Interview with Patrick Zapien
I have produced and hosted LivingArt on Houston's Pacifica station, 90.1 FM, kpft.org, since 2002. For a year now, I have made a point to interview artists from Caesura magazine. Why? Caesura seems critical of an absence in art; art is hardly alive. Art compromises its vitality. Art yields to social propaganda. Creativity hides in the wing of a museum’s Human Resources department. If the history of art is the root of art today, it is buried in the rubble of the 20th century. It is more tired than true that art ubiquitously opposes capitalism — or whatever you name our current age. Art can’t help but sleep outside of dreams. The unconscious is purged of its future. Anti-whatever-exists sells like hotcakes: Aimless, Righteous, Tendentious, Illogical. It is the history of good intentions and large hearts. Art’s impossible, creative insight lends itself finally to forgetting the terrible costs of its own failed efforts: “That had no impact, either.” “But we meant well.” And then we die. The necessity of transcending an age passes down like the ages themselves. Possibility paints in its corner. Art stands in defense. Victory is naive. Passion has no way to smile.
—Michael Woodson
Patrick’s two essays, discussed here, are published each in two parts: “Two, Three, Many Octobers, The Vanquished Tradition of the Avant-Garde” (Part I) (Part II), and “The First Episode: Poetry of the Past — The Future” (Part I) (Part II).
Michael Woodson: You’ve published two essays in Caesura that we're going to talk about today, Two, Three, Many Octobers, The Vanquished Tradition Of The Avant-Garde, and The First Episode: Poetry Of The Past — The Future. What you’re getting at in these essays is that no matter how much you want to just be inspired, and to throw yourself into the fun of it, and to believe in it, and to be spontaneous, and creative and imaginative, there's a history necessarily that needs to be taken up. Maybe not religiously, but it’s there. Where do you want to start?
Patrick Zapien: The October group would be a good way to start thinking about Contemporary Art theory and criticism. One thing about the October group is that they’re suspicious of the kind of naivety that is really essential for making art. Every artist knows that when they’re making a work of art, they’re doing things without thinking at a certain level. The actual act of making the work is something that happens spontaneously, and, at the same time, there’s something more to the spontaneity than just spontaneity. The artist hopes that they can do something spontaneously that will have a meaning that goes beyond the spontaneous action that they undertake. And it’s that kind of ambiguity about what an artwork means or what it is — what constitutes its content — that is the issue with Postmodernism.
The issue generally with art, the question that it poses for humanity is: What is the objectivity of subjectivity? What is the objectivity of taste, of beauty, of aesthetic form? Art is the objectification of this super-sensible sense of form — of beauty — that we have. The way that it appears to us is in this individual, subjective way: either as an individual artist who makes an artwork or as an individual viewer who goes to see art. Nevertheless, there’s this kind of objectivity that we’re all participating in; it’s hard to put our fingers on it. Even though everyone has their own idea of what is beautiful, there is a general idea of what the bounds of beauty are, what the limits are. Maybe they’re sort of unclear or not really specifically defined. But there is such a thing called beauty that we can point to and that all art points too. And so there is something of substance to it. It’s not immaterial, it’s not unreal, but it is, in fact, a real enigma that we’ve created for ourselves. It’s that ambiguity of objectivity and of subjectivity that Postmodernism tries to shy away from by disclaiming subjectivity altogether.
Postmodernists tend to see subjectivity as an illusion; that’s why the world appears in crisis. The understanding is like hubris in ancient Greek theater: the idea is that humanity in its subjectivity is prideful. It overextends itself, thinks too much of itself. That the crisis looks as a confusion of reality proves that all of man’s subjective thoughts are really illusions and projections that don’t actually apply to what really exists. It would be better to just forget subjectivity, because it doesn’t exist.
