On Art and Freedom
The enigmaticalness of artworks remains bound up with history. It was through history that they became an enigma: it is history that ever and again makes them such, and, conversely, it is history alone — which gave them their authority — that holds at a distance the embarrassing question of their raison d’être.
— Theodor Adorno¹
Those who peruse art solely with comprehension make it into something straightforward, which is furthest from what it is. If one seeks to get a closer look at a rainbow, it disappears.
— Theodor Adorno²
Freedom and art have a deep and inseparable relationship. Art only became art as a function of the development of freedom, and the task of the further development of freedom finds its highest expression in works of art. The history of art’s accomplishments and failures is the theory of the present art. Art’s relation to history is one of crystallization, distillment, and phenomenal expression. To refer to early 20th-century Surrealism: good art is more real than reality itself. This notion goes back to Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy.
We may begin at once by asserting that artistic beauty stands higher than nature. For the beauty of art is the beauty that is born — born again, that is — of the mind; and by as much as the mind and its products are higher than nature and its appearances, by so much the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature.³
Similarly, history appears in art more real than itself. For moderns, art is the appearance of suffering from the unrealized potential of freedom, i.e., the appearance of freedom’s task. That art appears this way itself is historical: it is a function of the development of freedom in society. For Hegel, art was superseded by philosophy and depends on criticism to have meaning:
We are above the level at which works of art can be venerated as divine, and actually worshipped; the impression which they make is of a more considerate kind, and the feelings which they stir within us require a higher test and a further confirmation. Thought and reflection have taken their flight above fine art.⁴
For ancient people, the significance of a work of art was self-evident and internal to the work, whereas in modernity the significance of a work of art is hardly ever self-evident and must be articulated from outside. Such outside articulations, however, are nonetheless founded in aesthetic subjectivity — they are rooted in the subjective experience of works of art — and, following the laws of the aesthetic faculties, have limits to their comprehensiveness: criticism depends on art just as art depends on criticism. The irreconcilable divide of art and criticism is itself a symptom, a phenomenological expression of the deeper crisis of practice and theory in society.
The dialectic of theory and practice opens the possibility of the self-transformation of these categories into something totally unrecognizable from the present standpoint — both categories, through their self-realization, would abolish themselves. It is the product and potential of freedom. It is not to be regretted but demands to be followed through and must be addressed in the realm of politics. It will not be resolved in art otherwise. Nonetheless, from the mid-19th through the early 20th century, it was the bands of outsiders, the avant-garde, which intensified this crisis as it appeared in art in such a way that it could be registered critically. It was up to the critics to take notice and clarify the symptomatic significance of such expressions. This is the substance of Susan Buck-Mors’ deft condensation of Walter Benjamin’s dictums: “[The artist’s] work is to sustain the critical moment of aesthetic experience. [The critic’s] work is to recognize it.”
Vincent van Gogh, Shoes, 1888. The MET.
But through the 20th century the consciousness of this historical project dimmed and entire generations retreated from the task not only in art but also in politics — both of which were symptomatic expressions of the regression of subjectivity. This resignation took the form of liquidating the productive tension between theory and practice — a false resolution back into the unity of art and life, theory and practice, and form and content, that existed for the ancients.
Duchamp is an important figure in art history because he was the first who sought merely to embody the appearance of newness as a style, bypassing the work of developing aesthetic newness on the grounds of beauty. Whereas the avant-garde submitted themselves to the power of the imagination, even at the cost of denying life, Duchamp sought to take up life in art affirmatively. To paraphrase Greenberg, in his art Duchamp one-sidedly embraced whatever accusations the detractors of avant-garde art leveled at it.
Instead of an interdependent and mutually constituting relationship of criticism and art, what resulted in postmodernism is criticism dominated by art and art dominated by criticism. The liquidation of art and criticism insults both the aesthetic spirit and a scientific obligation. The romantic regret of modernity in postmodernism (both as “anti-” modernism and “post-” modernism) was a further regression from earlier forms of romanticism in that it failed even to recognize itself as a repetition, and instead prided itself on an illusion of progress. This phenomenon is represented acutely by the October writers.
Now, the other side of the Postmodern project, Clement Greenberg’s words in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch intone vitality:
A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must depend in large part for communication with their audiences. It becomes difficult to assume anything. All the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works. In the past such a state of affairs has usually resolved itself into a motionless Alexandrianism, an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is produced.⁵
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 (replica 1964). Tate.
This Alexandrianism of our day can be seen symptomatically in the celebration of Duchamp. Today, Contemporary art is ordained as fundamentally Duchampian, and rightfully so, for the productions of Contemporary art embrace the now-homogeneous assumptions expressed both in Duchamp’s work and the “criticism” of the postmodernists: the identity of art and life and of criticism and art, a notion of the avant-garde as transgressive hyper-kitsch and modernism as an endorsement of the value of crisis,⁶ and undergirding it all, a presentation of history as flat and formless. It is no accident that there is a resonance between Greenberg’s characterization of creative stagnation and Caesura’s diagnosis of the crisis of Contemporary art in our editorial statement:
Contemporary art, which has dominated artistic practice for fifty years or more, adheres to a concept of the contemporary which obliterates the shape of history and demands the strictest currency as the criterion of art’s success. Like fashion, it has come to be distinguished by the marvelous arbitrary ascents and subsequent ridiculous falls that churn and cycle through art’s fortune, trend after trend, season after season.
There can be no fundamental progress in art without progress in society. The flipside is equally true — that there can be no progress in society without progress in art — because both take as their point of departure the transformation of subjectivity.⁷ Nonetheless, the art in vogue today makes it abundantly clear that we have plenty of room for improvement, even in such a regressive and fractured society as our own. Linking stagnation in art to a stagnation in society is not an apology for today’s bad art but rather a demand for art to discover the threshold of its present possibility. Perhaps art and criticism are non-identical but interpenetrated. Perhaps aesthetic subjectivity remains latent, awaiting cultivation. This much is clear: Contemporary art is subtragic, it is farcical. Greenberg’s sublimation of the spirit of the historical avant-garde ought to serve as a compass for post-Contemporary art: “It is among the hopeful signs in the midst of the decay of our present society that we — some of us — have been unwilling to accept this last phase for our own culture.”⁸
NOTES
A previous version of this essay was published in A2B2 magazine’s second issue under the title Art and Freedom.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 120
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 122
G.F.W. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, p. 4
G.F.W. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, p. 12
Clement Greenberg, Avant Garde & Kitsch
Paraphrase of Hal Foster in his Postmodernism: A Preface, as printed in his anthology “The Anti-Aesthetic.”
See Leon Trotsky, Art and Politics in Our Epoch.
Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch