hydrarchist writes:

"Secrecy and Publicity: Reactivating the Avant-Garde"

by Sven Lutticken

The last decade has seen an increasing use by young artists of strategies and forms derived from neo-avant-gardes—Fluxus, Conceptual or Performance art. This has called forth charges of plagiarism from an older generation of artists, who feel the young brats are getting credit for ‘things we did thirty years ago’, without acknowledging and sometimes—even worse—without knowing their predecessors’ work. Are these repetitions, then, the blind, dumb survivals of forms long past their prime? There are indeed young artists making neo-Conceptual or Fluxus-type work that seems an exasperatingly minuscule variation on what has been done before: creating ‘social works of art’ by cooking dinners or spending the night with strangers; taking ‘jobs’ in non-art professions.

While many such strategies bear an uncanny resemblance to activities in the sixties that were far more marginal, and far less commercially successful, the fact remains that the repetition of a given practice within a changed historical and cultural context has a different meaning and function. Theory has not found it easy to come to grips with this phenomenon, in part because we still find it difficult to think about history in terms of survivals and repetitions—as what Hal Foster has called a ‘continual process of protension and retension, a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts’. [1] The crucial question is whether (and how) artists actually manage to reactivate avant-garde impulses, or whether they merely recycle some of its forms in a nostalgic mode. In the first instance, they would resemble Benjamin’s Jacobins, seizing on the revolutionary potential of the Roman Republic to realize its now-time. [2] In the second, they would be closer to the postmodern pastiche-artists that Jameson analysed in the eighties as, precisely, recycling disembodied signs. Whereas Benjamin perceived the liberating potential of breaking through linear history in order to arrive at a ‘dialectical image’, Jameson concluded that the postmodern era resulted in a consumption of nostalgic motifs completely devoid of true historical consciousness. The active, revolutionary repetition described by Benjamin had been perverted into a passive, consumerist reflex. [3] The distinction between the two positions, however, is not necessarily clear-cut. There may be complex amalgams of both in any historical phenomenon—delusion and denial as the boon companions of insight. Aby Warburg was convinced that the practice of the Renaissance was just such a hybrid—artists deliberately sought to use antique forms, seeing a now-time in them; but they were also taken over by the forms, possessed. Their repetitions were not completely sovereign and intentional; at times they were involuntary, like neurotic symptoms. [4] Nonetheless, Warburg was firmly on the side of reason, and focused on artists’ attempts to master the pagan impulses encoded in the antique Pathosformeln that they deployed.

Art and Life

With various degrees of explicitness, some of the recent repetitions of avant-garde strategies have highlighted the question of art’s role vis-à-vis the—or a—public. While art has been ever more widely publicized, its public role, in a more fundamental sense, has become more doubtful. This problem has, of course, been tackled in various instructive ways at different points in the history of the avant-garde. Contemporary artists often offer repetitions-with-variations on these earlier approaches, thus pointing the way to a renewed historical examination of these ‘anticipated futures’ and ‘reconstructed pasts’. Social theory has also focused on the problematic role of the public sphere and investigated the different forms it can take. Following leads from both art and theory, we enter a realm where even apparently blind repetitions may be of significance as mnemonic traces; where even involuntary symptoms may yet contain re-activating elements.

Any reappraisal seems doomed to begin by repeating what Peter Bürger wrote in the Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), even if it goes on to criticize or dismiss it. Bürger’s book is the theoretical consummation of the late-sixties’ break with a depoliticized conception of the avant-garde. Clement Greenberg had used the term as a synonym for his idea of modernism, to mean ‘purified’ arts locked up within their own ‘area of competence’, their own history. In Jacques Rancière’s terms, both the Greenbergian and the Bürgerian conception of the avant-garde can be seen as responses to Schiller’s contention that art and aesthetic play, as the essence of man, would bear ‘the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’. [5] As Rancière has shown, the crucial ‘and’ within ‘art and life’ has been variously interpreted. Like others before him, Greenberg went on to link art and life by conceiving of an independent ‘life of art’, from Manet to Morris Louis. On the other hand, Bürger focused on the way movements such as Dada and Surrealism, whose importance had been minimized by the ‘modernist’ conception of the avant-garde, had attempted to use art to transform life. Modern art’s autonomous and specialist status was treated as a hindrance to be overcome; art should not be limited to its own small sphere, it should revolutionize society. The ultimate aim of Dada, Surrealism and the ‘historical avant-garde’ in general had been to integrate art into the Lebenswelt, into society and everyday life.

