seminar 3 - notes

Student notes



Session 3: Pragmatics – Real and Virtual Effects
Session 4: preparatory notes for discussion

Examining the necessity for a pragmatics that aligns the theoretical and historical with practical knowledge and concerns, (the ‘know-how’ with the ‘know-what’), in view of structuring a curatorial project that has both real and virtual outcomes, or where the effectiveness is fused between notions of real/virtual. What are these ‘practical’ outcomes and how do they interrelate the theoretical or hypothetical subject of the project? Provision of both written texts and physical artworks, address themselves both to networks and to a specific time / spatial location. How do these break down into individual processes and the forming (making) of unique objects and transmissions that are not mutually exclusive? Language marks the collaboration of the group: the assembly of material, as an event. Heterogeneous materials and voices. The ‘micro-museum’ or an-archive of disassembled parts, cohere or coalesce as a platform, make a boon of their disorganised material, which falls together in free-forms without homogenizing efficaciousness. The event ‘sublates’ the material and the voice together, either / or: art forms, words, spoken words, documents, collected things, simultaneously re-arranged within the electronic realm, the networked website live. These parameters would define perhaps some questions regarding process and saturation, the virtualisation and sublime object of the market, ‘ideology’ both from an academic position of detachment and as at the same time entering, immersed, in the subliminal actuality / ideology of contemporary-social milieu.

“A much more interesting notion, crucial to understanding what goes on today is the opposite – not virtual reality but the reality of the virtual. That is to say ‘reality’ by this I mean ‘efficacity’ – effectiveness – real effects generated by something that does not yet fully exist, that is not yet fully actual...” Slavoj Zizek, The Reality of the Virtual [youtube/excerpt]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5b_Q_KOGqE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiTum8eQ51E&feature=related

On Philosophy: Adorno, Marxism and Hegel by Zizek, how would our epoch appear to the philosophy of the perspective of the idea? What is really what is new, through the lens of the old. ‘One should begin from the beginning again’. Not nostalgia for the far-off other place, the dream of a utopia but what is pragmatic, critical? The overcoming of capitalism with or without a human face.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw

Topics discussed

The introduction began with a distribution of the notes from the first two sessions with references, paraphrasing the topics that were delivered in the form of lectures/ projected visual presentations / documentation. A suggested reading [with online addresses of websites] referred the group to Fluxus and Situationist works and writings / magazines et cetera. Essay titles were also provided as examples of topics that might structure an essay suggesting critical arguments and comparisons, descriptions, and historical analysis developed from personal study and attendance weekly at the presentations and discussions. Essays could be responses to different kinds of questions, in relation to the material that the course has considered.

The group discussed matters of time scales for assessment, and how the essay, the proposal for a project, and related visual material could be presented within the time frame of the module, and how these outcomes were to be integrated. It was decided that the text explication of 300-400 words would be handed in week 7 after reading week 6.

There was a provisional agreement that the final draft of the essay would be ready for the launch of the website, week 11, in early May, which would co-incide with an event in the space itself. The text would have to be ready a week before the launch to upload by the designers (to be decided). The exact dates for the launch of the website and event could be discussed next session. Press releases and mailing would be prepared and distributed a week before.



Week 9 would be a provisional date for the catalogue outline of 2000 words. This should also co-incide with the proposal for an individual project. The space would be transformed into an info-centre and a ‘fluxus’ table would present numerous texts and images, objects, boxes, and other collected material. Certain presentations were discussed – for example ‘manifestos’, press releases, texts, collages, cartoons, drawings, photographs, audio-visuals, that would be accumulated from a study of the practices and theories under investigation in the seminars – fluxus, situation, conceptual art, internet downloads, books, magazines, posters all constitute a ‘praxis’ whereby theory and practice fall together in arbitrary or chance encounters upon a table. It was also to inquire whether the group has access to printing larger scale work / posters for the walls.





Posters could be scanned from pdfs.


Videos would be projected, or on monitors. Audio works could be played on CD.

