One-Way Street

Graffiti on Trial

Graffiti art resides at the intersection of art and architecture. On the art side, it can be best classified as an emotive form; the formal qualities of the artwork are less important than the (often illegal) circumstances under which it is created. From the point of view of architecture and urban planning, graffiti is a sign of decay, of a building under duress.

Below is a video on the case of Mike Baca, a graffiti artist working in Brooklyn. He was arrested while shooting a documentary on graffiti. The exact details of his legal case are murky, but he seems to have originally been sentenced to seven years in prison on vandalism and trespassing charges. After a group called the Graffiti Research Lab intervened and arranged for legal support, his sentence was reduced to three months.

Addendum after accidentally posting this entry before I was finished: Can graffiti be art? We no longer have a reliable way to distinguish between art and non-art, but a whole class of art exists to pose exactly this question, and graffiti is certainly part of that class. My only equivocation is that graffiti art, it seems to me, is the only art form that is fully reducible to its act of creation. In this sense graffiti is closer to folk art than "fine" art, or whatever you want to call it.

And regardless of what the Graffiti Research Lab says, there's compelling evidence to suggest that the serious crime rate falls when minor crimes, like graffiti, are persecuted. Graffiti artists have been consistently vague about the boundaries between street gang tagging and serious graffiti art. Perhaps it's not in their interests to do so. In any case, Mike Baca seems remarkably amenable to a three month prison sentence, as if it's all part of a social contract undergoing constant renegotiation.

The video is courtesy of Current Media.

Animal Estates

In 1609, when Henry Hudson and his crew of the Halve Maen sailed past Manhattan Island, the crew was impressed by the land, which was "pleasant with Grasse and Flowers, and goodly Trees, as ever they had seene, and very sweet smells came from them." Early European visitors noted that the island was home to wild turkeys, wild-tailed deer, elk, wolves, black bears and mountain lions, as well as less lyrical creatures such as mosquitoes and horse flies.

The artist Fritz Haeg wants to make Manhattan hospitable to at least some of its former inhabitants; I'm guessing that the wolves and the mosquitoes are not welcome to return. As part of the Whitney Biennial, Haeg has initiated a project called Animal Estates, a sort of public housing project for the more aesthetically discerning species of wild animals. Haeg's inspiration for the elegant structures is the Mannahatta Project, which tries to recreate the landscape Henry Hudson's crew first gazed upon 400 years ago. He describes the project in this video:

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg first made his mark with a tire track. In 1951 he collaborated with John Cage to produce Automobile Tire Print, a work that is pretty much what the title says it is: A 23-foot-long automobile tire track on a scroll. It was a deliberate provocation to Abstract Expressionism, the dominant American art form of the early 1950s. Abstract Expressionism held dearly onto the painted mark as the unique trace of the individual who makes it. With one burned rubber streak, Rauschenberg and Cage ran over the Expressionists' claims to authenticity, spontaneity, and risk. And if the message of that gesture wasn't clear enough, Rauschenberg produced another work called Erased de Kooning Drawing. The Abstract Expressionists and the critics who loved them closed ranks against Rauschenberg , the Dadaist menace with a GI Bill art school degree. One critic declared that Rauschenberg made nothing but "handmade debris," a remark that was meant to be wounding.

Undaunted, and untempted by the reigning ideology of Abstract Expressionism, Rauschenberg continued to work against the grain of his times. Soon after Erased de Kooning Drawing he experimented with photo-sensitive surfaces that recorded the ghostly traces of a nude female body, creating a set of anti-Pollack paintings, or photographs, or some combination of the two. The Rauschenberg canvas wasn't a screen upon which the artist projected his psyche, nor was it a window onto the world. Rather, it was a surface upon which the real leaves its traces and language drops its extraneous signs. In this sense Rauschenberg was the bridge between modernism and postmodernism.

The strain of modernism Rauschenberg bequeathed to postmodernism was Duchamp's brand of cerebral Dadaism. Rauschenberg first encountered Duchamp's work in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which holds The Large Glass. Rauschenberg read The Green Box, Duchamp's notes for The Large Glass, and, according to one story, passed his enthusiasm for Duchamp's work onto Jasper Johns, whose career closely paralleled Rauschenberg's throughout the 1950s.

Rauschenberg was never interested in recreating the presence of the artist behind the artwork, so he also never felt bound by the requirements of painting and its history of auratic genius behind the pigment. He was as famous for his restless experimentation with different media as he was for his impish Dadaism. Printmaking, a medium in which Rauschenberg excelled, allowed him to combine a Kurt Schwitters-like Dadaism with a nascent Pop Art sensibility at the same time Andy Warhol was developing his screenprints. By the mid-1960s, Rauschenberg moved more deliberately into the artistic mainstream, staging live performances and constructing elaborate readymade sculptures.

Although later in his career Rauschenberg gave up on his more provocative gestures, he retained his absurdist sense of beauty, telling an interviewer that he felt sorry for people who didn't realize that Coca-Cola bottles were beautiful. He even adopted a Beat Generation version of Duchamp's withdrawal into chess: he abandoned New York for the humid isolation of Captiva Island, Florida because a psychic suggested it might be a good idea. From there he continued to tinker with different media and disperse his millions to women, children, and Democratic politicians. He died on the island on Monday at age 82.

Street Smart Art

This month the Tate Modern will host an exhibit of Street Art on its Thames river façade. Among the artists exhibiting are the Italian artist Blu, the artist collective Faile from New York (the image above is from their site), the French artist JR, a pair of Brazilian artists Nunca and Os Gemeos, and Sixeart, a Spaniard from Barcelona.

To call them artists is controversial, and indeed common street gang graffiti forms one of the genre's boundaries. The other boundary is the international art market, which is embracing Street Art with lots of cash. Street Art exists between these two poles, generating its repeatable forms and appreciating values from a play of institutionalization and rebellion, innocence and guilt.

Street Art as an object for curatorial attention and connoisseurs' interest is a largely British phenomenon, but the practice originated in New York City. British artists took inspiration from the city's graffiti-coated subway cars--scrubbed clean during the Giuliani administration as part of an effort to reduce crime in the city. Although some Street Art has the semi-permanence of an official public artwork, much of it continues to be hastily drawn, one step ahead of anti-graffiti teams. Stencils are popular with Street Artists, allowing reproducibility that eludes the law. As one of the genre's founders, Keith Haring, demonstrated, a reproducible form is also an excellent marketing strategy.

