God and the Avant Garde
The Artist as an independent agent confronting the world on his own, through his own subjectivity, is an historical entity. Perhaps this artist first arrived on Earth in the personage of Gustave Courbet- the anarchist who called his symbolic paintings realist not because they faithfully reproduced nature, but because they were unfaithful to the history of art. Gustave Courbet’s abandonment of history paintings, of Greece, was what made him a realist.
One hundred years later Hugo Ball would turn Courbet on his head. Ball would found the Carbaret Voltaire, an entertainment named after, in Ball’s words, “the anti-poet, prince of the superficial, anti-artist,” (pg 37, Collage)
After World War 1 and during the time of Freud, the notion of the ahistorical subjective artist, the rational and liberated man interpreting the world, was discredited. The heroic artist had had his legs and arms blown off in the Great War, he’d been driven into his art and away from the world perhaps as early as 1871, after the failure of the Commune. So rather than adopting the role of the artist, the dadaist became an anti-artist. Rather than seeking mastery of painting, of subjective techniques, the dadaist sought to eliminate the artist. This was an act of rebellion, an attack on the foundation of a bourgeois culture that they saw as ultimately barbaric. Marcel Duchamp presented a urinal as a work of art, not merely as a joke or an insult against the art world, but in an effort to eliminate the subjectivity of the artist. Dadaists cut up newspapers, collaged images from magazines, sang nonsense poems, in an attempt to leave culture behind and find the real.
After the Great War the avant garde artist realized that his conception of himself was false. The individual, the subjective artist, was just an image. In reality the artist had no individual face. In reality the subjective self didn’t have a head.
The subject then became not a producer of paintings or of art, but the self that selected and arranged ready-made cultural products, and if this selection could be eliminated so much the better.
“When I hear what we call music it seems to me that someone is talking. Talking about his feeling, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear the sound of traffic, here on sixth avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound,” -John Cage, On Silence, 1992
The true artist would be a receptacle for the flows of language, or a mechanism for the production of a third voice. By the the 1960s, Dadaism had been transformed into Anglo Saxon Pop, and the avant garde artist saw himself as a machine.
“I think [Andy Warhol] was one of the stupidest people I ever met in my life. Why? Because he had nothing to say.” -Robert Hughes, documentary film The Business of Art, 2009
Andy Warhol was the ultimate post-enlightenment subject. He was the subject left after subjectivity was eliminated. It turned out that bourgeois culture didn’t need artists as subjects in order to continue.
One way to characterize modern art is to see it as a set of strategies and techniques in search of a subject.
Friedrich Nietzsche described the starting point from which artists set out into the world and onto canvasses in his story of the Madman, and the Madman was the story of the death of God. The bourgeois dismantled the power relationships of the feudal period. They had killed God. And it was because of this murder that artists needed a stand in. After the death of God modern artists were left with the problem of defining or finding social and individual meaning without recourse to the creator. Men were neither believers graced by God’s good favor nor sinners who, through their separation from God, were among the damned. Society and its power structures were neither extensions of God’s authority on Earth, nor corrupted competitors with God.
Men like Gustave Courbet chose himself, or the bourgeois individual as his favored replacement. A century later artists like John Cage and Jackson Pollock would choose chance processes, or perhaps nature itself, as their favorite stand-in.
“We don’t have to have tradition if we somehow free ourselves from our memories. Then each thing we see is new. It’s as though we’ve become tourists and that we were living in countries that were very exciting because we don’t know them. I can’t tell anybody how to listen or how to look. I certainly can’t tell them what to remember, particularly when I don’t want to remember anything myself. If I look at a Coca-Cola bottle and then look at another Coca-Cola bottle, I want to forget the first Coca-Cola bottle so I can see the second Coca-Cola bottle as being original.” –John Cage, On Silence, 1992
God was dead and meaning seemed to die along with him. Worse, the mythic excesses of God, his power and authority, were now to be found on Earth. Not only had the bourgoise revolution relocated God’s power in the material realm, but his hyperbolic threats, the promises of plagues or extinction, the threat of hell, those had come into material existence as well.
“Why do think apocalypse movies are popular, because they’re scary? No. Mad Max is exciting because compared to the boredom, the banality, and the despair of everyday life in this society what could be more exciting than the apocalypse? It’s not that the apocalypse scares us at all. Now by the apocalypse I’m not speaking biblically. We’ve technology achieve the ability to create it long ago.” -Rick Roderick, “Philosophy and Human Values,” released by The Teaching Company on VHS, 1990
American Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists in the 50s and 60s turned back to religion, back to God, as the source for their production. They painted either soup cans or Brillo Boxes or, in an unconscious attempt to express or capture the nature of this new bourgeois God directly, they painted nothing at all. Barnett Newman’s pure zips of paint, Rothko’s emotive rectangles of muted colors, Pollock’s drips, all of these abstract gestures were, in fact, attempts to represent the new source of meaning in our modern technological society.