The denial of subjectivity that’s been accomplished by Postmodernism was meant to be a take-down of ideology imposed from above. In other words, it was meant as a criticism initially of elite taste, of museums, for example, or the notion that there were certain sensibilities that were being privileged over others, and that those were the ones that were on display most prominently. But the way that this criticism was leveled by the Postmodernists, through this rejection of subjectivity, also allowed for a devaluing of art altogether. If subjectivity is an illusion, then everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, and everyone can be an artist, because everyone can express their place in life. So then the question that you have leaving the gallery is, where does this all fit in with the history of art? What is the meaning of this? What is the purpose of this? Where did this come from? Where is it going? That’s the feeling that I get when I see Contemporary Art today: that it exists in this kind of historical vacuum where it doesn’t really even want to try to be anything or say anything new or different. Instead, it’s just folded in on itself, repeating the same forms, subject matter, etc., for the past 20 or so years.
What is the October group? Who are they?
October is an academic journal of art theory and criticism that was originally founded in 1976. It’s a post-New Left phenomenon. The October group is a splinter, a break from the kind of cultural criticism that had been practiced by critics like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, or art historians, like Meyer Schapiro or Arnold Hauser. The art critics of the October group were people who had been trained in that mode of art criticism and art history, but then made a turn against it, because they thought that it exalted a certain subjective sensibility. They thought that the way that it treated Modernism — and the avant-garde particularly — was as this heroic figure. And they thought that by the 60s, it had become clear that this was an outmoded way of looking at art history. It was founded by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Allen, and others. But I’ve singled these four out in the essay because of their contribution to an anthology edited by Hal Foster in 1983, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. It is a classic anthology for Contemporary Art theory and became a manual textbook for Postmodern art theory. It’s a crystallization of that tendency.
In your essay you mention Althusser in this regard, I think you develop your content by a critique of his view of the subject/object dialectic. Could you elaborate on that?
Initially they were under the wing of people like Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg, who had a Marxist philosophy of history that was guiding the way they were looking at and thinking about art — not so much in terms of the formal analysis of artworks, but in terms of the overall trajectory of art history and the relationship of artists to society at large. So when the October group was trying to break away from that tendency, they turned to French structuralism for a theory that could pretend to have a greater objectivity than the Modernist criticism of Greenberg or Fried.
This goes in a lot of different directions, I am sure, but we can apply it to the October group in that they abandon subjectivity via Althusser, in the wake of the failure of Marxism.
Yes. The example that I take up in this essay is from Rosalind Krauss, her essay from the Anti-Aesthetic called Sculpture in the Expanded Field, which was her seminal essay and is very important for Contemporary Art in terms of trying to understand the emergence of installation, Land Art, and Performance Art in the 1960s and 70s.
How does Krauss address these emergent art forms as a turn away from Modernism into this Althusserian tendency?
Krauss begins her essay by trying to distinguish this new tendency in sculpture — in Land Art and in Minimalism — from Modernist sculpture. What she says is that Modernist sculpture was a reaction to a crisis in the ancient practice of monuments; modern sculpture becomes its own specific medium, its own specific art, because there’s less of a need for monuments in the 19th century. There emerges an ability for artists to think about what it means to make art in three dimensions, in a way that’s not necessarily related to the practical uses and purposes of monuments. It’s not connected to a specific place, person, or time in the way that monuments are. There’s this kind of obliteration of space and time that is the beginning for modern sculpture, at least that’s what handcraft begins as. Modern sculpture develops itself through this process of self-reference, asking itself what it is. What is it to make something in space? What is it for that to be art?
Carl Andre, Copper-Zinc Plain, 1969. SFMoMA.
Her understanding is that this is how the Modernist notion of sculpture developed and progressed. Beginning with Rodin, she uses the example of his Gates of Hell and his statue of Balzac, as two failed monuments that inaugurate the history of Modernist sculpture. What she wants to say is new or different about Minimalism or Land Art is that it’s not actually concerned — in the way that modern sculpture is — with trying to understand what it itself is as sculpture. She says that whereas modernist sculpture has this kind of negative conception of itself; a negative relationship to the tradition of monuments, Minimalism and Land Art rather contain the beginning of a new positivity. She sees as her task trying to systematize these new positive approaches, which is where the “expanded field” comes in. She breaks down sculpture into categories of logical determination, logical relation.