Hence the skepticism the genre has attracted. That Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Christina Aguilera are among the genre's most avid collectors has done as much harm as good. Despite the five and six figures Street Art works can fetch, the genre's ethos is firmly in the tradition of outsider art. According to Street Art's Picasso, a Brit who works under the name Banksy, he started off innocently enough, explaining to woostercollective.com: "I've wandered around a lot of art galleries thinking: 'I could have done that,' so it seemed only right that I should try. These galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires. The public never has any real say in what art they see."

Banksy's explanation may sound disingenuous, especially considering Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have shelled out £1m for his artworks, but Banksy has art history on his side. The artistic avant-garde has served to challenge the institutionalization of art. Exactly how this challenge takes shape has changed over the past 100 years or so of avant-garde artistic practice, but one constant is the ways in which certain kinds of artistic practice force a re-examination of how we define art, how we assign value to it, how we preserve it for future generations, and how we lend it cultural prestige in the present.

Street Art isn't avant-garde in form, but it functions like one. On the one hand, we have to look more closely at the scrawls that appear all over our cities. Some of it is gang-related graffiti, merely territorial markings for criminal organizations. Some of it is intriguing and witty. Some of it appears on your garage door and pisses you off. The point is that it's all different, a form that's as old as cities themselves. On the other hand, do we want only a bunch of fey art-school grads in our modern art museums? A bit of anarchic energy is probably what the money-obsessed art world needs right now.

The Snapshot in the Age of Digital Reproduction

The Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor visits Contact, the largest photography exhibit in the world, now taking place at Toronto's Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Taylor says that this year's show, entitled Between Memory and History: From the Epic to the Everyday raises the question, "where exactly photography is leading us, cellphones and Coolpix in hand."

First of all, digital photography is leading to the wrecking ball for old film stock factories. Prominently displayed at the exhibit is a photograph taken by Robert Burley (above) of the destruction of buildings 65 and 69 at Kodak Park in Rochester, NY. The irony is double: the photograph includes former workers in the factories recording the event using their digital cameras, and Burley is himself mourning the death of film stock technology with a digital image.

But beyond the death of amateur film photography (the Polaroid Corporation recently announced it will quit the instant-film business next year), not a whole lot seems to be happening in photography, at least as the genre is assessed in Contact. If there's a broad trend, it's that digital technologies have allowed photography to assume the monumentality of painting. For instance, the Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen has a series of portraits blown up to the scale of an Ingres or David canvas. Marx once observed that new technologies initially take the form of the technology they replaced, but in Contact digital photography seems content to re-enact analogue photography's fascination with painting.

The Contact exhibit still stages photographs as singular objects for sustained contemplation. It seems to me that if digital technology has changed photography, it has opened a whole new realm of visual experience to photography. Cheap digital images are both permanent and disposable. Whereas we once had to factor in cost before we decided to record something with a snapshot, now we'll take pictures of pretty much anything and treat it like we were documenting the Spanish Civil War. My three-year-old son has his own digital camera, and he has already formed his own distinct style and subject matter. One series he recently completed, The Kitchen Floor, had a sequel, The Kitchen Wall. Another series, Little Sister Making a Mess of Her Lunch, was shot in one January afternoon. The Kitchen Floor sessions produced a single shot--his masterpiece, I think--of his foot. All these photos (well, most of them) are on currently exhibit on our iMac.

I'm not quite as prolific as my son, but digital photography has also changed the way I view the documentary qualities of photography, if not its expressive properties. A few weekends ago I was replacing our bathroom vanity when I ran into a particularly knotty plumbing problem. Instead of describing the problem to the hardware store salesman, I simply took a photograph of it on my BlackBerry and showed it to him. He understood right away and suggested a solution, which worked. Globally there must be several terabytes of storage devoted to shots just like this one, which I call IMG00038--quotidian photographs that either have one meaning, or none at all.

Taylor considers three photographs by the German artist Thomas Ruff as an exploration of "the false relationship that the ubiquitous image can create between the viewer and actual experience." This is hardly new ground, even for old film-based photography. It's based on a relationship of photographer to viewer that digital photography has broken down. Photography is now much more embedded in our own experience and the ways we record it and make sense of it. Photos of kids' parties and weekends in Telluride are now routinely circulated via email and photo sharing sites, a kind of exchangeable experience that Walter Benjamin never could have imagined, nor, evidently, any art photographs working today.

Artropolis 2008

There's an old story, retold by Jacques Lacan, about a trompe-l'oeil contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasios. Zeuxis paints some grapes that are so realistic birds flock to them, mistaking them for the real things. Then Perrhasios takes his turn and paints a veil so realistically that Zeuxis wonders aloud what's behind the veil. Zeuxis quickly realizes his mistake, blushes in embarrassment, and concedes the contest to Perrhasios. The story illustrates how animals can be lured by a false surface, but humans are lured by what lies beneath the surface.

This story is helpful in understanding Artropolis, an annual art show held in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. The Mart is a vast building consisting mainly of high-end interior design showrooms, along with a smattering of other businesses, including the software company for which I work. I don't know if it's because of the crowds in the Mart or the juxtaposition of artworks and displays of sleek Italian kitchens and faux-Second Empire living rooms, but Artropolis doesn't invite the sort of contemplation of formal elements one is used to in a museum. Rather, we're compelled to consider the art within a specific context, in this case images and objects of high bourgeois domestic idealism.

I didn't have the time to take in Artropolis on a systematic basis. I didn't even pay to see the exhibits (I snuck in to a few). But in my limited sample two artworks stood out as emblematic of the whole experience of Artropolis and whatever the exhibit itself is supposed to represent. The first was a life-sized unicorn set up in the lobby of the Mart. I couldn't get close enough to the sculpture to see the title or the artist. (In fact, it didn't strike me as a blog post subject until it was already removed.) It's pretty easy to imagine: an anatomically correct horse, whitish, with a horn sticking out of his forehead.  The sculpture made a direct reference to the image store of a fantasy world sometimes plundered for furniture advertisements. The horn also relieved the sculpture from being one of those hyperreal pop art objects, like Jasper Johns' Ballantine Ale cans, that retain the power to irritate precisely because they seem so artless.

Another take on the same theme--making the fantastic actual while de-actualizing the real--is  John Gerrard's Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas), reproduced above. Gerrard created the image using the virtual-reality techniques of video games, but the image itself is staged like a blend between painting and the cinema. The painting refers variously to The Wizard of Oz, Dustbowl photography, post-apocalyptic video game narratives, ecological disaster, widescreen mise-en-scene, and, most significantly, high-definition television. It's a highly detailed representational work (much of the artwork in Artropolis was representational), but any sense of trauma--an essential element of the real, as the Surrealists and Lacan have taught us--has been rigorously erased. Dust Storm has none of the visceral quality of Andy Warhol's early 1960s silkscreen images of blood car wrecks. It is reality filtered through a technologically-mediated way of seeing.