The historical avant-garde had failed, but Bürger was comparatively forgiving about this, while being notoriously hard on the postwar neo-avant-gardes who, in his view, merely repeated the forms and strategies devised by their predecessors, reaping huge institutional and commercial success without any real struggle for change. Bürger has been criticized for his blindness to the distinctions within this repetition—not seeing how the neo-avant-garde had tried to adapt to new circumstances. The historical avant-garde, too, had often opted for mockery of capitalist modernity (Dada), or utopian evocations of what cannot be (De Stijl) rather than attempting to integrate art and life. [6] This is certainly true, but what matters is that there was a constant oscillation in the avant-garde between irony, utopian visions and the desire to effect real change: the first two could lead to the last, which could itself revert to the ironic or utopian distance when it was frustrated. Malevich’s visions found their counterpart in the Constructivist attempts to realize a ‘productivist’ art; Constant allied his New Babylon, which remained essentially an art project, with the Situationists’ revolutionary interventions.

Corruptions of the Public Sphere

In a noteworthy repetition-and-critique of Bürger, Jürgen Habermas has argued that the attempt to ‘reconcile art and life’ he described was doomed to failure because it operated from only one of the autonomous spheres of which modern society consists. [7] For Habermas, as for Weber, modern society involved the disintegration of unified ‘worldviews’ into the separate fields of science, art and morals, or law; each one largely the domain of specialists. The avant-gardes may have tried to leave the art world behind in order to reform life, but they had not succeeded in penetrating any of the other spheres. The basic structure of modern society was left unscathed. Habermas was not particularly sad about this failure of the avant-garde project: in his view, the destruction of the different spheres would mean a regression, a break with the ‘project of modernity’ that emerged with the Enlightenment.

The Weberian spheres of art, science and law are not, of course, completely isolated from each other, even if their internal discourses are largely autonomous. They also co-exist within the public sphere, whose origins Habermas traced to the ‘reasoning citizens’ of eighteenth-century Britain. [8] While each of the specialized domains has its own, internal semi-public space—constituted by art journals, or scientific conferences, for instance—they also require a general public sphere to mediate between themselves and the rest of society. It is through this Öffentlichkeit that the smaller spheres have effects on the ‘outside world’. This was dramatically manifest when art criticism first emerged as an autonomous sphere within public debate, in the eighteenth century: the first critical reviews of the French Salon were illegal pamphlets, for the assault on state-sponsored artists was seen as undermining the entire Ancien Régime: when the decadence of its art was decried, so was the rottenness of the state.

The public sphere has been described as a fiction that creates its own reality. When people start addressing each other as its representatives, as these first modern art critics did, the idea of this sphere becomes an invitation to start behaving as if it actually exists—‘The idea of a public is motivating, not simply instrumental.’ [9] As modern art grew more specialized, art criticism’s ability to influence other spheres dwindled. But it was still aimed at a public—or at different, often overlapping, publics. At the core of the art world was a semipublic group of professionals, who addressed each other rather than a wider audience. But even the most esoteric forms of modern and contemporary art make an implicit claim to embody something that should—even if it does not—matter to society as a whole.