“The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality.” –Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967
The history of the 19th and 20th centuries, the history from which the avant garde sprung, is the history of our plunging into abstraction. It is the history of God’s death, the death of the individual subject, and finally the destruction of all representation. It is the history of a grasping after the real.
But simultaneous with the rise of Andy Warhol in America another group of artists were using the ephemera of popular culture to create art in Europe. The Letterists and then the Situationists didn’t reproduce simulcrum of Cambell’s Soup Cans, but rather took logos and advertisements and rearranged them in order to disrupt the usual meanings found in what they called the Spectacle and create real life situations instead.
In France this attempt to derail the bourgeois process of dematerialization led to the abandonment of art for theory. The Situationist International sought not to place God or the commodity on a canvass, but to seize and occupy history. If God had died and his power had been stripped of all qualities in order to reappear as an immanent alienation, if the individual had been disappeared and the spectator put in his place, then the artist’s job was to realize this process, not merely to understand it, but through action to realize it, and then, through realizing, to change it.
Drifting (part 2)
Wandering through the Woodstock neighborhood, moving between the lush lawns and gardens of Portland’s private houses,it seemed that each home was the same as the next. These atomized spaces were alike if in no other way than in their very individuality. There were a great many trees around me, meant to create a sense of continuity and identity in a place where no real identity could be found. The poplars and sequoias, the urban forest, obscured what was a material alienation. Driving by rather than walking a person might be taken in by the greenery and imagine they were in the natural world.
I was meant to be grateful for all the trees, for the stalks of corn that peeked over tall privacy fences. I was meant to be glad for the plums and apples I found rotting on the sidewalks and in the gutters.
In 1991 when I worked as a canvasser going door to door to save the environment I would frequently sit with my clipboard in my lap and ponder the street signs and painted lines. I recall a specific moment when I wrote my first note to the world while sitting on a curb outside a purple Arts and Crafts bungalow on Hawthorne. I turned my back to the windsock and chimes, all that good liberal Karma, and started writing.
I turned over a toxic toy factsheet printed on yellow recycled paper and wrote on the back with a Bic round stic pen with medium blue ink. I lit a hand rolled cigarette that was a mix of tobacco and marijuana, took a drag, and tried to put down my thoughts about how the world, the houses and streets, the sprinkler system and perfect lawns, was communicating with me.
I surveyed the progressive tranquility around me, the late 20th century update on a Norman Rockwell painting of an America with perfectly unkempt lawns and sunlit fuel efficient station wagons in the drive. I smoked my half joint and thought about it all. I smoked until I was evaporated and all that was left was a flow of information. A disjointed critique.
Everything was meaningful. The way the my pen felt in my hand, my awkward handwriting, the way the cool summer afternoon air felt in my lungs. I drew a coughing spiral of a flower petaled apocalypse on the back of the toxic toy factsheet.
That first note went something like this:
“Hello, world. I am nobody until I get my prozac. Nothing except for a brand new mist green Ford Taurus. I am nobody until I get my paycheck or until the girl in the street cafe smiles at me.”
I took another hit and then realized I didn’t know how I was going to distribute my work. It had to be put out there immediately. Maybe I’d leave it in somebody’s mailbox or slip it under somebody’s door? Or maybe I’d leave it under the windshield wiper of somebody’s orange VW van. In the end I searched out a convenience store that was on my route and purchased a roll of masking tape. I pulled out a long strip of tape quickly, enjoying the sound of the quick separation, and made a frame for my first message. I stuck my note to the world to a telephone pole.
Later that summer I attended a film festival in Telluride, Colorado. The town had functioned under the festival’s banner since 1974, and in September of 1991 every path, shop, hotel, and grocery was just one component of a what was no longer a community but a theater lobby. We the tourists, the attendees, had but one goal. We were there to watch. Every spectator was to take in as many films as possible. And if one could figure out a way to watch two or more films at the same time (maybe catching the first ten minutes of River Phoenix in Dog Fight, then sneaking off to watch the Rapture for thirty minutes, and then finally ending up watching Irene Jacob be beautiful and confusing in something called The Double Life of Veronique) then one was implicitly encouraged to do so. The only caveat was that you could not admit to having cheated.
I was still writing notes to the the world and taping them up in public space. I wrote my 200th note outside a cafe at this festival, after having read the summaries of the three films while waiting for my Latte and thereby saving myself the trouble of seeing them. Outside the coffee shop I taped this note to the underside of an abstract sculpture constructed from a bicycle wheel and a trumpet. The sculpture resembled either a satellite dish or a UFO but was neither of these objects.