Dust Storm is an apocalyptic fantasy domesticated, while the unicorn is an oblique fantasy of eternal fecundity. Despite the care that went into creating a reality effect, neither of them, I think, refer to some reality out there some place. Instead, they refer ultimately back to the images from which we create domestic space. Gerrard's painting in particular is readymade for consumption: it's a stylish replacement for the flatscreen TV, accessible to anyone with a Best Buy credit card. It also resembles the current fad of photographs blown up to unreal dimensions, then hung in a family room. The unicorn sculpture is too big for display in a private home, but it also invokes and disavows a déclassé desire: no connoisseur of fine design would admit to harboring the treacly, pre-modern fantasy of tame white horses prancing around eternally green landscapes.

Similarly, the interior design industry is all about the lure of what lies beyond quotidian residential spaces. Designers don't try to exactly reproduce a medieval French chateau in a suburban McMansion. The illusion is more or less explicit. It consists of real, and very expensive, objects positioned between the owners' historical fantasies and the traumatic realities of economic competition outside the home. Interior design, and the artworks in Artropolis, highly alluring veils obscuring both the real and the fantastic.

Modernism and Its Discontents

In his magisterial new book Modernism: The Lure of Heresy the intellectual historian Peter Gay makes some puzzling claims. Most comprehensive accounts of modernism divide it into at least two strains, one that saw something to retain in Western culture, and another that wanted to trash the whole thing and start all over again. But Gay claims that "liberalism" was the '"fundamental principle of Modernism."  Surely by "liberalism" Gay can't mean the way the word is currently used and abused in the United States. Gay is a historian, so perhaps he's referring to the eighteenth-century uses of the word to mean "open-minded" and "unorthodox." This early sense would accommodate André Breton's remark that "the simplest surrealist act consists of dashing into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can, into the crowd."

There was a whole brand of modernism that was all about exploring the limits of unorthodoxy. If you want an overly vivid demonstration of this tendency, just watch, if your castration anxiety will allow you, the first scene of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien andalou in which a man slits a woman's eyeball with a razor. But the modernist movement also includes the decorous T.S. Eliot, the fey artificer Andy Warhol, the dreamy mythologizer William Butler Yeats, and the solemn demythologizer Walter Benjamin. None of these people would be comfortable being labeled a "liberal" as the term is currently used. Benjamin certainly would have sneered at it as inadequate to what he was trying to do.

The second questionable claim Gay makes is his assertion that World War I inspired "few striking innovations in high culture." True, the most innovative artworks of the first two decades of the twentieth century were created before hostilities broke out: Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) and Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), but the most insouciant artwork of the century was created at the war's sour peak: Duchamp's Fountain (1917). Irish literature before the Great War was Yeats and John Millington Synge; afterwards it was James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Ezra Pound spent the pre-war years tinkering with Symbolism and the fustier reaches of romanticism. After the war Eliot overturned everything in English poetry with The Waste Land. By comparison, the Second World War was aesthetically barren. Abstract Expressionism, the most original post-war movement, owed a considerable debt to interwar painting, while John Cage was Dada with a piano.

Then there's the great modernism/post-modernism divide. Gay argues that modernism eventually ran out of gas, then sold out.  Duchamp's Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q. (pictured above) are now art museum gift shop items. The theater of the absurd has been picked apart in heavily-footnoted Ph.D. dissertations.  Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein threw up their hands at any political commitment and reveled in the cheesier aspects of popular culture.  The last warhorses of antagonistic modernism are Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. Among younger authors cutting edge lit is now about losing your memory.

But in his epilogue--maybe Gay wants us to see post-modernism as an epilogue to modernism--Gay pays a visit to Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim and sees in the brash curlicues signs of modernism's old anarchic energy. But in general, modernism "has had a good long run," Gay sighs, but now it's pretty much over with. Whether he's right or not is the subject of another book.

You Look Fabulous

The Getty Museum has acquired 252 photographs by Irving Penn. The photographs, condescendingly called "The Small Trades," represent a departure in content, if not form, for the fashion photographer. The photographs feature workers posed in Penn's trademark blank stage, in full body length, with the subject gazing serenely back at the camera. The Getty acquired the "Small Trade" photographs because they round out the career of an important American photographer. Virginia Heckert, an associate photography curator at the Getty, is "very excited" about the acquisition, which doesn't mean anyone else has to be.

The problem isn't fashion photography, per se. Fashion photography is unique because it finds an eternal value, beauty, in the transitory, fashion. The glimpse of something enduring within the fleeting formed the basis of Baudelaire's definition of modernism. Later, Walter Benjamin picked up this view for his own understanding of modernism and its relation to the culture at large.

But "The Small Trades" are not fashion photographs. They are portraiture of an elaborately staged, and class-conscious, kind. Why Penn should turn his attention to the lumpenproletariat isn't clear, but, now that they're in the Getty Museum, for us the question is, what do Penn's photographs tell us about the history of photography?

One explanation is offered by Heckert, who says Penn's photographs are "really about the subject presenting himself in a more intimate setting to his photographer. It's a more psychological relationship between the artist and the subject." Maybe Penn got tired of looking at vacuous models and wanted someone more interesting looking back at him. What's clear is that Penn wasn't interested in changing the nature of his medium's relation to its audience. These are photographs for the same cultivated middle classes that were consumers of his fashion photography.

In his writings on the history of photography, Walter Benjamin distinguished between those photographers who mystified the process of creativity, and those who opened up it. (He made the same distinction, by the way, amongst architects and filmmakers.) Penn may have placed the working classes at the center of his photography, but he doesn't allow his subjects to appropriate (Benjamin used the word "absorb") his mode of seeing.

Take a look at Penn's photograph of a waiter, "Garcon de Cafe -- Raoul," shot in Paris in 1950. Raoul is a vivid individual--no anonymous, plasticized model here. But there's nothing particularly illuminating here for another waiter. The subject has been completely decontextualized, utterly shut off from lived experience. Furthermore, you can practically see the process of commodification gathering around him. He is the model of the "Parisian waiter" at the exact time when the French tourism and leisure industries were assuming their present form to accommodate the masses of American tourists flocking to Europe after World War II.

Whether he's photographing a fashion model or a charwoman, Penn reduces his subject to a drama staged for the benefit of a controlling male gaze. It elicits the clichéd response, "You look fabulous," which is at once complementary and dismissive. Of course, one could argue that that's pretty much the essence of fashion, but at the same time, fashion is supposed to be something one inhabits. It allows one to control, to a certain extent, what semiotic messages one wants to send. Penn's crucial innovation, arguably, isn't the famous gray background, but the full body shot. The subject of the photograph is a whole thing with no outside--no inside, either. Nothing individual sticks out. Even Raoul's jaunty tray is off balance, a mere prop that doesn't express anything individual. In Penn's photographs, there is no place to hide, and no place to inhabit, either.