The groups, in three disciplines of fine art, art history and museum studies, would therefore be able to choose how to present their work, as written, drawn, photo- scanned, and moving image, that they felt represented their positions. It could be illustrated text, diagram, or manifesto [echoing the kind of presentation at the event].

A diagram was provided that explained the outcome structure of essay/website/event. The essay and the launch of website were outcomes of a skeletal structure like a backbone, the course pathway itself. Blog and proposal informed both outcomes on either side. The movement to / from blog to essay, and to /from proposal, was also to link to the final event and launch of website.
Web Presentation – website launch of www.slashseconds 7– monitors [Event Gallery 2007] presented material from the individual submissions in random play.

The website would be designed as a simple structure that allowed for each 44 individuals to upload proposal, visual documentation and essay. These can be designed idiosyncratically. The website differs from the blog in that it is a unified group entity that can be accessed publicly. The blog is the rehearsal of ideas, private, informal and to be used as a note and sketchbook. Each participant should set up a blog. This blog would be maintained as note / sketchbook/ reference log, writing ideas and developing them. Access to be enabled by providing address to the group.

We went on to return to some theoretical issues after questions. We looked for examples at www.slashseconds.org, the introductory editorials of issue 11, and issue 8. For examples of how practice is to be manifest, if a proposal is invited. We also looked at the relation between curating and archives. The proposal could be introduced through diverse quotations that connoted ideas, or inspired responses. An invitation could be staged as a series of references that form tangents around an idea or hypothesis. These could be at first not normally considered related in any sense other than poetically. However there is a tension in the non-relation, between poetry and pragmatics that Georges Bataille noted in his work ‘The Impossible’.

An Impossible Pragmatics

Pragmatics is an awareness of the necessary conditionality of collaborations and groups. Proposals and rehearsals of this collaborative group anticipate a shared event [that might never arrive]. The course itself is a ‘work’ of rehearsals and hypothetical [poetic/pragmatic] proposals. concerning ‘curating’.



Questions concerning a paradox about proposals were expressed– if a proposal can be hypothetical and in itself is ‘complete’ without necessity to any concrete manifestation, and completion or ‘realisation’ - why include the practical aspect of a budget and schedule for such an impossible hypothesis? The engineering of an impossible architecture for example like Constant’s New Babylon and other ‘mega-structural’ works are impossible: yet these sci-fi techtonic fantasies are meticulously drawn on blueprint. Conceived In the 60s [Archigram, Superstudio etc] the cities they imagine might yet result in a breakthrough. [Although the sublime architectural non-plans of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace are certainly not achieved in Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Centre]. How does the utopian dream here get reconfigured, if not as a failed enterprise of modernist functionalism?

Poetry and Pragma – The Abject, Transgression

Perhaps it is not strictly to be impossible, the purely hypothetical? Franz Kafka’s novel [‘Metamorphosis’] whose giant insect appears ordinary is ‘at home’. This is the practical aspect of the impossible, the abject subject, transformed, uncannily into the usual surroundings of his apartment. The apartment remains the same, yet is now transgressed, and impenetrable. Gregor is excluded from his own habitus. Kafka’s engineering of the story of the abjection of Gregor demands a solid and believable world for the transmission of the uncanny. Here pragmatics operates to fuel a certain desire, the taboo, death, perverse sexuality - or abjectness – that is also a death-drive, that Baudrillard will develop later in media criticism as the symptom of mass culture.

“ Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror and death – precisely the perspective of poetry, and in the opposite direction, that of science and the real world of utility. We the useful, the real, have serious character. We are never without our rights in preferring seduction to it: truth has rights over us, indeed it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must respond to something which, not being god is stronger than every right. That impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights.” Georges Bataille


Curating is set here in questions asked as to what and how is a work self-determining. Some terms in the process were explained.