From my 100th note I wrote:
“Evidence for the Festival’s complicity in the take over of humanity by aliens is everywhere. Every film, every artwork, every paper toilet seat cover left behind in every hotel or theater bathroom is a coded message from our new masters. We only need eyes to see the obvious when it is right in front of us.”
19 years later I did not have any masking tape or factsheets, but stood outside an orange and red Raised Ranch style house and considered how time seemed to stand still.
“The Bourgeoisie unveiled irreversible time and imposed it on society only to deprive society of its use. Once there was history, but there is no longer any history because the class of owners of the economy, who cannot break with economic history, must repress any other use of irreversible time as representing an immediate threat to itself.” -Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.
In 2010 I put my Mp3 recorder up to my face, held it up to my ear as if it’s a cellphone. This subterfuge allowed me to speak aloud without feeling awkward or odd. I could record my reactions to the built environment around me, but no words came.
I spotted a sign, a real sign, as I turned the corner onto SE 28th. The sign read “Refresh: Coca-Cola,” and I felt relieved. Up to that point I’d only found private spaces. There had been no place to stop, or to stretch out. There had been nowhere to rest, but under the sign of Coca-Cola I could find a moment of respite.
I went into what turned out to be a cocktail lounge and asked for the cola, and the bartender told me that I didn’t have to pay. Coca-Cola without booze was so inexpensive it didn’t make sense to ask for money at all. The time it would save if I didn’t pay was worth more than the money.
The bar was minimalist. The windows inside were high, well above eye level, and I could not see street but only where the light came in. The walls were curved concrete, and the track lighting and tall aluminum chairs communicated a graceful and utilitarian aesthetic. It was a place where one was meant to be seen, and not an appropriate pit stop for a sweating middle aged Slacker toting a knapsack.
I sat at a table outside the bar regardless and flipped through Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. I’m tried to ferret out just what a situation was. Was a situation something real, or just something willed? Was it enough to be free of manipulation, to take hold of your own strings?
Of all the films at Telluride I recall the movie the Double Life of Veronique the most clearly. Veronique was not one person, but two. Her lives were variations on the same theme, and the viewer, the spectactor, was led to wonder as he watched each event and its mirror image whether Veronique or her Polish doppleganger Weronika was really living at all. Was she just a flow of related events? To what extent is anyone free to act out his or her life, and to what extent is that life determined or overdetermined.
In 1991 I attended the Telluride film festival with my parents, and the three of us decided to view this picture about Veronica as a family. Afterwards we stopped off at a cafe and I ordered another Latte. My mother chastised me for drinking a caffeinated coffee in the evening while my father suggested that I might have asked for skim milk. I moved away from them, chose to sit at the counter next to a pretty girl who, in my memory, very much resembled the actress from the movie. She had dark wavy hair and wore fine clothing. She seemed to have good prospects. She had the aura of having recently been accepted into a ivy league college about her. In my memory she was as graceful, just as consciously inscribed with gracefulness, as the Coca-Cola cocktail lounge would be nearly twenty years later. I sat down next to her, feeling a bit overwhelmed and a bit greasy as I sat there with her, and was surprised when she struck up a conversation with me.
“Did you see the Kieslowski picture?” she asked.
I confirmed that I had, and then offered that I was interested in the synchronicities in the movie.
According to wikipedia the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s objet petit a (object little-a) stands for the unattainable object of desire. It is sometimes called the object cause of desire. Lacan always insisted for it to remain untranslated “thus acquiring the status of an algebraic sign.”
The girl at the Telluride film festival cafe was my object petit a. If I could gain her attention then I would be closer to the real me as I saw myself and further away from the me as I felt myself to be. But as she told me that she felt personally connected to Kieslowski’s film, when she explained that perhaps she herself had another self, another version of her that she could sense or that was perhaps always sensing her, I started to panic.
“I think I should probably go,” I told her.
Twenty years later while rereading the Society of the Spectacle I stumbled upon the notion of a constructed situation. They wanted to make moments and not find them. The situationists were not trying to escape from language, but to speak. They didn’t seek uninterpreted reality, but wanted to seize and transform the built environment, to make it real. They would make situations exactly through their own subjective experience of the built environment, and their opposition to it.
When my parents and I reached the sidewalk outside the cafe my father took me by my arm in order to get my attention. He asked me why I had turned away from the girl in the cafe. Did I not understand that she apparently liked me? That she was attempting to have a conversation with me?
I told him that the people in the back, the dishwashers and waiters, were clearly closing up shop. That they were clattering back there in such a way as to communicate. I told him that I’d cut the conversation short due to circumstances beyond my control.
He thought for a moment and the lights in then the lights inside the cafe went dark, confirming what had really only been an suspicion on my part. More to the point, it didn’t really matter whether or not the cafe was closing down. There could be a hundred more reasons or none at all, but I would never really know what was behind my retreat that night. Was my life, my reactions, determined or my own?