That claim now has a rather desperate sound. If the public sphere originally proposed by the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie had promised a forum for rational, enlightening debate, the media concentration of the nineteenth century led to an increasingly sensationalist, consumerist public domain: ‘critical publicity is replaced by a manipulative one’. For Habermas, the growing media focus on private life—of ordinary people, as well as celebrities—could be seen as a reprise of a premodern form of ‘representative publicness’, in which the king, as embodiment of the divine and social order, lay beyond criticism. Although their role was subordinate, the lesser nobles incarnated this order as well. Modern public figures, politicians or stars are also representations in this sense, although as embodiments of a shifting media culture rather than an immutable absolutist system. ‘Publicness becomes a court’, a baroque show rather than a sustained rational discourse. [10]

Robert Altman’s 2001 film "Gosford Park" connects and counterposes the declining British aristocracy of the interwar years with the world of cinema—indeed, with the entire culture industry. The film is, on one level, an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, set during the course of an English country-house weekend in 1932. Altman’s many cameras roam ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’, portraying servants who live their passions through the medium of their masters’ lives. There are some alien elements at the party: Ivor Novello, matinee idol and star of Hitchcock’s "The Lodger," and his friend, a Jewish-American film producer looking for ‘realistic’ details for a Charlie Chan mystery with a similar setting. As an entertainer, Novello is an outsider among the aristocratic house-guests, who make their contempt for the cinema abundantly clear. One particularly vicious old hag refers to "The Lodger"—Hitchcock’s film had just been remade as a talkie—as The Codger.

Mass Media: A Perverted Avant-garde?

The irony is that they are much more similar to Novello than they think. He is simply a new kind of aristocrat, in the media sphere. Like his outdated relatives, only more successfully so, he provides a thrilling spectacle for the lower classes. In one beautifully constructed scene, the enraptured servants stand in the darkened hallway outside the drawing-room, listening to Novello singing inside. Most of the upper-class guests are indifferent to the performance, but to the servants they are all stars—even if Novello is the most glamorous. All provide the servants with spectacle, and gossip about their private lives is traded assiduously. For Bürger, while the avant-garde had failed in its attempt to dissolve art as an autonomous sphere, the culture industry had achieved the perversion of that aim, a falsche Aufhebung of artistic autonomy. Its omnipresent products did change people’s lives, if only by drawing them into different patterns of consumption. [11] The perverted public sphere of the mass media had, in effect, become a dystopian avant-garde that was now successfully tampering with the autonomous spheres. Altman’s film is a sympathetic study of the effects of this cultural monster on people’s lives .

What was the response of the neo-avant-garde of the sixties and seventies to intimations that an alternative cultural force, in the form of the mass media, was fast perverting its own aims? Andy Warhol, who took these commercial media as a conscious focus for his practice, was often shunned by partisans of avant-garde art. Issues of Artforum from the late sixties and early seventies give the impression that the magazine was going out of its way to avoid discussing Warhol’s art and everything he stood for. Artforum was intimately linked to postminimalist, conceptual and related neo-avant-garde tendencies—reactions, in part, against the modernist abstract art of the postwar decades, and seeking ways to break out of the gallery’s white cube. Warhol did this too, but by integrating his art into the spectacular economy. His magazine Interview started as an underground film journal, became progressively slicker and ended up as the yuppie-lifestyle magazine of the 1980s. Warhol made the step from the avant-garde to its Doppelgänger, the culture industry. Openings became society events; cameos in soap operas and the labours of the paparazzi put universal recognizability within the artist’s reach.

Warholian practice has had perhaps more than its fair share of repetition among contemporary artists: a desire for integration into the worlds of fashion, advertising and pop culture is widespread. But—just as Warhol’s work continued to be exhibited in galleries and discussed in art magazines (eventually, even Artforum)—in targeting the mass media, contemporary artists have not abandoned the art world. If anything, they are now able to combine their activities across different spheres with greater ease. During much of his career, Warhol’s media success threatened to undermine his art-world credibility. Now that that world itself has definitively become part of the media, artists who work as veejays or fashion photographers are as welcome in museums and galleries as they are in the glossy art magazines where they might do fashion spreads. Scarcely anyone now makes a distinction between their work appearing in the ‘artist’s pages’, under the editorial control of the magazine, or in an ‘experimental’ ad by some fashion designer targeting an art-magazines audience. Such phenomena turn Warhol into a prophet, and have undoubtedly contributed to stimulating a wider critical approach to his work that has shed the traditional art-historical focus on his paintings—which is not to say that this neo-Warholian avant-garde is a particularly encouraging phenomenon. The artists who think they can finally escape art’s isolated, autonomous sphere end up as fodder for a perverted avant-garde that they cannot control or even influence to any significant degree.