For Krauss, if Modernist sculpture was this kind of subjective attempt to define what sculpture could be outside of — the particularities of culture, history, or even the conditions of a particular site or place — then the way to approach this new art, which is taking this objectivist approach to logical possibilities, is not to think about what it means subjectively for the artist to make these works, but rather to try to categorize these works according to their different features. The term “expanded field” that she uses means that sculpture can be defined as something that is in between — and also not merely either — architecture and landscape. She makes this grid where the idea of sculpture, the practice of sculpture, is something that refers to architecture, but is not architecture; it refers to landscape, but is not landscape, and so on. She thinks that those are more adequate categories for defining and critically assessing this new art of the 1960s and 1970s of Minimalism and Land Art than dealing with art as this history of subjective forms.
It seems to me that we’re on a razor’s edge here because of the Modernists who were negatively critiquing a loss, or a coming-up-short, or a failure — something that’s not good enough. They persisted in doing that to the point where, at least according to Krauss, it didn’t go anywhere. The Modern, Modernism, or the avant-garde got stale. At least Krauss is in the school of freedom, right? She’s asking: “What's next for the imagination?” Postmodernism sells the problem short, but we can appreciate how this is a problem worth working on.
Certainly. The artists of the 1960s and 1970s who were engaged in this transformation of sculpture were thinking about the way that Modernist sculpture had reached a certain dead-end. The issue that I take with Krauss’s argument isn’t so much the value that she sees in the work that she identified. I don’t disagree with her about most of what she says of the work, in terms of logical description of its structure and how it functions. There’s the question of what the work is as a piece of material existence. But then, what does that mean for the viewer?
I always look for some sort of proof. And then it escapes you. I think we can talk about your idea of how art is dealing with the negative, but it seems like the proof is in the frustration of the very problem. You cannot deny the fact that Postmodernism is related to Modernism, and it can’t just dodge the problem. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
While preparing for this interview, I saw this little piece by Rosalind Krauss where she is reflecting on visiting a museum with Michael Fried and looking at a Frank Stella painting. A student that comes into the gallery and asks Fried why the Stella painting is good, and Fried says something about how Stella goes to the Met every day and looks for hours at the Velasquezes there and racks his brain trying to figure out how he can paint like him, but he recognizes that he can’t. He has to paint stripes instead. For Krauss this was an example, first of all, of Fried’s ability to bridge the history of painting in a couple of sentences, and to express the problem that the history of painting presents to itself. At the same time, by the end of this little reflective piece, what she recognizes is that the kind of history that was being emphasized by Fried was only the history of Modernism. And the history of Modernism was only a particular sensibility. It was only a point of view. Art history and art theory or criticism that tried to judge art by mobilizing the history of all art history was really mistaking its own opinions or perspective for history. She wants to liquidate history, as a perspective from which to look at art, because history is only a particular history.
History always sort of appears in this kind of fraught way, as this thing that could either be the thing itself or could just be a fancy idyll. It always seems like anything, could be the thing that changes everything, or it could be nothing at all. The fact that they want to single out history as a subjective mode is the way that they shy away from the problem that it presents.
Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell, c. 1890. The Rodin Museum.
How are the Postmodernists positive?
In the October case, the search for a new positivity lands, to give one example, with new artists making sculpture that can’t be clearly categorized within the old ways. Postmodernism in art initially wages its battle in a discursive register. It tries to combat Modernism at the level of representation. This is why for Krauss, it was so important to define the conditions in the logical space of Minimalism and Land Art because she thinks that it’s the formal strategies of construction that constitute the rejection of Modernist subjectivity. Conceptual Art is a good example, because in Conceptual Art the notion is that the artwork exists only as an idea, or even just as the instructions for its own making. Postmodernism initially wages its battle against Modernism in this heavily intellectualized, academicized, representative linguistic register. But more and more in the 90s and the 2000s, this becomes more concretized; it becomes more about the identity of the artist — the cultural identity, racial identity, gender identity, sexual identity — and it becomes about how the artwork is an expression of that identity: how the artwork is a representation of the concrete experience of that identity. Artists that deal with stuff like cultural stereotypes are similar. Another prominent tendency is the Social Practice activist tendency, which thinks that that art can directly be an agent of change by either engaging in activism or creating situations in which relationships between people are foregrounded in a certain way.