Escape from the Precious Object

Video art has been on the verge of hitting the cultural big time for forty years now, but it still isn't there yet. Video as an art form faces a lot of challenges. For one, its technology is constantly threatened with obsolescence. Already expensive archiving projects are underway to make sure someone has a VHS machine to play those hours of 1970s video art. Video is a tough sell to collectors, so it's generally stuck in museums and galleries. And video art is often boring, which is puzzling, considering the form's closest relations, television and film, fear boredom most of all. Video artists seem irresistibly drawn to boredom. Douglas Gordon has made a career out of appropriating movies for video art, infusing them with exquisite kind of boredom. His 24 Hour Psycho (1993) is an frame-by-frame reproduction of Hitchcock's film drawn out to 24 hours.

The New York Times' Holland Cotter has found some recent videos that aren't boring. The most remarkable of these videos is Ryan Trecartin's I-Be Area, which asks its viewers to watch for an hour and forty-eight minutes, much longer than most people are generally willing to endure a video artwork. Cotter says Trecartin's video rewards extended viewing

because "I-Be Area" is so giddy, so different. But it's also just plain strange, which is part of the larger appeal of today's video art. It represents a possible way out of something, out of the renewed tyranny of the precious object, out from under a boutique art market that has amassed grotesque wealth and power while making art itself seem small and utterly dispensable.

If Cotter is right and Trecartin and the other video artists Cotter discusses--Kalup Linzy, Sadie Benning, and Nathalie Djurberg--the escape from the precious object may lead to another kind of cultural object: the feature-length narrative film.

If video art can be said to have a master form, it would be textuality. In contrast to the auratic artwork, video art draws from, then disappears into, the vast system of books, movies, TV shows, commercials produced by the culture industry--all of which seem to be related to each other, somehow. Video art's thematic of boredom can be seen as a reproduction of the flow of all that pop culture stuff that whizzes through our minds every day. I-Be Area is a text rather than a work; we've seen it all before, just not in such an audaciously weird form. What distinguishes Trecartin's work is that it has a narrative--a more or less cinematic one. So should we view it as we would a movie?

There's long been a debate about whether or not video art has the suturing effect of cinema. Is video art supposed to engage us as viewers with the same set of identificatory mechanisms as classical cinema? Or is video art a refutation of all the ruses of the classical film style? For all its antic editing, claustrophobic mise-en-scene and visual non sequiturs, I-Be Area wants us to enter its strange world and stay a while, just as we would in a film. Everyone in I-Be Area is clamoring to be noticed. Forget the passive "ready to be seen" pose of the film character, Trecartin's characters constantly play with their appearances to distract us from the reality that they're characters in a video. There's a touching earnestness to the strangeness in the video. (Much the same can be said for Linzy's All My Churen.)

I-Be Area and the other videos Cotter discusses have a made-for-YouTube visual aesthetic, which would seem to disqualify them as films. And yet, filmmakers could learn a few things from video artists. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a terrific film, but every frame has a lush quality that seems airless at times, which is perhaps why Daniel Day-Lewis's performance is so stagy. Anderson's film, like many other Oscar-ready films this year, is a precious object. It would be refreshing to see a film that's willing to pull out all the stops to show us something new. Film directors could use the fearlessness of video artists.

Beckett in the Big Easy

Among the awful things that has happened to New Orleans since Katrina is that its culture of pleasure-seeking has turned into self loathing. The Big Easy has become a cauldron of resentment and recrimination. It's in this atmosphere that the artist Paul Chan decided to stage Samuel Beckett's  Waiting for Godot amidst the ruins of the Ninth Ward. With three actors from the Classical Theater of Harlem, including The Wire's Wendell Pierce, Chan's production concluded last month to much popular success, and not just because the performances were free. Chan, however, remains in New Orleans, where he continues to teach in the local schools as part of a deal he reached with community leaders. 

The New York Times' Holland Cotter describes Chan as someone "who is well known to the international art world for his video animations of paradises embattled and lost, and to law enforcement officials for his activist politics." The wording is careful. Chan isn't a political artist. Rather, he's an artist who involves himself in political activism.

A canny tactician, Mr. Chan insists that his art and his political work run on two separate, possibly conflicting, tracks. Political action is collaborative, goal-specific and designed for power, he maintains. Art, by contrast, is individually produced, ductile in meaning and built to last. It is the opposite of ideologically instrumental; it is made to melt power.

Chan's Godot production recalls the efforts of another artist activist, Rick Lowe, who runs Project Row Houses in Houston. Both Chan and Lowe acknowledge that artistic practice, by itself, isn't necessarily political even when the artist intends it to be so. We may be entering a new age of political art in America in which personal artistic expression is no longer sufficient to achieve political ends. Artists like Chan and Lowe are forging a collectivist politics by working with coalitions of community leaders, local governments, political organizations, and ordinary citizens.

Collectivist politics have had a checkered past in the United States. Since the Second World War, American art has struggled to find a middle ground between American exceptionalism on the one hand and an international standard of aesthetic legitimacy on the other. One way out of this conundrum was Abstract Expressionism.  Although Expressionism had been conventionalized in the European avant-garde after the collapse of the Weimar Republic, in the post-World War II era the events of history had become so overwhelming, and the force of state control so total, that avant-garde artists once again turned into radical expressions of the self in response.  By the 1950s collective politics of the kind we're seeing now had been discredited by their association with Soviet communism and socialist realism. The power of individual artistic protests can be seen in Chan's choice of plays to stage in New Orleans: Waiting for Godot, one of Beckett's bleakest portrayals of existential solitude. 

We're clearly reconsidering collectivist politics during a time of liberal optimism at the collapse of neo-conservativism, signified by the devastation of two old cities, New Orleans and Baghdad. The extreme political futility in the face of what's happened in New Orleans seems to open the door for different kinds of political responses, but even seemingly more direct interventions may not be as transformative as we would like. Among other challenges, collective politics may run aground on our entrenched  habits of talking about politics in terms of ruthlessly self-interested special-interest groups.  Collective political forces are now subject to the same gaffes and narrow agendas as individual candidates -- or demagogic political commentators like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. One recent baleful example of a grass-roots political force getting lumped in with all the other braying political action committees was MoveOn.org's infamous ads during the Patreaus hearings last September. 