The other response to populist mass media—and conservative art magazines—was to make one’s own. Small-circulation journals and reviews became crucial media for twentieth-century avant-gardes. When these penetrated the public sphere at large, it was as caricatures that mocked the latest form of artistic ‘madness’; establishment art journals were only slightly more interested. Various Dada and Surrealist reviews (from the belligerent, political La Révolution surréaliste to the glossy Minotaure) tried to create something close to what contemporary theory has dubbed a counter-public: an audience that to some extent has a subordinated social status, and is critical of mainstream media and the prevailing ideology. Nancy Fraser, who introduced the term ‘subaltern counter-publics’, focused on subordinated social groups such as women, coloured people and gays. Michael Warner, while putting special emphasis on queer experience, has argued that participants in a counter-public can be ‘subalterns’ for no other reason than their identification with this group—be it a fundamentalist tendency, a youth-culture tribe or ‘artistic bohemianism’. [12]

Avant-gardes can thus be seen as attempting to establish a counter-public not through some a priori social stigma—its participants were often white males with a middle-class background, although there was the occasional Claude Cahun—but on the grounds of a radical dissent from the dominant form of publicness, and the society it represented. Avant-garde reviews differed from both the mass media and the more traditional art and literary publications which, equally marginal, merely existed alongside the culture industry. These were aimed at a specialized public, a target group of art-lovers, whereas the avant-garde saw its productions as counter-media that tried to create, or maintain, an oppositional public. They were thus potentially addressed not to a limited group with some special interest (such as art) but to a much more diverse layer that wanted to develop a critical understanding of society.

Bataillean Transgressions

In the late fifties and early sixties, the Situationists could conceive of their publications as means to create a revolutionary counter-public that would effect real change. In the thirties, Georges Bataille had taken a different approach. Although intimately involved with reviews such as Documents and La Critique sociale—not to mention the Collège de Sociologie which he co-founded in 1937, and which can be seen as a counter-medium of the spoken word—Bataille was simultaneously impatient with such counter-publics, incapable of bringing about the total revolution he felt was needed. Reviewing some volumes of Surrealist poetry for La Critique sociale in 1933, Bataille was scathing about the gap between Surrealism’s ambitions and its concrete results. He reminded his readers that Surrealism had wanted to be ‘a mode of existence that exceeded limits’—especially the limits of the literary and art worlds. The aim had been not merely artistic renewal but ‘surrealizing’ life—and thus creating a social revolution. In practice, as Bataille acidly underscored, it just resulted in collections of poetry, some of it good (Tzara), some of it bad (Breton, obviously), but in any case, not more than verse. [13] Surrealism had failed in its avant-garde attempt to revolutionize life, to be more than merely art or poetry (although Bataille might have been less harsh on some of the Surrealist painters).

