Ambivalence as a Tool, Part II
This text is a draft of an unpublished essay written after the first year of Caesura. As it never became a cohesive whole, I present it now in three parts. Read Part I here. What follows is a lightly edited part II of III:
The critic loves art because she has been left nothing else to love. And this love is a sado-masochistic love. The critic’s ambivalence — her sado-masochistic relationship to art — will be worked through, and if not, it will lead to either unreflective aesthetic hedonism or critical impotence.
If the phenomenon of ambivalence is to become a critical tool, we must learn to distrust any artwork that does not make us feel ambivalent, and, along with it, any theory that does not admit its own ambivalence (i.e. any theory that presents a purely affirmative or negative judgement) towards art. The critic must cultivate the split attitude towards art and articulate the polarized tensions between affirmation and negation, repulsion and attraction, contempt and reverence, pleasure and pain, doubt and certainty, progress and regress (or decay), freedom and unfreedom. This ambivalence is not only of an art critic’s ambivalence towards art, but towards herself. This is no better represented than in the long and nearly exhausted conversation about the crisis of art criticism. What would it take for the crisis of art criticism to advance? To amount to a critical, qualitative change? To work through one’s own ambivalences about the practice and its theories. To work towards self-knowledge and self-consciousness.
But how is ambivalence as a critical tool different from dialectics? My stress on ambivalence originates in dialectics, but it is also trying to hold on to Benjamin’s recognition of dialectics at a standstill, and the Marxian understanding of regression in history. The dialectical standstill or liquidation is expressed in the disintegration/collapse of the theory and practice problem that concerned Marxism from the rise of international socialist parties to its crisis and final gasps in Adorno’s work from the 60s. But since regression has deepened even further since that time, even Adorno’s perspective becomes more tenuous. We cannot take anything for granted: not Adorno, not Hegel or Marx, not dialectics, not art, not even capitalism. The difference is that ambivalence is a feeling — or rather the tension of two opposed feelings — and we can nurture the awareness of these oppositional feelings in the moment of the experience of an artwork. Articulating our feelings towards the object can aid in articulating our thoughts as well and maybe even nurture those faculties that would allow us to engage in an immanent dialectical critique of the object. This is a highly speculative proposition; it does require a leap of faith, or at least some testing. But it does not intend to be prescriptive; it simply proposes a way to reach a judgement or diagnosis.
On the other side of these feelings is the history of ideas — the theories — and the multiple historical problems that art criticism should account for and keep exploring. Art criticism does not equal the philosophy of art, however; it is the child of a modern/bourgeois philosophy of art. The following are just some of the “old problems” that have remained unresolved and need to be reconsidered in the present:
There is arguably a subjective and objective need for art, but it does not follow that there is a need for a philosophy of art or even art criticism.
The consciousness of the potential of aesthetic experience has been lost, and even the desire for aesthetic experience has been rejected.
“There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” — Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
Art criticism is parasitic to the art world, and this position leaves it vulnerable to merely serving the purpose of affirming that which exists and smoothing the way of new art into the market.
The lost aura of art has been replaced with the “phony spell” of the commodity and the star/celebrity.
The desire to make art criticism profound — historically self-conscious — when we know it’s irrelevant to the dynamics of the art market, specifically the production of art.
Having to say that art is socially important today, despite all evidence that it might not be, stems from an effort toward self-preservation on the part of the art critic.
Aesthetic relations of production are sedimentations or imprints of social relations of production, i.e. they are self-contradictory.
The unsolved antagonisms of reality manifest in artworks as immanent problems of form.
Art is a social product that appears alien to society because it is also a protest against reality.
All art is doomed to failure. All art is doomed to be appropriated by the very forces it seeks to oppose. All art will reproduce that which it seeks to oppose — politicized art even more so.
A Marxist critique that would understand the problem of the relation of art to society as a whole — the relation of art to the task of freedom — is now absent; any kind of radical gesture now would be futile.
With all this in mind, does art still hold the potential for freedom in an unfree world? One wants to hold on to this concept of art — of modern/bourgeois art — because otherwise it would be an abandonment of freedom.
Caesura is not trying to say anything new. With my emphasis on ambivalence as a critical tool, I am not trying to say anything new. If we are ever to manage to pull the brake, at least long enough for a short pause (long enough for Caesura to position itself in relation to artistic production), we will need not only to recover the problems, but to further specify them.
For example: How do these meta-theoretical problems help us understand, critique, and transform contemporary art? If we are to maintain the primacy of the object, one would assume art criticism would maintain art as the object of critique. In this light, art criticism’s job becomes the preservation of the idea of art as a freedom-problem — as emancipatory, pointing beyond itself. Art criticism’s role is still to emphasize the need for art, and one way art and politics are connected is through this question of whether there is still a need for art.
The task of the art critic (or any intellectual) is to prove that art still matters, that art still has a right to exist — even when she knows it might not, hence the importance of ambivalence as a critical tool. But the art critic is impotent or sterile in the face of everyone agreeing that art actually matters and has a full right to exist. So the challenge is to try to make sense of a landscape where everything is identical, everything becomes monotonous, and try to parse out what is actually potentially different (in its ambivalence, or at least suspicion about the status quo). What matters is being able to communicate what is new, what is different and unexpected. Are we in fact impotent, or are we able to recognize the critical moment of aesthetic experience? Can we reproduce this for others to learn from? Arguably, taste/preferences will lie in what is familiar, what already gives us pleasure, what we ascribe higher qualities to: this is because we recognize it. So what does not give us an easy pleasure (but might attract us through surprise, curiosity, repulsion, or ambivalent feelings), what we do not easily recognize, what is alienating and sublime, is potentially where we can direct our aesthetic education and critique of the artwork. As Greenberg wrote in 1971:
Taste develops as a context of expectations based on experience of previously surprised expectations. The fuller the experience of this kind, the higher, the more truly sophisticated the taste. At any given moment the most sophisticated, the best taste with regard to the new art of that moment is the taste which implicitly asks for new surprises and is ready to have its expectations revised and expanded by the enhanced satisfactions which these may bring. Only the superior artist responds to this kind of challenge, and major art proceeds as one frame of expectations evolves out of, and includes, another. (Need I remind anyone that this evolution, for all its cumulativeness, does not necessarily mean “progress” — any more than the word evolution itself does?). [1]
But — and this is a big BUT — the critic (and most sincere intellectuals) are always constrained by the self-doubt that maybe we just don’t know enough, maybe the writing is not good enough. These are true sources of the critic’s impotence. A cure could be found in drenching yourself in the experience of art in order to learn from it, turning that into a practice of building recognizability and expanding taste, etc. Because in the absence of the Academy — of a true discipline of art criticism — we need an ethos of proactive aesthetic self-education. The risk there is that quality will then be ascribed to that which we are most exposed to and familiar with, and as such, it forces us into complacency. This is why we still need to develop the faculty of judgement. As Greenberg points out above, this might in itself still not mean “progress”. //
Martin Kippenberger, Broken Child, 1985. 130 x 120 cm. Dispersion, rubber, stickers on canvas. From: Xtra-online.
Jeff Koons, Hulk (Yolk), 2004-2014. David Zwirner. From: Bllnr.
Louise Bourgeois. Fillette, 1968. Latex over plaster. 23 1⁄2 x 11 x 7 1⁄2” (59.7 x 28 x 19.1 cm). From: MoMA.
Meret Oppenheim, Ma gouvernante - My Nurse - Mein Kindermädchen,1936/1967. From: Moderna Museet.
[1] Clement Greenberg, “Counter Avant-Garde,” in Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, ed. Robert C. Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 14-15.