Performing Waiting for Godot in New Orleans should be a piquant political commentary in and of itself.  That a bleak existential comedy should find a perfect stage in the real world of a ruined American city should be sufficient to shame power into changing its course of action.  However, we are now so invested in political polarities that what strikes one person as an egregious violation of fundamental humanist principles can appear to another as a routine bit of partisan gamesmanship.  So, curiously, in order to complete his political gesture Chan was obliged to do something that supposedly politically disenfranchised academics are asked to do routinely: teach a few classes, give a few lectures.  This is the price that the artist needs to pay in order to make a political gesture in 2007.

A City of Art

The real estate developer Hines has unveiled plans for a new 75-story tower by French architect Jean Nouvel to be built on land once owned by MoMA, which, under the terms of a complicated real estate deal, will receive three floors of the new building for exhibition space. The 40,000 additional square feet of space, Nicolai Ouroussoff implies, will make up for the shortcomings of the museum's three-year-old expansion, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi.

A building that's one half curatorial do-over and one half commercial opportunism doesn't promise to be anything but bland and exploitative, but happily, and unexpectedly, the developer chose the more daring of the two designs Nouvel was asked to submit. Ouroussoff goes so far as to proclaim that the building "promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation." Nouvel's gothic design departs not only from the restrained rationalism of Taniguchi's addition, but also from the heroic rationalism of the recent crop of supertalls under construction in Chicago. The Chicago towers use the new core and outrigger method of constructing  very tall skyscrapers. One advantage of the new method is more direct access to windows, but at the cost of a thick core. Nouvel's building uses external buttressing, a method common in post-World War II skyscrapers such as Chicago's John Hancock building. In fact, the building on the MoMA site resembles an Expressionist version of the Hancock tower, making the Nouvel's design fit more easily into the Modernist tradition than its extravagantly gothic structure might initially suggest.  Oh, and the VP's are going to love having their skyline views obscured by a steel buttress cutting across their windows.

The Nouvel design is also traditionally Modernist in its self-contained, city-within-a-city design that both intensifies the congestion of its Midtown setting and offers a respite from it. The MoMA block is developing into a city of art. Containing itself within one block, it segments itself off from the information economy structures surrounding it. In the city of art, skyscrapers sprout from sculpture gardens and galleries sprawl across buildings. The newest addition to the MoMA block underscores the tension between art and commerce within the museum, as well as the conflict between artists and the institutions of art that have defined the sequence of avant-garde art movements since Dada. Ouroussoff balefully notes that Hines is more daring and innovative than the Museum of Modern Art has been in recent years, indicating that the concepts of Madison Avenue marketing are currently ahead of the concepts that shape contemporary American art.

Suffering for Art

The 150 N. Michigan Avenue Building may be one of the few 1980's buildings that has aged well,but the sculpture that stands in its small plaza has not. Yaacov Agam's Communication X9 is set to reappear in public in the spring of 2008 after a nearly three-year restoration process. A Harvard-trained art restorer was hired to repair the 43-foot column, which had suffered more than 20 years of harsh Chicago winters. However, the restoration isn't up to Agam's standards because there's "no  movement in the color," and if the tone of one panel is off by a little bit, the whole sculpture suffers, the entire city suffers, and most importantly, the artist suffers. "It's not an Agam," huffed the artist. "It's an abuse of the artist, and an abuse of the public, to misrepresent the sculpture as mine."

Agam has hired a lawyer who's waving around the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act, which was intended to present the desecration of artworks. Agam may be out of luck, though, because his work was completed in 1981 and he doesn't own it any more. The law was intended to prevent the wanton destruction of public art, and Agam has a tough case to prove that X9 has been desecrated after the restoration, especially considering Agam was paid $18,000 for his contributions. As for abuse of the public, I don't recall the column looking like a new way of representing movement in art, as one of its supporters claims. Rather, it looked more like a bad 1980's sweater. The subtle changes in color as one walks by, Agam's signature effect, wasn't that arresting.

This isn't to say the artwork doesn't deserve a careful and professional restoration, but to invoke a law intended for real crimes against art for trivial matters of color matching is the real abuse of the public. Public works of art inevitably suffer some indignities, especially from the weather. An artwork worthy of public funding should take this into account. No one from Picasso's estate has hired a lawyer to remove the rust from his sculpture in the Daley Center plaza. Suing over the Pantone values of a minor work of art, especially since the color effects will be lost in a winter or two anyway, trivializes an important issue in American public space.

Art in a Magical Town

In the "magical town" town of Lund, Sweden, four vandals, plus camera crew, broke into the Kulturen Gallery and smashed seven photographs by Andres Serrano in an exhibition called  “The History of Sex." The vandals, allegedly a group of local neo-Nazis, shouted "We don’t support this shit" as they took crowbars and axes to the photographs in the gallery containing the most explicit of the photographs. On Friday night they posted a video of the attack on YouTube, complete with subtitled commentary and a death metal soundtrack.

If these self-appointed (fascists are always self-appointed) preservers of public decency re-enacted a chapter in the history of art: philistine outrage at sexually explicit artworks. Their act was entirely symbolic, since the exhibition reopened the next day, the offending presence of the photographs only circumcised. It's interesting that the vandals didn't simply remove the photographs, as any true defender of public decency would. The defaced photographs remained visible, in shards in the gallery and in the YouTube video.  The fascinated gaze of the museum goer has been replaced by the distracted gaze of the Internet video--still voyeuristic spectatorship, but with the rage of the repressed.

Sprezzatura

My son and I are home with stomach flu, so I'm unable to process anything more complicated than Word Girl. Here are some links picking up on stuff I've been writing about recently:

Steven Clemons says we're not going to attack Iran, despite the current buzz in Washington that indicates we are. Bush is gun shy, for once, and he's dispatched Condi to find a third way between an aerial attack and "appeasement." Meanwhile, Cheney is plotting to force Bush's hand into an attack. Clemons' article is a rare account of Bush actually learning from his mistakes.

I'd rather see Stephen Greenblatt write more directly on Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, but he invokes the Renaissance concept of sprezzatura (nonchalance) in a highly personal reflection on sports, writing, and his own entry into college, complete with a sly contrast to Kaavya Viswanathan's more mercenary approach to making one's way through Harvard.

Salman Rushdie, with uncharacteristic brevity, crashed the National Book Critics Circle symposium on the future of book reviews and proclaimed, "I think it's rather unfortunate that some of the coverage tries to pitch print reviewing against the new media. I think they complement each other very well." By the way, the NBCC event shows that the newspapers v. blogs debate remains stuck in place.

Why didn't this collection stay home? It could have gone in the new Renzo Piano addition to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Traces of the True

Yesterday I introduced Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics. I'd like to take a closer look at his remarks about modernism, which, in all their ambivalence, bear a striking resemblance to Walter Benjamin's sometimes contradictory writings on modernism.