The ‘dispositif’ [Foucault] is the conditional / contingent set of relations of materials and voiced and unvoiced discourses that enable the rehearsal of an event, constituted from many discursive formations and disciplines. These are in states of flux and are precisely contextual, processing, changing, becoming. The poetic device, the dispositif, is itself gauged to operate as a bracket to interrogate structures of meaning. The reception of meaning is therefore opened up to the process of deconstruction of ‘accepted’ cultural matter and histories that have produced an influential collective, a body of works, preoccupied in the modern period with the development of novel, complex and heterogeneous spatial and temporal forms, in art, architecture, design and technology. The modernist drive is characterised by a ‘passion for the real’, in the direct action of its avant-gardes. What ‘is’ the avant-garde in the ‘obsolete’ present, now symptomatic of ‘real time’ cognition, that it no longer has any affectivity? The work of Alain Badiou, specifically ‘The Century’ was forwarded as a brilliant analysis of avant-garde movements and manifestations of the 20th Century in relation to a rejection of history and ideology, reformed in the criticality of the montage as a break from the past, a ‘present’ tense that motivates the ascension of the ‘new’, as an artificial construct and egalitarian wish fulfilled. Autonomy of the art work is thereby rejected in favour of action or manifestation, aesthetics is left behind, and what must be maintained is an opposition, an aggressivity, to social hegemony, through the montage process that strips back the ‘doxa’ or the ideological representations and narratives that collude as the disguises of so called reality and its ‘ideal’ - Realism.

A horizontal movement is identified by Hal Foster in ‘The Return of the Real’ of a new entropic, fetishist, kind of art, as signifying the ‘post-autonomous’ space. The immolation and petrifaction of the polemical / provocative force of the avant-garde occurs at a moment of a self-contradiction regarding post-autonomy; its ‘containment’ as an institutional archive, or its adoption as simulated ‘sign’ of the new. [Baudrillard].

The aesthetisation of ‘the passion for the real’ forces out strategies of institutional critique, affirming the hiatus. The institution has no ‘outside’. Museums are utilised as political tools, or present a new kind of transparency – an ideological architecture that performs within the Post-Fordist economy, where oppositions of old are dissolved, and where the situationist ‘street’ does no longer exist. The dogmatisms of a new ‘freedom’ in the Museum’s dematerialised function, poses problems for Multitude, as a resistance to control. Technology enters and supersedes all practice. The Post-Fordist worker must recognise the conditions of this change and of a crisis period of post modernity, which Baudrillard makes a claim for as mourning the end. The after-world is sited, as a non-place- an illusion, which constitutes the inversion of the real of the modern’s passion, yet is also the absolute potential of freeing from the past, from both the vortex of ‘new’ and ‘obsolete’. Merz produces a horizontality spreading everywhere rather than a self-contained object.
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/003/articles/plewis/index.php

THE POMPIDOU CENTRE PARIS

Reference: The Pompidou Centre: or the hidden kernel of dematerialisation
Author: Proto, Francesco
Source: The Journal of Architecture, Volume 10, Number 5, Number 5/November 2005 , pp. 573-589(17)
Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

Already in the mid-1960s, with the first warnings of juvenile arraignments, an open critique of the naive enthusiasm with which the former generation had absorbed the myth of technology and communication came to the fore. So that Archigram members themselves, in proposing a cardboard megastructure for the ARCHIGRAM VII special issue (‘everybody's got their own mega-structure, do it yourself' they wrote), kept an ironic distance from the modernistic belief in the linear evolution of society (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, the dramatic decrease in the utopian mainstream that had characterised the ‘Year of Megastructures', as Banham called it (1963), succeeded in producing an unrepeatable architectural gesture for the celebration of individual freedom and social equality. As one of the best-known contemporary icons, the Pompidou Centre was also responsible for turning the modernistic interest in functionality into the de-materialised aspects of urban fetishism. The hyper-objectification of its form and the consequent ‘transparency' of its content led in fact to a new type of architectural fruition: that in which the ideological perception of the building exceeded the real possibilities suggested by its hyper-flexibility. Thus, the Pompidou also inaugurated a new era for the dogmatic myth of self-empowerment by means of self-learning (auto-didacticism) and mass jouissance.

Reference 2.