“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” -Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Drinking my Coca-Cola and reconsidering my journey I realized that, while I’d been drifting, I had not moved the cobblestones aside. I had yet to find the beach.
Drifting (part one)
I set out to wander the Woodstock neighborhood without conscious purpose, headed out into the built environment in order to see where it led me, and in order to be sure to be aimless I started my journey by going wherever the arrows pointed. I was in the parking lot of a strip mall, between Safeway and Bimart, and beneath my feet the white arrow pointed North. I walked toward the exit, and then turned to follow a forest green Volkswagen station wagon that was driving into the parking lot. When I reached the double doors of the Supermarket I stopped.
I was the red dot on a map. I was exactly there, a fixed point. I didn’t know where to go next.
The concept of confronting the built environment directly, of intervening in everyday life, has a multi-faceted history. The derive or drift may have originated in the middle of the twentieth century in Paris, but many others have played with the concept since then. In 1970 a woman artist named Adrian Piper took to the street after she saw how traditional art galleries and museums were faltering. She concluded that if the art world as she’d known it was crumbling this was because the capitalist structure on which these institutions relied was also giving way. Her response was to quit producing conceptual art installations and instead perpetrate what she called catalytic actions. She adorned a polo shirt laden with white paint, hung a “wet paint” sign around her neck, and set off to shop at Macy’s.
According to Wikipedia Adrian Piper is a philosopher as well as an artist. Her confrontational stunts at Macy’s apparently, in some small way, informing her development of a “Kantian conception of the self [that] accords priority to freedom, autonomy and moral obligation over the satisfaction of desire and the maximization of utility,” but while Macy’s may have been able to deliver Ms. Piper to a firm conception of her self, the Safeway parking lot was for me a difficulty.
I zigged and zagged between parked cars, and worried that I might spend my entire afternoon bouncing around the parking lot like a pinball. I followed another painted arrow to my left, then trailed behind a college student whose uniform of a purple Izod shirt and Khaki shorts somehow attracted me. He was talking on a smart phone and I followed him around the corner of the Safeway, and then stopped when I found him pacing in front of the dumpster. He just wanted a private corner where he could talk to his girlfriend or his boss or his mother.
I walked around him, squeezed between the dumpster and the brick wall of the Safeway, and then stopped one more time when I reached a high voltage junction box. I stood there and waited.
Psychogeography is meant to offer a violent emotive possession over the streets. Exotic and exciting treasures were to be found in the city by drifters able to conquer her. But standing by the junction box, watching the traffic slowly pass by, I could only muster a critical gaze.
“I’m tempted to, uh, knock on the door of this house with a wooden welcome sign. To take it literally. But that welcome sign actually means the exact opposite of what it says. The welcome sign means ‘Stay Away.’” – recorded note to myself during my drifting
In 1991 I worked for an environmental organization called OSPIRG. I was 20 years old then and they sent me out into these built environments in Portland as a part of a search for environmental types. My job was to wander residential streets, examine the ranch houses and bungalows, and find good liberals willing to hand over checks.
Wandering those same streets nearly twenty years later it is as if nothing has changed. By continuing to wander the urban forest of Portland, remaining with the Alders and Oaks, I am always caught in my memory. Or more precisely, I am always stuck in my same alienation. Walking along Ramona in 2010, stopping outside an orange Raised Ranch style house, staring at the dark red garage door that someone left slightly ajar, I sense a female presence inside. I flash on a memory of a memory. A woman in business attire, maybe a Pant Suit, a faceless woman whose ordered life was contained inside a Raised Ranch like this one. Or maybe I’m remembering a woman in a tweed jacket and a brown pencil skirt who lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright style Prairie house in SW Portland. Or maybe she was wearing polyester pants and a purple plush robe and lived in a converted International House of Pancakes in Beaverton.
In any case there was a presence. I could feel it as I stood on the sidewalk not daring to look in. I stood on the street and strained to hear her voice inside. I tried to remember what relationship I might have had with her when I met her before. I must have met her when I was working for OSPIRG. Or maybe she was one of my friend’s mothers back in highschool. Perhaps she was the woman who lived next door to my family when I was just a baby. The woman who told me about reincarnation and served me store bought chocolate chip cookies on a crystal plate. She told me that I’d had lived before, maybe. She told me that I might have been somebody else before I was me. This was back in 1976, in Colorado, in what was probably a converted farmhouse.
I stood outside this house, this orange Raised Ranch style house, and felt that some part of my history, some unknown and inaccessible part of my life, was in the garage. There was a woman from my past in the garage, or maybe in the kitchen.
This was my delusion, and it was a long standing one. I could almost remember a time when these American neighborhoods, these series of square yards and square houses with triangle roofs had been integral to real life. Some woman had, perhaps long ago, told me a secret and I’d just forgotten it over the years. And if I could remember what she said I’d be whole again.