That’s sort of been the trajectory of Postmodernism; it’s this sort of move away from any consideration of art as an object of aesthetic experience instead making art an expression of intercultural relationships.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, pad thai, 1990. 303 Gallery.
I don’t think you can fault Krauss. I don’t think you can fault her for trying to escape dead art. Of course she has to escape dead art, but it seems unfounded how she does it. I’m sure she’s working with a certain rhetorical tradition and artistic tradition. What’s the foundation for her claims?
From the artist’s perspective, it’s the case that all art has to be a reconsideration of art history. Every artwork, in order to find its originality, has to reconsider all of art history. Krauss saw the move by the Minimalists and the Land Artists as a rejection of the earlier tradition. That’s where the black and white thinking of being either for something or against something becomes an obstacle to really understanding what’s happening.
For example, I had the chance about a year ago to see a couple of Robert Smithson’s preparatory sketches for the film that he made in the helicopter where he unfortunately died in the crash. He’s got this quote from Lenin, saying that history moves in spirals. It’s funny the way that he’s thinking about Spiral Jetty not only as this kind of intervention in the landscape — in the way that Krauss and the Postmodernists would like to talk about it — but as an imaginative object considering the shape of history. It creates an artificial image of something, even though that’s precisely what Rosalind Krauss thinks that these artists are avoiding.
We’ll turn now to the importance of 1848. The article is titled The First Episode: Poetry Of The Past — The Future. In it you are setting up the problem as it surfaces from Modernism. You go back actually to 1789, although your focus is 1848. This is the moment of Baudelaire.
There’s definitely an affinity between our moment and Baudelaire’s moment. What Baudelaire and the avant-garde was dealing with in the middle of the 19th century, circa 1848, was the problem of two previous generations of artistic production: Classicism at the end of the 18th, and the beginning of the 19th century, and Romanticism which reacted against it. There’s a way that we could think in terms of an analogy between Baudelaire’s time and ours: of Classicism as Modernism and Romanticism as Postmodernism, and that the problem that Baudelaire is confronting is the kind of exhaustion of both. There was something to Classicism that was heroic and essential that then became stale and academic, and there was something to the Romantic rejection of that, which also became its own kind of resignation to the status quo. Baudelaire is taking up neither Romanticism or Classicism but critiquing both by using both.
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Holt/Smithson Foundation.
To preface this a little bit, one of the reasons that I take up French history in relation to French political history or French art history is that there is a closer relationship between art and politics in France in the 19th century. Accordingly there’s an art historical trajectory that one can map onto this, circa 1789. You have the development of Classicism as a kind of artistic component of the bourgeois revolution. The figure of this is Jacques-Louis David, the French painter who actually became the official state painter of the revolution, if you will. He was a member of the Jacobins and was imprisoned for a while because of his involvement. With David, you have the beginning of art self-consciously emerging from religion, and from the confines of religious subject matter and the emergence of a new notion of history painting. History painting in the 1600s and 1700s had come to be seen as the pinnacle of painting. But this meant that it was relegated to religious subjects, or if not to religious subjects, to commemorating particular events: battles or treaties, etc. With David you have this renovation of history painting; an attempt to turn history painting to the present. For instance in David’s painting The Death of Marat you have this strange confluence of a religious style; this heavy chiaroscuro that David uses recalls Spanish paintings of priests — Ribera or Zurbarán — which are very austere, ascetic works. David is treating Marat as a martyr, but also as a saint. There is this change with David: there’s a recognition of art being self-consciously bound up in a process of social transformation. It happens not only at the level of subject matter — not only in choosing to paint Marat, as opposed to painting a priest — but also in the way that he paints Marat: the overall aesthetic effect that David is driving at is in the combination of who Marat is with the way that he is represented. The fact of the painting is all of these things coming together.