The full force of Rancière's claim that the political and the aesthetic are intricately related becomes clear when he takes up the issue of technology and the aesthetic. "The aesthetic regime of the arts," he writes, "is the true name for what is designated by the incoherent label 'modernity.'" Under the aesthetic regime the arts freed themselves from all the old rules, but, at the same time, neglected mimesis, the salient quality of the previous regime, the poetic. The loss of mimesis meant art cut itself off from the "spheres of collective experience." This appeal to the experiential nature of art and modernity is familiar from Benjamin, as well as Oakeshott and the British Marxists of the 1960's, when Rancière was an Althusserian. The Marxist tradition, in its Western European manifestation, mourned the general decline of experience in modernity, when cultural and economic forms had less and less to do with how people actually lived. Worse, the abstraction of economic relations--and modern art--drained ordinary experience of all substance and precluded most forms of collective political action.

And yet, virtually all of Rancière's examples of the aesthetic intervening in the political occur under the aesthetic regime of the arts, when art had supposedly retreated from collective experience into contemplation of its own perfect forms. In his discussion of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Rancière expresses some reservations about Benjamin's essay, as everyone does, then goes on to acknowledge how much he's learned from it--again, as everyone does. Rancière makes the startling claim that literature and painting were, in effect, the true leading edge of modernity. Following Benjamin, Rancière points out that literature discovered the subject matter of photography before photographers did. In fact, the great Realists Balzac, Hugo and Flaubert broke down the opposition between high and low culture long before reproductive technologies did. Rancière concludes,

On the one hand, the technological revolution comes after the aesthetic revolution. On the other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour acquired by the commonplace, which is pictorial and literary before being photographic or cinematic.

This is where Rancière is far more interesting than his complaints about modernism. He says that literature conducted a symptomatic investigation of history long before historians or scientists did. By extension (Rancière himself doesn't make these claims), the economic theory of Adam Smith isn't possible without the rise of the pastoral tradition in English poetry during the eighteenth century, nor psychology possible without the Romantic poets. Freud himself once admitted that everything he discovered about the human psyche was already known to the Romantics. Stephen Greenblatt shows us in his study of Columbus's diaries in "Marvelous Possessions" that the entire conquest of the New World was made possible by writing.

Rancière concludes his remarks about technology's role in modernity with a Benjaminian flourish. As Benjamin knew, we can no longer see ordinary life directly because we no longer trust mimesis. Instead, as Rancière puts it, "the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure." First of all, this is a pretty succinct description of Benjamin's critical practice. Second, the social sciences, with their dry empiricism and disdain for the figurative, were in fact founded upon the phantasmagoric nature of the true, only they've forgotten this origin. Rancière accuses modern art of just this type of forgetting, only to explain how we can't see ordinary life, the fertile ground of the political, unless we see it aesthetically.

Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics

We've been taught that Richard III is a political play, but what about A Midsummer's Night Dream? Picasso's Guernica is obviously political, but can we say the same thing about Malevich's Black Square? If we were inclined to talk about Black Square as a political work, how would we do that?

Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible gives us a way to talk about the political meaning of art that's both powerful and limited. He makes historical comparisons easy, but his theory of art and the political doesn't offer a means to read a work closely for its political implications, although he doesn't preclude such a reading. He also regards modernism as something of a historical dead end, a view I don't share. Rancière's theory of art and politics is worth considering, at the very least, because it's elegant and simple. According to Rancière, art is one means by which a culture determines what is perceived and what enters language, as well as who gets to do the perceiving and writing or painting. In short, art represents a distribution of the sensible. He says that art

is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.

Art has its own way of doing and perceiving, and changes in aesthetics cause epochal changes in ways people perceive and reflect upon the world around them.

In this short book Rancière provides few examples that exemplify this or that distribution of the sensible, but two examples stand out, each marking an important change in Western culture.

The first involves the arrival of Renaissance quattrocento painting, which introduced three-dimensional space in order to capture the immediacy of live speech and action. Giotto and those who followed him eschewed not only the iconic work of the Middle Ages, but also Plato's separation of art and living. The return of two-dimensional pictoral space in Modernism, Rancière claims, reflects a technology-saturated world of pages, screens, and interfaces between different media, including different artistic genres. Malevich's Black Square, for example, depicts the interface between typography and painting, a prevalent theme in a lot of explicitly political art in High Modernism. That this interface now strikes us as commonplace doesn't vitiate its initial impact or the political gesture of pointing to emergent forms of life.

Modernism not only broke down the neo-classical separation of the arts from each other, it also incorporated new subject matter into high art. The plein air painters of the mid-nineteenth century were one strain of the massive re-distribution of the sensible during the 1800's. Another was literary Realism, which emerged around the same time. Rancière discusses the proto-modernist Flaubert, who refused to give any particular emphasis to anything that found its way into his fiction. When Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education first appeared, they were hailed as democratic, even revolutionary works, "despite Flaubert's aristocratic situation and political conformism," Rancière dryly adds. For Rancière, Flaubert's indifference to the bourgeois material of his fiction

is the result of a poetic bias: the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is this indifference after all if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available to everyone's eyes? This equality destroys all of the hierarchies of representation and also establishes a community of readers as a community without legitimacy, a community formed only by the random circulation of the written word.

This last remark, with which I disagree, points to an affinity Rancière has with Walter Benjamin, whom I also disagree with about the possibility of the novel as the basis for community, or less abstractly, of exchangeable experience. In my next post I'll talk more about Rancière's debt to Walter Benjamin.

Same Barnes, Different Place

Yesterday the Barnes Foundation announced, with a characteristic sense of shadowy intrigue, their new downtown Philadelphia museum will be designed by the New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. (More here and here.) People have been bickering about what to do with the Barnes collection since, it seems, Gauguin shipped out for the South Seas. Albert Barnes created the foundation through the well-meaning but unworkable terms of his will. His priceless collection of nineteenth-century art was bestowed to the trustees of Lincoln University, an historically black university outside Philadelphia. The trustees were to ensure that the collection was reserved for the edification of students who ordinarily wouldn't have access to fine artworks. A commendable idea, but the collection was stranded in Merion, a wealthy suburb far away from anyone who could be called disadvantaged. Even seasoned field trippers rarely ventured to Merion to visit Barnes' small and staid museum. Attempts to update the collection were fruitless; Barnes dictated that the paintings should never be moved from the walls. Eventually the museum came to attract more probate attorneys than art lovers.