How did the student revolution of May 1968 influence the French art world? What were the repercussions of the activists’ social criticism on museum practice and artistic display? How was contemporary art informed by these critiques, and how did French cultural policy respond to the new artistic imperatives that emerged in the decade that followed the protests? These are the questions examined in Rebecca J. DeRoo’s, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968.[...] DeRoo continues her investigation of the institutionalization of the spirit of ’68 with a chapter on the creation of the Pompidou center in 1977. This new museum--“transparent, open, flexible, crowded, user-friendly”--appears at first glance to engage directly with the criticisms that activists launched at “museum-cemeteries.” Its architecture, café, shops, audio guides, media center and--not least of all--location in a former working class neighborhood can all be seen as creating a more democratic and accessible art institution through an incorporation of the everyday into the museum experience. Following Baudrillard and other critics, DeRoo argues, however, that the view of the everyday that the Pompidou center actually embodied was one centered on “popular entertainment, mass media and commodity culture” (p. 168)--a “supermarket of culture” in which the public was relegated to the role of passive consumers.

The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968 describes the broader impact and legacy of 1968 in French art and culture. It investigates the cultural policy of a decade –the evolution of French cultural policy from Malraux to the 1990s, and contextualizes this evolution in the major theoretical debates of the period. DeRoo’s examination of the institutionalization of May ’68 critiques in the creation of the Pompidou centre; her reassessment of the significance of Christian Boltanski’s and Annette Messager’s work, as well as the misinterpretation of this work by French curators adjusting to the post-68 cultural climate; and her broader investigation of the politics of artistic display in the second half of the twentieth century make

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-vi-the-beaubourg-effect-implosion-and-deterrence/

http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm

www.brianmassumi.com/textes/REALER%20THAN%20REAL.rtf



IMPOSSIBLE TOURISM / ARCHITECTURE
On the city tourism in Beirut and the Middle East -Tony Chakar
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/001/articles/14_tchakar/index.php

On Cedric Price and Peripheral Architectures
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/003/articles/ffergusonplewis/index.php

Reference 3: Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulations - VI. The Beaubourg Effect : Implosion and Deterrence
The Beaubourg effect, the Beaubourg machine, the Beaubourg thing - how to give it a name? Enigma of this carcass of flux and signs, of networks and circuits - the final impulse to translate a structure that no longer has a name, the structure of social relations given over to superficial ventilation (animation, self-management, information, media) and to an irreversibly deep implosion. Monument to the games of mass simulation, the Pompidou Center functions as an incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it - a bit like the black monolith in 2001: insane convection of all the contents that came there to be materialized, to be absorbed, and to be annihilated. All around, the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone - remodelling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygienic design - but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness. It is a bit like the real danger nuclear power stations pose: not lack of security, pollution, explosion, but a system of maximum security that radiates around them, the protective zone of control and deterrence that extends, slowly but surely, over the territory - a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical glacis. What does the nuclear matter? The station is a matrix in which an absolute model of security is elaborated, which will encompass the whole social field, and which is fundamentally a model of deterrence (it is the same one that controls us globally, under the sign of peaceful coexistence and of the simulation of atomic danger). The same model, with the same proportions, is elaborated at the Center: cultural fission, political deterrence.[...] This space of deterrence, articulated on the ideology of visibility, of transparency, of polyvalency, of consensus and contact, and sanctioned by the blackmail to security, is today, virtually, that of all social relations. All of social discourse is there, and on this level as well as on that of the treatment of culture, Beaubourg flagrantly contradicts its explicit objectives, a nice monument to our modernity. It is nice to think that the idea did not come to some revolutionary spirit, but to the logicians of the established order, deprived of all critical intelligence, and thus closer to the truth, capable, in their obstinacy, of putting in place a machine that is fundamentally uncontrollable, that in its very success escapes them, and that is the most exact reflection, even in its contradictions, of the current state of things.

