You can read Adam Lehrer’s Art’s Moral Fetish, published October 27, 2020 in Caesura, here.

“Culture war is merely the illusion of politics; it’s what remains when hope for real change has died.”

— Adam Lehrer

Art and Morality

The highest historical advocates for the transformation of modern society understood well that the content of modern morality is uniform among the different classes. The crisis-appearance of morality emerges rather out of the inadequacy of such morality to itself, which in turn is produced out of the objective crisis between consciousness and social being of which the “character masks” of modern classes are phantasmagoria. In other words; it’s not a difference in morality among the two great classes which drives class conflict, but rather a shared morality which is continually undermined by production: “where right meets right, force will decide.” Further, this self-crisis is not simply a dead-end — a stalemate — but rather provides an opportunity for the transformation of our categories of morality, among other things.

Lehrer’s arguments orbit the suspicion that art has ultimately perished and we are left only with an ocean of default-Democrat propaganda, and a pond of contrarianism. Perhaps this sentiment sums up our moment’s landscape, but is that truly all that’s left? If not, where should one begin the task of recollecting insight into the potential of aesthetic forms? What about today’s artworks that aren’t concerned with identity politics, Trump, et. al.? What happens if we take up Lehrer’s suspicion and follow his line of thought? As a critic of the collapsed distinction between art and artist, he commits that very offense. An advocate of moral ambiguity, he prescribes the correct cynicism. Any simple opposition (antinomy) to pseudo-politics hypostatizes the latter, and delegitimates the oppositional thought. This is not due entirely to theoretical oversight. There are objective contradictions at play which land one precisely where one had not wanted to land, despite one’s best intentions. 

Leon Trotsky wrote in 1938 that “Art, which is the most complex part of culture, the most sensitive and at the same time the least protected, suffers most from the decline and decay of bourgeois society.” The recoil from any discussion of art qua art today is expressive of the vacuousness of our imaginative faculty. Lehrer’s Art’s Moral Fetish reacts: the art world is an ugly soup of the opportunistic pseudo-politics of the professional managerial class and the pathetic, insipid artworks lining fairs, biennials, and apartment galleries — less imaginative than the average advertisement on YouTube, and which appear and disappear more quickly than the seasons — how did we end up here? How do we escape?

Art and Commodity

Artworks are not only commodities, they are the objectification of the subjectivity of commodities, as they have been for more than a couple hundred years. Perhaps what is required is the clarification of the concept of the commodity and its crisis-ridden appearance following the industrial revolution, but I'd rather begin with the definition which Lehrer utilizes. He writes, following Baudrillard, that in the 1980s art had forsaken it’s right to exist; it had failed to prove its value beyond the level of the products of the culture industry. What’s objectionable for Lehrer is that the products of the culture industry transmit a comfortable (numbing) attitude towards reality as opposed to an “ambiguous” or “critical” one, which art formerly laid claim to. Hence, for instance, Lehrer’s admiration of Jon Rafman and disdain for Sandow Birk. The former doesn’t tell you what to think, the latter does. But what do artworks, such as those created by Rafman, have to say? And what does a work like Birk's American Procession latently admit?

The greatest modern artworks do not so much reflect reality, whether in a didactic or ambiguous way, as they do intensify our experience of the conflict of reality through a negative tension with it, embodied in aesthetic form. Modern art required, in order to stay true to itself, to acquire its own autonomy. This has collapsed, not since the 1980s as Baudrillard says, but much earlier. The aesthetic experience of great works of art can be best described as an ambivalent one; not a lukewarm ambiguousness, but an experience that is at once piercing cold and scalding hot. Great artworks are a crystallization, a condensation — yet, not an ossification — of the subjective experience of the commodity-form, which is an experience of conflict, crisis, and self-contradiction. This does not rebut Picasso’s quip that “art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth,” but instead captures it in a different register: art is just as false as it is more real than reality. Recall the marginal comments made by the older, cynical Rimbaud — who had given up literature — on the fantastical images of his younger self’s poetry: “There are no such things.”

Honoré Daumier, Francis Bacon, and the Viennese Aktionists

Lehrer makes no delay in presenting us with three examples of his conception of critical artists: Honoré Daumier, Francis Bacon, and the Viennese Aktionists. Daumier’s caricatures, from which all caricatures sprung — including much of the anti-Trump art we are presently inundated with — are remarkable as an early expression of a new imagination of human form. But more profoundly perhaps, they are an expression of a new experience of looking at pictures. They are bite-sized laughs, a single frame of a comic, and there are thousands of them. They reveal the new insatiable desire for images, so characteristic of modernity, and they foreshadow serial novels, photography, moving images, memes, etc. Some of his caricatures evince shades of moral chastising, as Lehrer notes, but this is applied to aristocrats, townspeople, and workers alike. But these images, even his contorted illustrations of wealthy Parisians, did not serve to provoke a critical recognition of reality. They did not demand that we confront the task of modern society, they only tugged at its loose ends.

One painting which stands out prominently in my memories from my time in Chicago is Bacon’s Figure with Meat in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute. With wings formed from the bookmatched halves of a beef carcass, a cloaked figure looks out across the chasm into the viewer’s space, in invariable panic; stunned by something which seems to lurk just beyond our own senses, all the while vibrating erratically against the void of his black container. The agony of his restraint boils over onto the shoulders of the beholder. Staring into the abyss-for-a-face in Bacon’s picture, one has the sense that one is observing a decaying imitation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, so powerfully illuminated by Walter Benjamin. It is a picture of a picture of fixed-explosion, murmuring increasingly faint demands that were already obscured to begin with. Unlike Klee's Angel, Bacon’s Figure sacrifices its potency in proportion to its resistance to expiration.

The resurgence of fascination with the Marquis de Sade in the post-World War II world found sister-symptoms with the emergence of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the institutionalization of the authoritarian personality, and, to offer but one example in the realm of art, the exhibitionistic performances of the Viennese Aktionists. In 1968, a year of revolutions, Günter Brus performed his infamous Kunst Und Revolution at the University of Vienna in which he shit, rubbed his shit over his body, and masturbated while singing the Austrian national anthem. The experience of ambivalence embedded in great modern artworks, intuitively cognized by young artists, had reached a certain quivering pitch as a function of the regressed consciousness of its meaning — a regression which looms over Brus’ historical moment and continues to cast its long shadow onward, engulfing us today. Despite this work’s titular intentions, it is a celebration of regression. It is a call not for liberated sexuality, but sexuality submerged into the depths of a narcissistic present disguised as a primordial past.

My intent here is far from an attempt to pick apart and tear down a house of cards. Lehrer’s essay provides an expression of a real experience, no doubt. And it is an opportunity to reflect upon that experience — to which I can relate in certain respects. What I’ve hoped to do in this brief response is to throw Lehrer’s reflections into a new light; to consider the possibilities for a way out. //