David’s Classicism becomes institutionalized at the beginning of the 19th century. It became the official painting of the French Academy of Beaux-Arts. You get people like Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres as the representatives of the tradition of David and his school. By the 1830s, that’s what's seen as the most acceptable form of painting. David’s style had become academicized. David was striving to make history feel present in a painting. Not only history as the past — as it happened — but history as an activity that one could engage with in the present.
Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793. Wikipedia.
So that’s what Delacroix takes up in 1830 with Liberty Leading the People where again, there’s an attempt to register the change that's happening in France that Delacroix is bound up with. A couple of the figures that Delacroix paints in the foreground of Liberty Leading the People are pietàs: images of Christ after his death on the cross. He too makes these references to religious painting. But with Delacroix, there’s an important recovery in terms of color. Color becomes the means to escape from the bounds of Classicism. In Classicism, color had been reduced essentially to light: the purpose of color wasn’t really to be color, but to show light and depth.
I say recovery, because it’s not that color isn’t something that hadn’t been used in different ways previously in art history. For instance in Mannerism, the period of art after the Renaissance — e.g. El Greco or Reubens — you have this brash use of color and of line that’s really different from the clarity and lucidity of Renaissance painting earlier that emphasized perspective and the depth of spatial planes.
How do we get from the 1830s to the Modernists, like Baudelaire, and eventually to the October group?
At a simple level, Delacroix was representative of kind of a Romantic reaction against Classicism in his emphasis on line and color and even the subject matter that he chooses: he’ll go on to do a lot of paintings of hunting for lions, battle scenes, or paintings of Algeria; these dramatic scenes allow him to really put color and line on display in a dramatic way.
There’s a crisis of Romanticism in 1848, and one of the events that shows this involves Delacroix himself. In 1848, new revolutions happened, and the state commissions Delacroix for another painting, one that could represent the Republic and represent the revolution as iconically as Liberty Leading the People had in the Revolution of 1830. His idea for it was called Equality Leading the People. He thought that this would be how he would define the revolution of 1848 as a continuation, but also something distinct from the revolution of 1830.
Ultimately Delacroix never never made this painting. Instead he left Paris, retired to his country estate at Champrosay, and abandoned history painting for a couple of years, instead painting flowers. The reality of the revolution was overwhelming for him. He was unable to muster the courage to do something about it, but also unable to recognize in what way his art would need to change in order to address the new reality. Maybe the only way that he felt that he could fulfill that need to address reality was not by turning to a new social subject, but by turning inwardly to the work itself.
This is a big turn in Modernity. I’ve been pushing Baudelaire because that’s how you ended your essay.
Baudelaire was one of the biggest supporters and exponents of Delacroix’s work, even into the 1850s. In 1855, there’s the Exposition Universelle in Paris, which was a big exhibition like the salon that was done every year but more international in character, bringing in paintings from around the world. Baudelaire dedicates a whole section of his criticism of that show to Delacroix. For Baudelaire, Delacroix really was one of the greatest painters of his time along with maybe Ingres and even — though he wouldn’t admit it at that point — Courbet.
There’s a kind of failure at this point in history that Baudelaire speaks to. He saw new forms of life around him: street life, dandies and prostitutes, etc. He’s looking at the grunginess of it and the disappointment of it, and yet seeing that that’s what he had to work with.
He calls it “monstrosities flowering like a flower”. This goes back to where we began: how do you deal with the task of self-transformation, with revolution as self transformation — not as the rejection of something or the opposition of something, but of the transformation of something from within itself? That’s what Modernism was about. //
Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Wikipedia.