Certainly, all the cultural contents of Beaubourg are anachronistic, because only an empty interior could correspond to this architectural envelope. The general impression being that everything here has come out of a coma, that everything wants to be animation and is only reanimation, and that this is good because culture is dead, a condition that Beaubourg admirably retraces, but in a dishonest fashion, whereas one should have triumphantly accepted this death and erected a monument or an anti-monument equivalent to the phallic inanity of the Eiffel Tower in its time. Monument to total disconnection, to hyperreality and to the implosion of culture-achieved today for us in the effect of transistorized circuits always threatened by a gigantic short circuit. Beaubourg is already an imperial compression - figure of a culture already crushed by its own weight - like moving automobiles suddenly frozen in a geometric solid. Like the cars of Caesar, survivors of an ideal accident, no longer external, but internal to the metallic and mechanical structure, and which would have produced tons of cubic scrap iron, where the chaos of tubes, levers, frames, of metal and human flesh inside is tailored to the geometric size of the smallest possible space - thus the culture of Beaubourg is ground, twisted, cut up, and pressed into its smallest simple elements - a bundle of defunct transmissions and metabolisms, frozen like a science-fiction mecanoid. But instead of breaking and compressing all culture here in this carcass that in any case has the appearance of a compression, instead of that, one exhibits Caesar there. One exhibits Dubuffet and the counterculture, whose inverse simulation acts as a referential for the defunct culture. In this carcass that could have served as a mausoleum to the useless operationality of signs, one reexhibits Tinguely's ephemeral and autodestructive machines under the sign of the eternity of culture. Thus one neutralizes everything together: Tinguely is embalmed in the museal institution, Beaubourg falls back on its supposed artistic contents.

Fortunately, this whole simulacrum of cultural values is annihilated in advance by the external architecture. Because this architecture, with its networks of tubes and the look it has of being an expo or world's fair building, with its (calculated?) fragility deterring any traditional mentality or monumentality, overtly proclaims that our time will never again be that of duration, that our only temporality is that of the accelerated cycle and of recycling, that of the circuit and of the transit of fluids. Our only culture in the end is that of hydrocarbons, that of refining, cracking, breaking cultural molecules and of their recombination into synthesized products. This, the Beaubourg Museum wishes to conceal, but the Beaubourg cadaver proclaims. And this is what underlies the beauty of the cadaver and the failure of the interior spaces. In any case, the very ideology of "cultural production" is antithetical to all culture, as is that of visibility and of the polyvalent space: culture is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained and highly ritualized symbolic exchange. Nothing can be done about it. Too bad for the masses, too bad for Beaubourg.

What should, then, have been placed in Beaubourg?

Nothing. The void that would have signified the disappearance of any culture of meaning and aesthetic sentiment. But this is still too romantic and destructive, this void would still have had value as a masterpiece of anticulture....

One must thus start with this axiom: Beaubourg is a monument of cultural deterrence. Within a museal scenario that only serves to keep up the humanist fiction of culture, it is a veritable fashioning of the death of culture that takes place, and it is a veritable cultural mourning for which the masses are joyously gathered.

And they throw themselves at it. There lies the supreme irony of Beaubourg: the masses throw themselves at it not because they salivate for that culture which they have been denied for centuries, but because they have for the first time the opportunity to massively participate in this great mourning of a culture that, in the end, they have always detested. The misunderstanding is therefore complete when one denounces Beaubourg as a cultural mystification of the masses. The masses, themselves, rush there to enjoy this execution, this dismemberment, this operational prostitution of a culture finally truly liquidated, including all counterculture that is nothing but its apotheosis. The masses rush toward Beaubourg as they rush toward disaster sites, with the same irresistible elan. Better: they are the disaster of Beaubourg. Their number, their stampede, their fascination, their itch to see everything is objectively a deadly and catastrophic behavior for the whole undertaking. Not only does their weight put the building in danger, but their adhesion, their curiosity annihilates the very contents of this culture of animation. This rush can no longer be measured against what was proposed as the cultural objective, it is its radical negation, in both its excess and success. It is thus the masses who assume the role of catastrophic agent in this structure of catastrophe, it is the masses themselves who put an end to mass culture.

