Ambivalence as a Tool, Part III

This text is a draft of an unpublished essay written after the first year of Caesura.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 and Part II here. What follows is a lightly edited Part III:

The art world mistrusts the “Marxists” because they might want the revolution. What they don’t know is that “Marxists” abandoned the revolution long ago. What remains today is the memory that in capitalist society the function of art was determined by its relation to the revolution. What is this relationship now when neither Marxists or artists want the revolution? 

The task for art is not to serve a social movement, there is no real movement for change for it to serve. Art needs to remain faithful to itself. Art will not save us; it cannot even save itself. And besides, Marxism is not a philosophy that can be “applied” to art regardless. Marxism was never just a philosophy to apply to history, politics, or art. Marxism was a mode of politics sui generis — meaning unique, not like anything else. Marxism was and is not definable as “philosophy,” “science,” or “politics,” but it did raise the question how these relate to each other in the historical epoch of capital; it did try to understand the fragmentation of these as a symptom of modernity — that is a unique and new epoch that brings about a new social reality, a new form of subjectivity, and new aesthetic experiences. Marxism provides the fundamental critique of the modern world we still live in that emerged in Marx’s time with the Industrial Revolution. This critique is not prescriptive; it does not provide an answer. Marxism is a task in response to the crisis of modernity. Marxism does not advocate for one concrete form of life over another: whether you should get married or not, whether you should have children, whether you should pursue a sex change operation or not. It’s not about being for or against either of these, or extolling the virtues of one form of life over another, say monogamy vs. polyamory. Marxism also does not advocate for a certain kind of practice over another, say violent vs. non-violent street confrontations, or abstract art over representational art, artivism over relational aesthetics, etc. Marxism is concerned with the freedom problem in modernity, in capitalism. It’s concerned with how capitalism, and the art produced in protest against it, is a distorted form of freedom and at the same time manifests the need for greater freedom. Marxism tried to understand why capitalism, as a society in constant crisis and disintegration, yields new forms of freedom and new possibilities while also constraining all those possibilities. Marxism tried to understand how art, as a distorted form of freedom in capitalism, was self-contradictory, and thus pointed beyond capitalism itself. 

So the underlying ambivalence is whether Marxism can indeed serve or be applied in a critique of the art of the present, whether Marxism can still point to the self-contradictory aspects of art, whether it can still make the case for life beyond capitalism through its engagement with art as a symptom in the absence of revolutionary politics. 

This point leads us to art’s relationship to bourgeois ideology, which is so obvious that we have taken it for granted. For the most part, those who uphold bourgeois ideology and the principles of the role of art that are explicitly self-defined as modern have a narrow sense of it, and end up rejecting all contemporary art after Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism. They only privilege those artworks that stand concerned with modernist problems, as they understand them, but often the definition is too narrow, and the art that they come to study or critique is therefore also too narrow. Say for example, Michael Fried, who is unique in his specific reading of art history as a thread of concerns with absorption and theatricality, and who maintains this line from Caravaggio, to Manet, to Anri Sala’s video art. Admittedly Fried’s project is immensely useful in understanding high-modernism, but it leaves everything outside of that very specific thread — much of contemporary art — without clear categories of engagement, critique. Although in some cases one can read the return of the concern with theatricality as a negative judgement, a regression below the threshold of the advancements of high modernism, it still has to be said that it is not an adequate formula to apply to most of contemporary art. The same applies for the opposing tendency to paint the history of 20th-century art as the history of the dematerialization of the object. These kinds of bourgeois ideology (of art) sans Marxism, provide a linear view of history as one of progress through art. They still succumb to the postmodern abandonment of the task of moving beyond capitalism. 

We can no longer take for granted that the pursuit of freedom in society is bound up with the pursuit of enlightenment in art. We can no longer say in all certainty that the practice of creating a “liberating” or “emancipatory” art is inseparable from the practice of pursuing liberation and freedom. Does searching for and finding an emancipatory art, an art that adequately protests against reality — either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic — mean that the pursuit of art’s emancipation still can be found in society? As society regresses, decays, and the pursuit or presence of freedom dissipates, a similar movement or failure will be seen in culture: in visual art and philosophy. 

This raises the much larger question of whether art, as a fellow traveler of the pursuit of freedom in politics, always runs in a parallel line to politics. It is always possible for the paths to diverge: decades, or even centuries, of progress in art might not directly align with progress in society. This might be one implication that Adorno’s and Benjamin’s — Marxism’s — perspective becomes more tenuous over time. 

Critics cannot turn shit into gold, although many have tried. Or maybe they have succeeded, but the issue is transformation of reality. A desire for the shit to be gold is expressed but does not mean actually transforming how culture is produced, how society is reproduced. Can we speak of cultural “tailism” in the absence of cultural leadership? Can we speak of culture progressing if society is not? Can we still say, as Trotsky once did, that the function of art is determined by its relation to the revolution? If so, then what is the function of art in the absence of the revolution?

In what way does art still point beyond capitalism today? Whether or not contemporary art still has a potential to point beyond the present is a question we must be willing to ask. And it’s up to critics to recognize when those critical moments of aesthetic experience are there, if in fact they are. Art criticism will only have something new to offer in the twenty-first century if there is something new in the art of this century. Everything else is a reevaluation and review of what has already been said and done; although sometimes you need that too. It may still be desirable to (re)artificulate or redefine the bourgeois concept of art, and to question the ways in which art points beyond and offers the possibility of freedom. 

There is no predetermined formula in which art criticism today can express its reservations about the monolithic and homogenous character of art practices and reconcile themselves with their admiration or masochistic infatuation with the power and potential of art. We have to navigate ambivalence like Scylla and Charybdis without succumbing to a cultural conservatism that thinks everything is shit — or its alternative, merely turning shit into gold — simply because we need art to point towards the overcoming of capitalism. 

All of this might have been a roundabout way of asking whether we can still practice an immanent dialectical critique of art and culture after the death of the Left and the failure of Marxism. It does not seem self-evident that the desire for socialist revolution makes such an endeavor possible. However, it might make it necessary.  //

Gustave Courbet, The Wave,1869. From: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Anri Sala - Take Over (Installation View), 2017

Jeff Wall, After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellisson, the Prologue, 1999-2001. From: ArtSlant