Bürger’s analysis of the neo-avant-garde itself repeats Bataille’s condemnation of its historical predecessor: the diagnosis of failure is the same. Like Habermas, Bataille was well aware that the autonomy of art was only part of a wider phenomenon. In his essay, ‘L’Apprenti sorcier’, he noted that science, art and politics (to Bataille, now just another sphere) operated in isolation from each other, and that ‘existence thus shattered into three pieces has ceased to be existence: it is nothing but art, science or politics’. [14] What distinguishes Bataille from Habermas and Bürger is, of course, his deep aversion to the inheritance of the Enlightenment. Bataille was driven by a Romantic longing for pre-modern times, peopled with integrated, ‘virile’ beings whose lives revolved around the myths and rituals through which the sacred is made manifest. His Collège de Sociologie, which organized lectures by various speakers in a room behind a bookshop, was dedicated to la sociologie sacrée. For Bataille, this studyof the sacred was an instrument to bring about its revival. But sociology, as a scientific discipline, was structurally similar to modern art—an autonomous sphere of modern society. There was no reason why a sociological avant-garde should succeed where an artistic one had failed: surely such an undertaking would be just as doomed as Surrealism, from Bataille’s point of view?

One can deduce Bataille’s response to this conundrum from his activities and writing of the late thirties. In the final analysis, artistic and scientific avant-gardes alike were to be no more than stepping stones on the way to the true avant-garde: the sacredone. The realm of the sacred had been all but closed off to modern man, whose world was ruled by the imperatives of production and who had no access to the excessive, wasteful consumption that Bataille admired in primitive feasts and sacrifices—the potlatch, for example. [15] A sacred avant-garde would have to be transgressive—not merely to break out of the art world and into ‘life’, but also in order to forge complete human beings and a re-integrated society. This would not be possible, in Bataille’s view, without the creation of new myths and rituals, capable of momentarily suspending man-made institutions and laws.

Going Underground

But how could the merely artistic infringements of Surrealism give way once more to the ritualistic transgressions of the sacred? In his theory of religion, expounded in a series of books in the forties and fifties, Bataille examined the interplay between prohibition and transgression: ‘A prohibition is meant to be violated’, he noted in L’Érotisme. In his view, the violation of the law was intimately connected to the sacred—transgression opening the way to the world of gods, feasts and sacrifice that lay beyond law, beyond prohibitions. Yet his insistence that ‘transgression exceeds, without destroying, a profane world which it complements’, suggests that what is at stake here is a kind of social and psychic equilibrium. Like Bakhtin, Bataille argues that the order of the profane world is guarded by its very opposite, the (temporary, ritualistic) transgression of its rules. [16] An avant-garde that could succeed in re-establishing the sacred as a primary force would be truly revolutionary, in that it would destroy the modern social order. But it would then become deeply conservative—the guardian of a world in which periodic outbursts guarantee equilibrium.

The Collège de Sociologie was just as unlikely as Surrealism to effect this revolutionary transition to a post-capitalist world that would also be a return to the pre-modern era. It could be no more than a preliminary investigation of the possibility of creating a true sacred avant-garde. It is in this light that one must understand the attention given by Bataille and his fellow ‘sociologists’ to secret societies, as tools for radical change. Bataille argued that the idea of the secret society was already implicit in the artistic avant-garde, at least since Dada. He made clear that he was not interested in vulgar conspiracies but in covert organizations that could create new myths and rituals, which would later be widely disseminated. In a lecture given before the Collège on March 19, 1938, Bataille proposed the primitive Christian sect as the exemplum of such a cell—one that had, in fact, revolutionized the world. In a fit of realism, he admitted that there were counter-examples, such as Freemasonry—in his view ‘ un monde mort’, a sect that had never become a church. [17] On the other hand, as the German historian Hans Mayer showed in his lecture to the Collège on April 18, 1939, there were more successful models closer to home.

In the domain of rites and symbols, Mayer argued, Hitler had not really created anything new: instead, he had transformed the ideological totems of a wide variety of reactionary sects into political reality. [18] Mayer traced this heritage back to the Romantic era and the German resistance to Napoleon, when secretive political and paramilitary groups had created a cult of Germanic tradition that was fiercely opposed to French rationalism. There is no doubt that Bataille, who prided himself on the title of ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ that Kojève had applied to him, was at some level impressed by this achievement. He was dissatisfied with the avant-garde’s reliance on counter-media—journals like La Révolution surréaliste and Documents were severely limited in their effects. His attempted solution to this problem was to go underground—to create a secret world at which the Collège, or Acéphale, the Nietzsche-studded review he was editing at this time, merely hinted. Parallel to the Collège, he founded a secret society, also named Acéphale, which was to create the new myths and rituals of the future. [19] Taken together, Bataille’s activities surely amount to the most ambitious, most carefully thought-through, most desperate and supremely bizarre undertaking of the historical avant-garde. But by April 1939, when Mayer gave his lecture, time was fast running out. Soon the Collège would be disbanded and Walter Benjamin, its frequent visitor, dead. Bataille’s sect would not become a church.