The Real of the Virtual, not the Virtual of the Real = no way back

The archive, aided by the virtual/entropic sphere of the internet, is infinite in accumulations of data, residues of ‘facts’, and pollutions of knowledge. The simulacrum is the real, for Jean Baudrillard, and again positive for Brian Massumi. The impurity of language begs for a new kind of ‘critical’ space of the internet. Where there is no distance, no outside, there is what Edward Said names ‘the space of invention’. The self-fashioning this implies is also the kernal of an idea of curating. .

However, if we consider the theoretical work of Paolo Virno, or of Michael Hardt and Tony Negri, in Italy, concerning the ‘Multitude’ there is an argument for a continued passion of the ‘real’, which is to be indifferent, yet powerful, to the status quo and the period of a second restoration. It might utilise subliminal strategies, net wars, simulations of simulations, in the virtual key, since dissolving all sense of origin and originality, and copyright, i.e. ownership and privilege. Dates that mark a kind of equivalent transition are 1977 [the completion of the Pompidou Centre in Paris] [see Charles Harrison’s critique of the Pompidou on Open University, and references below]; and the Fiat factory strikes in Bologna that year, when resistance collapsed with the emergence of armed terrorism [The Red Brigade, Baader Meinhof, The PLO]. [See Franco Beradi [Radio Alice, Bologna]. It is a case that the self-determination of artists echoes in symbolic ways the kind of resistance model of terrorism.




Seminar 4 Preparatory Notes for Students


http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/mmcgowan/index.php

http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/hhatry/index.php

http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/tionlee5/index.php



ABJECT SPACES

Was the vertical trajectory of the avant-garde, against Realism, not contradicted equally, by the internal contradiction of an anti-aesthetic, which recognises and aims to the power of the museum, the exhibition, and the scandal of entering some ‘dirt’ or life into its hallowed halls, only to be accommodated by it? The contemporary situation as Zizek has pointed out, requires precisely that dirt stands in as truth, once occupied by the sacred icon, beholden in the hallowed space, if not the ‘holy relic’ what? The earliest ritual- museums, cathedrals, the empty signifier, in Christology, the empty sepulchre that Hegel identifies as the inherited condition, of art’s failure to immanence. Death. Void. Shit. However, the ‘scandal’ of the rotten is at the same time without any of scandal’s redemption value, it is just rotten. If the rotten is to be forcibly confronted as its own subject, as the truth of the subject...abject art must take residence in this non-place, where the threshold cannot be passed without significant horror of non-being. In contemporary critical theory, abjection is often used to describe the state of often-marginalized groups, such as women, people of colour, prostitutes, convicts, poor people, disabled people, and queer or LGBT people. In this context, the concept of abject exists in between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, something alive yet not. Neither this nor that. To live excluded from both the social sphere and from oneself. Between two deaths. This term is used in the works of Julia Kristeva. Often, the term space of abjection is also used, referring to a space that abjected things or beings inhabit. William Apess used the term in the early 1800s in "An Indian's Looking-Glass For The White Man" to describe the plight of the Native Americans.

According to Kristeva, since the abject is situated outside the symbolic order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience. For example, upon being faced with a corpse, a person would be most likely repulsed because he or she is forced to face an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject. We encounter other beings daily, and more often than not they are alive. To confront a corpse of one that we recognize as human, something that should be alive but isn't, is to confront the reality that we are capable of existing in the same state, our own mortality. This repulsion from death, excrement, and rot constitutes the subject as a living being in the symbolic order. [On the Abject, Black Sun, Julia Kristeva]




[Some references from wikipedia] The roots of Abject art go back a long way. Painters express a fascination for blood long before the Renaissance but it wasn't until the Dada movement that the fascination with transgression and taboo made it possible for Abject Art, as a movement, to exist. It owes a considerable debt to Antonin Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty.” Well before the Abject Art movement was given a name by the Whitney Museum, New York in 1993, the movement towards Abject Art had long been in existence.