Now Barnes' imaginary South of France will be located on Philadelphia's imaginary Champs-Élysées. The Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the location of the new museum, was created in an inept exercise in Haussmannization. Instead of a grand promenade, Benjamin Franklin Parkway is a favorite location for local drivers to menace tourists scurrying across its wide crosswalks. During the ten years I lived in Philly the Parkway averaged one dead bicyclist a year, including several children. Plopped awkwardly between Logan Square and the Art Museum, the Parkway has never felt very organic to the city, so city planners might as well fill up the space with buildings. All things considered, Williams and Tsein are sensible choices to design the new museum, but the foundation didn't see fit to invite a local architect to submit a design.  Philadelphia is a lovely but underachieving city that could be a lot better. New York and, to a lesser extent, Washington and Boston suck up all of the energy on the east coast, so it's sad to see Philadelphia subscribing to the same dynamic.

If Paris was once the capital of the nineteenth century, as Walter Benjamin once proclaimed, then Philadelphia remains a provincial city of the nineteenth century, Flaubert's Rouen with cheese steaks. With its odd exhibition spaces and fusty collection reproduced in a MoMA-style building, the new downtown Barnes is emblematic of the city as a whole: clinging to the harsh quirks from its past while looking elsewhere to update itself for the new millennium.

MTV’s Poet Laureate

mtvU may have an irritating acronym and a dubious business plan, but at least it showed some imagination in selecting John Ashbery as its first poet laureate. mtvU will broadcast snippets of his poems  to 750 colleges across the US as part of an effort to expose students to poetry and provide some cultural cover for Viacom's expansion plans in the 18-24 demographic.

Ashbery has taken a what-the-hell approach to the project. He doesn't get paid, but one or two students somewhere may be paying enough attention to read some more poetry. For the students who already read poetry--and there are more than one would expect--the project will be yet another well-meaning but somewhat puzzling publicity campaign, much like the 1990's vogue for poems in subways.

The mtvU presentations are slick and minimalist, and, I suppose, it's beside the point to object that they're not accurate representations of the experience of reading a full Ashbery poem. The short mtvU films lend the poems a formal closure the full poems lack. For instance, "Soonest Mended" becomes aphoristic, and Ashbery is anything but an aphoristic writer. On the other hand, Ashbery's aesthetic has been likened to music, or, perhaps more accurately given the current context, a music video: scraps of discourse and images float by, each arresting in its own way but not adding up to anything coherently meaningful. It's also worth noting that Ashbery is the only major literary figure associated with the Abstract Impressionist movement in the 1950's. Ashbery is too reserved and cerebral to be a prosody version of Willem de Kooning, but Ashbery did pick up on the Abstract Expressionists' explorations of form and emotion--at the same time early rockers were forging the same connections. Maybe someday soon mtvU will designate Barnett Newman as its first court artist.

Coop Himmelb(l)au's New Akron Art Museum

Yesterday was the official opening of the extension to the Akron Art Museum. The new extension, designed by the Vienna-based firm Coop Himmelb(l)au, has been given the unpromising nickname of "space junk" by grumpy Akroners unhappy with the building's jarringly postmodern forms. Blair Kamin likes the unconventional outside of the building but deducts points for tame conformity of the galleries. Despite grumblings of dissent, he says architect Wolf Prix's extension "delivers a jolt of energy to a  reviving Middle American city."

Akron was once the rubber capital of the world, but now it's trying on some other identities. While some Akroners may not be too keen on their new piece of Austrian exotica, the brash, jumbled forms of Prix's extension perfectly represent the historical plight of a smokestack city trying to reinvent itself as a  post-industrial urban space.

It's no small exaggeration to say that Akron once existed solely to make tires. The city exemplified Plato's segregation of artisans from other forms of public life, including political discourse (artisans didn't have the time to bother themselves with the affairs of the polis). This strict limitation to making and doing carried over to the city's attitude about the fine arts. The core Akron Art Museum is a Renaissance Revival building originally constructed as a post office. That the art museum was housed in a building with such modestly functional origins says much about the city's preference for artisanal and representation art. Appropriately, the museum's 1850 to 1950 collection is heavy with representational and regional art.

To a significant degree the museum's post-1950 collection remains true to representational art. One of its prized pieces is Chuck Close's photorealist painting Linda. But the post-war collection, considered to be the museum's strength, also includes artworks that break down the traditional division of fine arts into painting and sculpture, each with their own ranges of appropriate subject matter. Two examples of paradigm-breaking artworks are the Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo's installation Atrabiliairios and Frank Stella's Diepholz, which combines both painting and sculpture. These postmodern works have narrative and linguistic dimensions totally foreign to the purely optical American Impressionism of the 1850-1950 galleries.

Replacing the purity of vision with the raucous play of image and word is a familiar postmodern move, and one that's analogous to the recent history of Akron itself. Once it made tires; now it's trying to find its place in the trans-national circulation of words and symbols in the globalized economy. Making and doing have been replaced by the analysis of symbols and signs. The Internet-based economy dissolves all the old divisions between copy and original, word and image, two and three-dimensional space.  Prix even refers to his extension of the Akron Art Museum as a "three-dimensional sign."

Prix divided the extension into three sections: "Gallery Box," "Crystal," and " Roof Cloud." Each section is stylistically distinct, but all three represent a radical departure from the original building. Prix's discontinuities and disruptions place him squarely in postmodernism's late, traumatic phase (as opposed to its early, carnivalesque phase). The "space junk" extension signals an abrupt departure from the grand historical narratives of industrialization (bounty for all, eventually) and Renaissance humanism (toward a perfect humankind)--an aesthetic departure as abrupt and traumatic as the departure of manufacturing jobs from Akron.

Notes on Anselm Kiefer at the Grand Palais

Anselm Kiefer is probably the most Benjaminian of contemporary artists, so it's fitting that he would have an exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris. The Grand Palais was built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, the third in a series of world's fairs in Paris. (The second one, in 1889, left the Eiffel Tower behind.) The nineteenth-century world exhibitions are important subjects in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, his unfinished study of the Paris arcades as the origin of capitalist culture. The world exhibitions were Gesamtkunstwerke, total works of art, phantasmagoric admixtures of technology and art, armaments and  fashions, business and pleasure. According to Benjamin, the world exhibitions were the origins of the pleasure industry. The fantastic displays at the exhibitions "refined and multiplied the varieties of reactive behavior of the masses. [They] thereby prepared the masses for adapting to advertisements."

Benjamin would have appreciated using the Grand Palais, a monument to humankind's dreams of progress, to exhibit art works of profound melancholia and despair. Kiefer's imagination is allegorical of a particular kind: the trauerspiel, mourning plays from the German baroque period. The trauerspiel was the subject of Benjamin's first book, and the Arcades Project was an attempt to apply its allegorical methods to the study of consumer culture.

