Taking Stock: First Month of Caesura
Dear reader,
I have been living under COVID-19 crisis for 9 weeks. Some of it has flown by quickly: 7 weeks of the reading group and 4 weeks of Caesura have helped. Keep busy, they say.
Today marks a month since the launch of Caesura on 4.20.20. Most of the editors have produced 3 or 4 pieces, and we’ve published contributions from fellow travelers.
I will lay out the most popular articles of our first month, because I believe any successful publication needs to account for its audience. At Caesura, we are still making sense of who that audience is and who it can be. But we can begin by considering what you are reading.
A quick look at the most popular articles indicates there is a lot of interest in new serial initiatives:
Translation as Conquest, Part I
By Austin Carder
Two, Three, Many Octobers: The Vanquished Tradition of the Avant-Garde, Part I
By Patrick Zapien
Eclipse of Postmodernism (Week 1 of my letters on the reading group)
By Yours Truly (Laurie Rojas)
These, if I may speculate, point to the development of a very different kind of Caesura from the previous iteration. These series are becoming more of columns where our editors’ voice, interests, arguments are developed through their “Caesura Dailies”. This serialization has also been started by Allison Hewitt Ward, who has been heroic in single-handled taking up the question of museums and reflecting on the future of the art world in New York; and, in a less explicit way, Bret Schneider’s insightful, if sometimes vitriolic, series of dailies also have a cohesive thread (but bear in mind that he considers himself an artist rather than a critic).
The other set of most-read pieces was the reviews — good to know people still like reading reviews:
A girlhood fiction novel in The Shape of Confusion in Joni Murphy's Double Teenage
By Louis Sterrett
A celebrity documentary in “On the Right Side of History”: Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana and the Gauntlet of Cultural Liberalism
By Pamela C. Nogales C.
A pagan horror film in Midsommar: The Lost Reflection
By David Faes
I must note that the main characters in all three reviews are women and the reviews take up the heroines’ relationship to society when they are at a particular moment of maturation. (Tip: I would love a review of either Fleabag or Killing Eve, if there are any takers out there!)
What all of these have in common is actually an absence: none of these pieces were about artworks; they addressed a popular movie and documentary, a novel, reflections on postmodernism/October, and the work of translation. This is somewhat concerning but interesting given that we all started with the idea that we wanted to start an art criticism publication. The first sign of this was with my own first piece last month, where I wrote:
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.
I must confess that I do not know what I am doing with my life. I find myself in a limbo of sorts, but not necessarily depressed. I wish to write while being able to maintain a bourgeois-bohemian lifestyle in Berlin. Maybe have a child one day. But really I see myself as a public intellectual of sorts, an established art critic who will eventually publish a book on how contemporary political art is an expression of the death of the Left. But I have a terrifying suspicion that making this happen is not very straightforward — or even worse — that it doesn’t even have an audience.
Putting all my cards on the table: I am not entirely happy with the work that I was able to do while I was at Spike. But one of the key lessons I took away is that we have to write with passion about what we care about, otherwise, you lose the reader — and what’s the point of writing without readers? Audience matters. But by working with skilled but very different writers such as Ella Plevin and Natasha Stagg, I realized I had not found my voice (or style-approach) as a writer. Having been trained as a journalist, my style and personal opinions have been completely flushed out of me. With good reason. As a paid gig, it was better not to have my opinions intervene in what needed to be done. But putting aside for the moment that journalism is never an objective practice, I understood that the point was to reach as many people as possible, to keep their attention, and to teach them something. I have probably lost you already. But the challenge for me is to find my voice, to trust my instincts, and hopefully come out of this in a year with a much better sense of what kind of writer I am when the writing is at its best — that is, most engaged with an audience. I don’t want to write messages in a bottle.
Writers right now that I take certain kinds of inspiration from are very diverse. Chris Kraus, of course, is one of the best known genre-bending authors in the art world who manages to use the personal and subjective voice very well with regards to art criticism while at the same time producing a book that was turned into an Amazon TV-Series (assignment to self). And then there is Isabelle Graw, whose academic style could use some editing, but whose interest in the question of judgment, criticism, value, and the art market is very dear to me; she is the closest to a mainstream author in the art world that takes the art market and Marxism seriously, even if she doesn’t quite get Marxism (another assignment). Then there is the well-researched and oftentimes brilliantly on-target Claire Bishop, from her critique of relational aesthetics to her critique of New Labour and the proliferation of socially-engaged art as a means of putting a band-aid on aggressive austerity measures (hope to interview her soon). The melancholia, beauty, and indulgence of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (have not read her other books yet) cut straight through my heart and bones (I should review it). There is also Stewart Martin, whose work on Adorno and art’s relationship to the commodity form is of the highest order in the present. Then there is the huge presence of usual art school influences such as James Elkins, T.J. Clark, Hal Foster, and Michael Fried, and so on. But none of them really matter as profoundly as the work of Chris Cutrone (aka The Last Marxist). He was my teacher at SAIC, he taught me Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer, Freud, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lukács, Korsch, Marx, the philosophy of modernism, and all the texts of the Platypus Art & Politics reading group. His dissertation on Adorno’s Marxism can be found here.
For this reason, I am proud to be publishing Chris Cutrone’s piece, Critique of Revolutionary Art: Trotsky, Benjamin, Adorno, and Greenberg today in Caesura. It was recently presented at CAA’s 2020 conference in Chicago. It will serve as a sort of palette cleanser I wish to return to anytime I lose my way.
In short: The Marxist approach to art is historical in character, it is not prescriptive but only diagnostic of the problem. Art cannot save society — or itself. Instead, art as the ambassador of freedom, as a protest against reality — which all art in modern society is — expresses a task, a need. But art cannot satisfy that need; it cannot resolve that problem posed in capitalism — that is, art itself cannot lead us to socialist revolution/revolutionary change. But we still need art to remind us of that need for freedom, for socialism. From the standpoint of the critic, the question is to recognize this in the moment of aesthetic experience (as Susan Buck-Morss put it), and the question with each artwork is how it does what it does. As the first month of Caesura can testify, this might be easier said than done.
Looking back at this month, it might appear to you that Caesura has a deeply anti-academic stance. Avant-garde artists really emerged in a rebellion and rejection of the Academy in the mid-19th century. They thought to liberate art from the Academy in order to pursue an art that was critical of society. That might make Caesura’s anti-academicism true to a degree — depending on what you think academicism is. Is the Academy an enabling institution or a disabling institution? For all of my friends who have gone through the churn of academia, their hope that the academy was a place where real intellectual interests could be pursued was quickly squashed. But with the COVID-19 crisis — the increasing amounts of courses done virtually, the structural transformation underway in universities around the world — it is very likely that this will propel the further demise of the Academy. Why would anyone pay for such (liberal arts/humanities) education when it seems to have very little impact on the world? When you can get a better education in Platypus’s reading groups, or Youtube lectures, etc.? And this loss, as my friend Richard told me (a brilliant renaissance man of sorts with no academic credentials of his own) would be a huge loss in a world where the public intellectual and the public sphere have already been decimated. Our ambivalence towards the Academy is a real problem of the present, one to which I am sure we’ll keep returning in the weeks to come.
Sincerely,
Laurie Rojas //
John Walter, A Virus Walks Into A Bar, 2018. HD video, 19 minutes 54 seconds. Arts Council Collection. From: Creative Tourist.