore these issues. Caesura allowed me to consider why reviews have long been ghettoised to the “back of the book” of magazines. Reviews are a quixotic genre. Over time we became more uncertain of the purpose of reviews themselves and whether what we sought to do could be contained in reviews. We asked ourselves, do we push against the grain of how curators or artists have framed the work, or take the work on its own terms? Do we review what we love or what we hate? There was much we hated and little we loved. Here is where the recognition of our ambivalence towards much of the art and music we experience began to take shape. As the sections on late criticism essays developed in different directions we thought reviews could function as our selection of artworks that we thought were important, to highlight certain new practices to each other that could somehow represent critical moments to build upon our own critical approach. Along the way, our conversations about the reviews we were publishing made us wonder if we should abandon them altogether. We began asking ourselves whether contemporary art could open up avenues to reflect on the purpose of art criticism at all. We were more comfortable with historical artworks. Should we abandon talking about contemporary art concretely? Should we abandon art as our object of critique, in order to explore the problems of art criticism? What this conversation had at its core was our own ambivalence about contemporary art and its relationship to criticism. We wanted to take contemporary art seriously, but so few artworks took themselves seriously. This is perhaps not so surprising. But as critics, how could we abandon art? What else could art criticism be if disconnected from art? Unwilling to take this defeatist approach, which really posited the abandonment of art criticism altogether, we sought to consider that perhaps we needed to explore this ambivalence towards contemporary art more directly.
Can ambivalence be a precondition for critique? Can ambivalence be turned into a critical tool? The self-contradictory aspects of art and of capitalism have been reduced to ambivalence. In a sense, ambivalence has penetrated all spheres of intellectual and daily life, i.e. modern subjectivity. But this widespread form of appearance can be a possible avenue for rearticulating the contradictions. The question is whether the opposing tendencies and antinomies, expressed in ambivalence, can be rendered dialectical and thus provide a way out of this impasse. By dialectical, I mean the orthodox Marxist idea that the fundamental purpose of the dialectical method is to change reality. Knowledge of the present — of reality as social process — is an essential of this approach. So we do need to look at contemporary art and contemporary conditions informing contemporary art.
One way of describing the ambivalence of art critics towards art is through the twin poles of doubt and certainty. Artists too experience this ambivalence towards art and society. A doubt and a certainty about whether art can have a role to play in society: can art and critical thinking change society? //
Extreme Sisyphus. From: The New Yorker.
From: image2.slideserve.com.
Tweet by Elon Musk. From: twitter.com.