Whereas Warhol allied himself with a power that was, effectively, changing things—the media of a corrupted public sphere—Bataille plunged in the other direction, that of the underground cult. Contrary to what one might expect from today’s heavily publicized art world, Bataille’s penchant for secrecy returns in some contemporary practices—but combined with publicity for these hidden activities. If Spanish–Dutch artist Alicia Framis spends the night with strangers as a dreamkeeper in a silver dress, this ‘privatization’ of the work of art is then made public in exhibitions, with photographs and articles. The same goes for Suchan Kinoshita, who went on journeys with various individuals to unknown destinations, or for Carsten Höller, who locked himself up in the Atomium in Brussels for twenty-four hours to see what it was like to step outside society for a day—here, following in the footsteps of Belgium’s King Boudewijn, who abdicated for twenty-four hours in order to avoid signing an abortion law. Höller’s work was more ‘secret’, in that he did not publish any photographs or video recordings of the event himself, but it was nevertheless quite widely publicized in the art world.

Such activities no longer retain the hope of forming a sect that will lead to major social transformations. Instead, they convey a sense that meaningful communication must be sought in a non-public realm, in small groups. This fact is then made public: the public itself is excluded from the intimate sphere of ‘real’ contact or experience, and must consume it—the idea of it—at a remove. French curator Nicolas Bourriaud has developed what he calls a ‘relational aesthetics’ with regard to this sort of work, identifying the crucial establishment of new forms of communication as alternatives to the perverted mass media—for instance, by organizing a party or a dinner. [20] But such activities quickly tend towards the mere simulation of a ‘more authentic’ kind of communication, and fail to create a convincing publicness. Their ephemerality and small scale makes them exclusive and closed.

The Warholian embrace of a corrupted publicness or the Bataillean retreat into secrecy are, fortunately, not the only options. Over the past decade, there has been a growing sense of the need for a public sphere which, if it is based in the art world, also reaches out to a wider layer, beyond a specialized circle. In part, this has involved paying renewed attention to the central role that counter-media have played, with reprints of magazines such as Documents and various studies of avant-garde reviews. If there has been an element of radical chic in the art world’s re-awakened interest in the Situationist International, it has nonetheless helped to put the status of the art audience, and art’s wider responsibility for a critical form of publicness, back on the agenda. Rarely has an avant-garde gone about creating a public for itself with the same thoroughness. The Lettrist International’s obscure and freely distributed Potlatch aimed—as Debord later stated—to ‘constitute a new movement’; the more accessible Internationale Situationniste was published once this had taken shape. [21]

The nineties’ art-world reprise of Situationism has come under attack from T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith for its focus on the early phase of the group, when artists like Constant and Jorn were involved, and neglect of the later, more political stages. [22] There is much truth in this and the reason, in many cases, is all too apparent: Jorn and Constant provided objects to show and commodities to sell. But things are not always that simple. When an exhibition space like Witte de With in Rotterdam stages a New Babylon exhibition it may be an attempt by a minority within the art world to use this sphere to establish a critical counter-public, rather than a fiendish plot to depoliticize Situationism. From this art-internal perspective, the focus on the Constant and Jorn phase makes sense: at this stage the SI had not yet cut its ties with the art world, so its practices can help curators, critics and artists to gain an understanding of how art media can work as counter-media, rather than as specialized reviews.