Reflections on starting an art and politics reading group in the time of corona: Week 1.

Dear reader,

Over 40 people showed up to the first Zoom session of the Platypus “Art and Politics” reading group I organized with Caesura co-founders Allison Hewitt Ward and Bret Schneider. I confess the response to the 10-week course, which includes classics by Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Trotsky, Benjamin, and Adorno, alongside some more contemporary writings, was overwhelming — as if the texts weren’t overwhelming enough.

Despite having gone to the grocery store in panic the day after the first two COVID-19 cases were reported in Berlin, I was feeling optimistic that I could use this “free time” and isolation to engage in some self-education with friends, comrades, and even a few strangers, online. 

Around the same time, the new editors of Caesura had reached out to us to discuss their interest in launching an art criticism publication. The founders of Caesura agreed that they should take over this publication and make it their own. 

I decided to use my first “Caesura Daily” post to reflect on the start of this reading group since both initiatives seem driven by the same impulse: to use this historical moment, where things are quickly falling away and others are accelerating, where the crisis is experienced as a temporal reprieve from the high-speed experience of everyday life and all while our notion of everyday life is changing so fast we cannot but experience gut-wrenching fear or anxiety-ridden shock. Caesura is the perfect sanctuary. 

We kicked off the online course on March 28th  with a discussion of art and politics after postmodernism based on the following readings:

• Susan Buck-Morss, response to Visual culture questionnaire (1996)

• Robert Pippin, “On Critical Theory” (2004)

• Chris Cutrone, “The relevance of Critical Theory to art today” (2011)

• Cutrone, “An incomplete project? Art and politics after postmodernism” (2010)

In response to Susan Buck-Morss’s text, we kept returning to the question of what does it mean that art might be liquidated, or that museums preserve the illusion that art exists. We also kept circling one of her key formulations: “[Artists’] work is to sustain the critical moment of aesthetic experience. [Critics’ work] is to recognize it.” But do we even all agree on what Buck-Morss meant by “critical” or “aesthetic experience”? Can we even begin to unpack the idea of artists’ work as sustaining “the critical moment of aesthetic experience”? And further, the division of labor implied in the sentence that follows it, that “critics’ work is to recognize it”?

As the session progressed several questions were raised, although a few were answered, it only led us to more questions: What do we mean by critique? Why is art only contradictory in bourgeois society? Has art superseded religion, as Hegel posed? And how does this question address the present? Why and how has aesthetic experience been liquidated? Why do artists continue to make art that reproduces a culture they find boring? How is aesthetics different from communication, from sign and signified? Isn’t the problem about the relationship of art to history? Didn’t the problem start with the postmodern rejection of master narratives? But isn’t there a veiled historicism in – at least at the beginning of – postmodernism? Do art institutions survive to maintain the illusion that art exists? Is modern art a failure (to be a necessary/conscious failure)? Can artworks succeed in their own terms? Is it possible to receive or not receive an aesthetic experience today? Has medium specificity returned with the dominance of performance in the museum? How to recognize the new in the old and the old in the new? What is the failure of art not provoking some kind of satisfaction or recognition? Is it all an endless self-cannibalization of art? Can the past have meaning to the present in a critical way? Does this mean that the separation between the artists and the critic is necessary? Do artists find it necessary to anticipate the criticism of their work? Are we living through post-postmodernism?

Of all the questions posed by the first session, the question that I feel most compelled to want to address as an art critic in 2020, is ultimately not about art itself but about the relationship of art — of our aesthetic experience — to our society, whether or how the limitation/frustration of our aesthetic experience speaks to our frustration with the society we live in.

And what do we make of the issue that our frustration is with realizing the futility of any radical gesture? That’s the problem of postmodernism in a nutshell. 

So much has been lost under the decades of postmodernist rejection of art as an aesthetic experience. The relationship of art to history and politics has become incredibly underspecified and if explored, even by us here at Caesura, it has only been able to happen superficially. What matters is not so much what these concepts mean, but the arguments — rather judgments — about what they are and what they ought to be. 

The task at hand is daunting, but we might begin to understand the problem of art’s relationship to politics and society, or the relationship of politics to art — in modernity, under capitalism — by posing such a question as what art ought to be. Or, as in Pippin’s formulation, coming to grips with the post-Kantian situation with respect to something like “the necessary conditions for the possibility of what isn’t.” And if we can’t answer that because it is no longer self-evident what art is, its relation to the world, or its right to exist (to invoke the reading group’s last reading on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory), we might ask what “oughts” did art express historically, and why has this problem been totally abandoned. Spoiler: a lot has to do with postmodernism, but as Cutrone points out, that only gets us halfway to the deeper problem of the failure of Marxism and the abandonment of the task of freedom as it was posed by socialist politics a century ago, or even further back to the mid-19th century. To the extent that there is a theoretical framework that might have been previously available — say a Marxist critique that would understand this as a problem of the relation of art to society as a whole — but which is now absent, is what makes postmodernism, as an ideology as well as a mood or atmosphere, plausible. 

How this problem has been unraveling over the last 200+ years is what this reading group is trying to understand (among other things), but this is made even more challenging by the fact that what different societies since the Enlightenment value or need art to be shifts and changes (as we will see when we jump from Kant to Hegel, or Baudelaire to Nietzsche, or from Trotsky to Adorno). The problems and the crisis of art posed by each of these historical moments moves on to the next stage largely unresolved, accumulating or compounding the problem. Meanwhile the things  we call “art” and “society” have persisted — either through repetition or regression — as they went through several unresolved crises. This can only appear as a historical train wreck from our standpoint. We do live among the desecrated remains of what once felt possible. All that we might be able to do right now as a point of departure is to explore the ruins and to survey the damage. 

I’ll be posting reports on the reading group over the next ten weeks.

More soon,

Laurie

P.S. I watched Girl, Interrupted (1999). Especially struck by the scene where the head of the mental “hospital”, Dr. Wick, asks Susanna if she knows what ambivalence means. Susanna says “It means I don’t care!” On the contrary, Dr. Wick tells her, “ambivalence suggests strong feelings in both directions, the word suggests you are torn between two oppossing courses of action.” In that scene we are made to believe that this will be relevant later, but it never returns. The film sets up considerable expectation that Susanna will go through a meaningful transformation. But I was very disappointed with the film’s portrayal of what this young woman’s transformation is about. Everything was too easily resolved in her transformation from girl to woman, from simply deciding she wanted to get better and being released back into the world.  //

Read Laurie’s Week 2 letter here.