Here are some notes on  Kiefer's Monumenta exhibit. The images were taken, without asking, from Alan Riding's New York Times article. The photos were taken by Vincent Nguyen and Samson Thomas. Click on the thumbnail to see a larger version of the image.

A detail from "Palmsonntag" (Palm Sunday). Human progress at a standstill: history as petrified nature.

"Sonnenschiff" (Sun Ship). The Baudelairean fascination with decay and ruin, a melancholic reaction to urban phantasmagoria with its promise of change as progress. Kiefer says, “What you see is despair. I am completely desperate because I cannot explain why I am here. It’s more than mourning, it’s despair.”

Another detail from "Palmsonntag" (Palm Sunday). Within the biblical story of rebirth, a sterile earth, the god-forsaken landscape of the German baroque allegorists.

"House number IV" (Aperiatur Terra). The paintings are landscapes sculpted by half-finished beings laboring under a permanent dusk. In Benjamin's reading, the half-finished beings of Kafka's stories are messengers not from the world to come, but from the archaic world of myth, a world that always threatens to return.

"Journey to the End of Night," a tribute to the novel by Louis Ferdinand Celine. The leaden ship: the surrealism of Thanatos. The sea as an infinite nightmare, the floating ship of lead signifies life as mere resistance to death, the null point of an ethics derived from guilt.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Art

Let's say you're going to attention an exhibit of Rembrandt drawings and paintings. Do you try to read up on the artist before you go? Do you rent the audio tour? Or do you enter the exhibit deliberately unprepared, freed from someone else's vision and ready to rely on your own idiosyncratic responses? Both approaches have their perils--merely checking off features you recognize from the guidebooks, staring dumbfounded at the interchangeable little Dutch houses and murky allegories--but in neither case can we expect automatic illumination or a completely fresh eye. We're blind to some aspects of the paintings, and vulnerable to fixating on details we suspect aren't fully artistic, like a particular shade of blue on a dress.

San Francisco Chronicle culture critic Steven Winn points to the unconscious as the dominant mechanism governing our responses to art. He cites neurobiologists and psychologists to develop a notion of the unconscious as a kind of broadband network. "The unconscious, like the Internet," he writes, "can be seen as a vast interwoven fabric of data about ourselves and our connections to one another and the world."  He describes looking at some Brice Marden paintings, which "work[ed] on me like an Rorschach inkblot, pulling out associative data as some skilled forensic psychologist would." Winn goes into greater detail describing a performance of Handel's oratorio Belshazzar by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.

 

[C]ontented as I was to be there and hearing Handel expertly performed, everything seemed distinct, separate and clear, like shiny beads on a bracelet. The singers' trills, the timbre of the strings and burbling harpsichord, the sumptuous poise of the music itself, the back of conductor Nicholas McGegan's head, a jacket that fit countertenor William Towers a little too snugly -- everything ticked through my consciousness.

And then, late in the second act, Labelle began an aria ("Regard, O son, my flowing tears") that went through me like light through glass. The spun-silver phrases, the soft tides and surges of the orchestra, one exquisitely wrenching interval all poured in, weightless and shining. It went on and on, and was over before it started. "The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable," the writer Italo Calvino once remarked. I was out there, afloat. That's all I can really tell you about what happened that night.

What I don't understand is how unconscious meaning can lead to such equipoise, or how a computer network, which in my experience is a maddeningly unpredictable and literal-minded thing, can effectively serve as a metaphor for an unconsciousness fine-tuned for optimal aesthetic pleasure. The two great theorists of the unconscious, Nietzsche and Freud, would have been astonished at both claims. For Nietzsche, art is shot through with libidinal desire. He once growled, "Music is just another way of making children." He declared in The Genealogy of Morals that art is "in all eternity chaos . . . A lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, [and] wisdom."  To behold an art object is to put into play a form-giving power that becomes an end in itself, feeding off the pleasure of its own associative inventiveness. It is, in short, the will to power. Nietzsche laughed at the idea of disinterestedness, that somehow meanings spring magically beyond our will. In fact, he probably would have dismissed the notion of the unconscious as a network of data as idealist as the idea of consciousness itself, merely positing a stable entity as a cover for "change, becoming, multiplicity, opposition, contradiction, war"--which we know by the shorthand "unconsciousness."

Freud would have been more sympathetic to Winn's definition of the unconsciousness, but he too would have been skeptical about any claims for the ameliorative power of aesthetic experience. The Freudian unconscious is a peculiar thing, picking out things from the world for safekeeping and gnawing over other parts. This messy process forms the uncertain foundations of our identities. In contrast to the classical ideal of art appreciation handed down from Goethe, Schiller, and Matthew Arnold, with its serenely balanced subject, for Freud our unconscious is a war zone of slippery, contradictory desires barely capable of fleeting reconciliation. From the Freudian point of view the dream of the self filled up with art, from the uppermost reaches of cognition to the subroutines of the more primitive parts of the brain, is just another infantile fantasy, a self-serving and therefore entirely illusionary melding of body and mind. Our bodies--the rumblings in our stomach, the focused gaze, the sweating latecomer--don't fit very well into language. To linger at the threshold of feeling and utterance is a regressive return to the traumatic rupture of self from speech, only without suffering the pain of actually giving way to one or the other. We don't like to talk about art because, invariably, our perceptions always come across as sounding inadequate and stupid. But simply shrugging and saying nothing like Winn is a tricky approach, too, for language has a way of rushing out in front of us. Take, for instance, the image with which Winn leaves us: a grown man sitting immobilized in a dark theater, held safely in the arms of a rigorously ordered father (Handel) and a warm, loving mother (the Philharmonia). 

Goethe on the Art of Life

Nietzsche once called Goethe "the last German I hold in reverence," and it's not hard to see why. Goethe was not only good at everything he did, he seemed to enjoy everything he was asked to do, even inspecting roads and working out state budgets. In addition to being the Shakespeare of German literature, Goethe carried out scientific experiments, advised a duke on matters great and small, and lived to a contented old age. He was perhaps the last engaged intellectual -- engaged not in the political sense, but engaged in the ordinary activities of a middle-class life. In his new biography, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet, John Armstrong calls Goethe

a new kind of hero. The real task is not merely to criticize power, but to exercise it well; on the other side, the task is not merely to make 'pure art' or conduct 'pure research,' but to bring art and knowledge into fruitful engagement with experience. Goethe's example is powerful because he undertakes these tasks as a creative artist of the highest order. So, the integration of art and life doesn't — when we fix our attention on Goethe — look like a grubby compromise.

The integration of art and life is an immensely appealing idea, but it's underdeveloped. We have maxims here and there from artists, like Oscar Wilde's "put your talent into your art and your genius into your life,&quo