It was preceded by the films and performances of the Viennese Actionists, in particular, Hermann Nitsch, whose interest in Schwitter's idea of a gesamtkunstwerk led to his setting up the radical theatre group, known as the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater which involved the use of animal carcasses and blood shed in a ritualistic way. Nitsch served time in jail for blasphemy before being invited to New York in 1968 by Jonas Mekas where he organised a series of performances which greatly influenced the radical New York art scene.

Other members of the Viennese Actionists, Gunter Brus, who began as a painter, and Otto Muehl collaborated on performances. The performances of Gunter Brus involved publicly urinating, defecating and cutting himself with a razor blade, which had a powerful influence on later Abject Art from the 1980s and 1990s. Rudolf Schwarzkogler who committed suicide by jumping from a window in 1969 is better known for his photos dealing with the Abject. The growth of extreme performance art coincided with the radicalisation of politics in the late 1960s.

In the late 1960s Performance Art took off in New York. For a short period, Carolee Schneeman made performances that led to her inclusion in the 1993 show at the Whitney Museum of Abject Art. In the early 1970s Mary Kelly caused a scandal in 1976 when she exhibited dirty nappies at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. This was followed by the concentration on the abject which is implicit in punk rock and, in particular, the performances of Genesis P. Orridge and GG Allin which involved spit, piss, blood, semen and shit.

In the 1980s and 1990s, fascination with the Powers of Horror, the title of a book by Julia Kristeva, led to a second wave of radical performance artists working with bodily fluids including Ron Athey, Franko B, Lennie Lee and Kira O' Reilly.

In the late 1990s, the abject became an important theme of radical Chinese performance artists Zhu Yu and Yang Zhichao.

The abject also began to influence the work of a number of mainstream artists including Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Paul McCarthy, Gilbert and George, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith and Jake and Dinos Chapman who were all included in the 1993 Whitney show.

Brody and Paetau, from their series, Chinese Paintings 2008


Other important artists working with abjection include New York photographers, Joel Peter Witkin, whose book Love and Redemption is made up entirely of photos of corpses and body parts, and Andres Serrano whose piece entitled Piss Christ caused a scandal in 1989 when it received $15,000 dollars of public funding.
Abjection in other works

According to Barbara Creed in Horror and the Monstrous Feminine a male's relationship with the mother and other females is complicated by the use of the feminine in horror and science fiction as we are forced to confront it as horrific and abject. Through an analysis of the film Alien (1979) and the female roles and representations, Creed explains how females are often related to the object of horror, be they as the object of horror or the object of the actual horrors' desire/hatred. The conclusion is that through monstrous representations of the female or the Mother, the audience is drawn into viewing them as abject rather than subject or object. The aliens themselves from the film in question are often described as having phallus-like appendages in the shape of their head and tongue, while maintaining an almost female form. Their interaction with the human crew takes on very abject roles as one crew member, a male, is forcibly impregnated (clearly as a product of rape) with an alien that eventually rips itself from the male 'womb' in a horrific scene of blood and gore. The process of a male being impregnated through the mouth with a creature that gestates -- in a being that has no womb -- and rips itself free in a shower of blood is one way in which this film abjectifies female roles.

Abjection is also a major theme of the 1949 work The Thief's Journal (Journal du Voleur) by French author Jean Genet. As a criminal outcast from society, during a fictionalised account of his wanderings through Europe in the 1930s, he claims to actively seek abjections as an existentialist form of 'sainthood.'


100 Wheelchairs – Thaniel Lee

Merz event– wall, Royal College of Art 2009– Redux archive, flyers, posters, photographs, texts, press releases, video




















Theorizing the avant-garde

Several writers have attempted to map the parameters of avant-garde activity with limited success. One of the most useful and respected analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon remains the Italian essayist Renato Poggioli's 1962 book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia (The Theory of the Avant-Garde). Surveying the historical, social, psychological and philosophical aspects of vanguardism, Poggioli reaches beyond individual instances of art, poetry and music to show that vanguardists may be seen as sharing certain ideals or values which are manifested in the non-conformist lifestyles they adopted, vanguard culture being shown to be a variety or subcategory of Bohemianism.

Other authors have attempted to both clarify and extend Poggioli's study. The German literary critic Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) looks at the Establishment's embrace of socially critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work."

Bürger's essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art historians such as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, while older critics like Bürger continue to view the postwar neo-avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century, others like Clement Greenberg view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000) critically argues for a dialectical approach to these positions

Avant-garde and mainstream society

Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg, Germany.

The concept of avant-garde refers exclusively to marginalised artists, writers, composers and thinkers whose work is not only opposed to mainstream commercial values, but often has an abrasive social or political edge. Many writers, critics and theorists made assertions about vanguard culture during the formative years of modernism, although the initial definitive statement on the avant-garde was the essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch As the essay’s title suggests, Clement Greenberg conclusively showed not only that vanguard culture has historically been opposed to ‘high’ or ‘mainstream culture’, but that it also has rejected the artificially synthesized mass culture that has been produced by industrialization. Each of these media is a direct product of Capitalism – they are all now substantial industries – and as such they are driven by the same profit-fixated motives of other sectors of manufacturing, not the ideals of true art. For Greenberg, these forms were therefore kitsch: they were phoney, faked or mechanical culture, which often pretended to be more than they were by using formal devices stolen from advanced or vanguard culture. For instance, during the 1930s the advertising industry was quick to take visual mannerisms from surrealism, but this does not mean that 1930s advertising photographs are truly surreal. It was a matter of style without substance. In this sense Greenberg was at pains to distance true avant-garde creativity from the market-driven fashion change and superficial stylistic innovation that are sometimes used to claim privileged status for these manufactured forms of the new consumer culture.
A similar view was likewise argued by assorted members of the Frankfurt School, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass-Deception (1944), and also Walter Benjamin in his highly influential The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). [9] Where Greenberg used the German word kitsch to describe the antithesis of avant-garde culture; members of the Frankfurt School coined the term mass culture to indicate that this bogus culture is constantly being manufactured by a newly emerged Culture industry (comprising commercial publishing houses, the movie industry, the record industry, the electronic media). They also pointed out that the rise of this industry meant that artistic excellence was displaced by sales figures as a measure of worth: a novel, for example, was judged meritorious solely on whether it was a best-seller, music succumbed to ratings charts and the blunt commercial logic of the Gold disc. In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales increasingly became the measure, and justification, of everything. Consumer culture now ruled.

Despite the central arguments of Greenberg, Adorno and others, "avant-garde" has been appropriated and misapplied by various sectors of the culture industry since the 1960s, chiefly as a marketing tool to publicise popular music and commercial cinema. It is now common to describe successful rock musicians and celebrated film-makers as avant-garde, the very word having been stripped of its proper meaning. Noting this important conceptual shift, major contemporary theorists such as Matei Calinescu in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), have suggested that this is a sign our culture has entered a new post-modern age, when the former modernist ways of thinking and behaving have been rendered redundant.

Nevertheless the most incisive critique of the vanguardism against the views of mainstream society was offered by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg in the late 1960s.[10] Trying to strike a balance between the insights of Renato Poggioli and the claims of Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg suggested that from the mid-1960s onward progressive culture ceased to fulfill its former adversarial role. Since then it has been flanked by what he called 'avant-garde ghosts' to the one side, and a changing mass culture on the other, both of which it interacts with to varying degrees. This has seen culture become, in his words, ‘a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it.’


Essay suggestions

Looking at the relationship between the avant-garde, the abject, where can a line be drawn that locates their critical / categorical dimensions and topographies? What gains, what losses to the will to freedom?

What is left of ’68? Is the inheritance of avant-gardism now forced underground? Is there a disagreement with the market economy in current practices that have accepted the institutional programming of artists into the culture industry?

How do archives work with material that is ‘left-over’ from performances, things, bits and pieces that were never intended as aesthetic objects? Give examples.

What does the dispositif mean, if we consider the range of installation art projects in Taschen book’ surveys of ART NOW?

Is Jean Baudrillard correct to say in Simulations that there is no power to combat, only a virtual threat? What does he mean by the 'end of dialectical evolution’?