Don’t Call it Comeback (I’ve been here for years)
Don’t Call it Comeback (I’ve been here for years)
Obamamania is no longer limited to American politics. The individual as leader has been reinstated and is being held high aloft. We can say that this is remarkable, after decades of the author being declared dead, of the cultural world giving itself over to endless system analyses of the economy, of politics and other power structures. What does this revival of the ultra-personal creative subject mean for art and culture?
Prelude: Er ist auch ein Berliner.
The essay before you took shape primarily during the final sprint to the White House, in the last weeks of September and the first weeks of October, just before the dramatic conclusion of what, without any doubt, has been the most exciting American presidential election of recent decades – and that followed with the greatest international mistrust. In particular, the fact that the American political system has for years no longer a been about easily identifiable, contrasting political programmes, but solely and exclusively about the rhetorical potential of a more or less charismatic individual to mobilize the voice of mythical middle America, is of course universally Known.But just when European common sense thought that the personality cult in American politics could not take more epic form, the phenomenon of Barack Hussein Obama II took centre stage, to be followed soon thereafter by the Republican wonder drug, Sarah Palin. Disguised as the ‘hockey mom’, this queen of Main Street single-handedly managed to breathe new life into the dull, mundane campaign of John McCain, despite the obvious lack of any international political experience whatsoever. Everyone was quickly in agreement that McCain’s choice of Palin as a running mate was evidence of very little (indeed, none whatsoever) sense of political responsibility: strategic electoral considerations (reinforced by what was meanwhile being referred to as Obama fatigue in the American media) had the upper hand. It even began to look as though McCain would be proven right. Palin’s radical Republican variation on the gripping success story of the unknown senator from Illinois immediately restored the lost balance in the American election contest, now again officially a neck-and-neck race between more (Obama, Palin) or less (Biden, McCain) charismatic individuals.Last summer, Obamamania was experienced in person by your erstwhile writer. On 24 July, 2008, an innocent bicycle trip through Berlin’s sun-drenched Tiergarten was rudely interrupted by the impressive presence of the police, who were escorting Obama’s blitz through the German capital. In his speech, delivered at the foot of the iconic, highly symbolic Siegesaule, and although he himself (naturally) seized every possible opportunity to distance himself from the grandeur and historic impact of earlier presidential speeches in Berlin (Kennedy, Reagan), the German audience, having arrived en masse – a crowd of 200,000 that began applauding hysterically at the first notes of David Bowie’s Changes – was clearly feasting on this undisguised American fairy tale. Soon thereafter, it would become clear that it was precisely Barack Obama’s phenomenal popularity in Europe that could cost him the presidency in his own country. Only a month later, established authorities in the European media landscape were unabashedly comparing the battle between Obama and McCain to an unequal, sobering contest between (respectively!) Traum and Wirklichkeit. This was the heroic dream – ‘the audacity of my father’s dreams’ – and an inspired, messianic individual bathing in godly light (Obama) against the sinister, impenetrable machinations of a faceless and monolithic power, against ‘the system’. You have come a long way, Baby.
Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (Max Stirner, 1844)
The degree to which the heroic, messianic individual is back from banishment gives us a fleeting view of the current tortuous trajectory that has distracted continental philosophical tradition over the last four decennia – a trajectory that is unavoidably reflected in artistic practice. There too, in the year 2008, heroic messianic individualism has completely returned from years of exile in the barren desert of systematic artistic thinking.[1]In his 1966 magnum opus, Les mots et les choses, the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, concluded with a now famous statement that if knowledge about things and their order should come to disappear in the same way that it appeared, then we can well bet that mankind will disappear – the way a face drawn in the sand disappears at the edge of the sea.[2] The disappearance, the end of mankind, was the most speculative conclusion of a long process of ‘dehumanizing’ that was initiated as far back as the 1950s, influenced by the early structuralist revolt against the heroic individualism of such existentialist authors as Sartre and Camus. It was a concept that, before the publication of Foucault’s masterpiece, had already taken different, more easily digested forms, but only afterwards – just think of the ‘death of the author’, quoted almost as frequently, proclaimed in Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay of the same name – crystallized what finally, if with a delay of several decades, would become new popular opinion. What began as a critique of the masculine, Western and heterosexual subject of modern philosophic tradition transformed itself over the years into the fundamentally institutionalized cultural complex of the assassination of the subject. The ‘great’ story of this process of (both cultural and intellectual) institutionalization is now perfectly familiar: for the past two decades, we have simply called it postmodernism.As already mentioned, these two decades are over (I already miss them!). The merciless, quasi-compulsive criticism of the subject and the indefatigable deconstruction of its/his philosophies and ideological principles, are something of which we have now had enough. Towards the end of his life, in his historiographic triptych, Histoire de la sexualité, did not Michel Foucault himself also turn back to what was for many surprising and for some even unacceptable, the traditional concept of the indivisible self as the only sensible subject? If in the final sentence of Les mots et les choses, mankind was doomed to disappear, the later work speaks of the history of sexuality as that of a stable, desiring Self. Which, if you will, can be called an early foreshadowing of the unmistakable revival in our current cultural context of an organized philosophical tradition revolving around the subject – attributable to such diverse thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Sennett, and anyone who still today might let himself be inspired by the long neglected heritage of Hannah Arendt.Obviously, the return of this fairly conventional notion of the subject as the indivisible foundation of the ‘world as we find it’, and its associated syndrome of deconstruction fatigue – the desire for reconstructive thinking after years of a diet of exclusive, narrow-minded deconstructive thinking – are, as noted, unavoidably also felt in the world of contemporary art.[3] Or could it be that this art world has simply once again shown itself to be old-fashionedly avant-garde, and that it has long since foreseen the coming of this trend towards the reinstatement and renewed appreciation of the individual, a ‘re-individualizing’ of artistic practice? Has art in fact helped it take shape?
Cornerstones and a priori
The history of modern art may do its thinking primarily in terms of trends, schools and networks of reciprocal influences and dependent relationships, but a wider public concept of what constitutes that history will irrevocably stand or fall with the recognizable name of the artist. The fairly recent phenomenon of the blockbuster exhibition would be all but unthinkable without public adoration of the author and his authorizing signature. What can the public (of which yours truly is a part) possibly care that the traditional author is supposed to have been declared dead a full 40 years ago?Public adoration, which bears a marked resemblance to old-fashioned hero worship, is probably also what keeps the unassailable myth of an imperturbable contemporary art market on its feet. It is at this very moment, when across the entire globe, financial markets are on the verge of collapse and one apocalyptic omen after the other declares profound recession on the horizon, that Damien Hirst Inc. manages to pull off a unique stunt. During a spectacular auction at Sotheby’s in London, his golden calf changed hands for more than £9,000,000, without the least intervention from a single gallery (be it Jay Jopling or Larry Gagosian, in this context, the gallery remains the symbol of a faceless, anonymous system necessarily inclined to being the enemy of the individual).[4] A certain overkill of narrow, thematically defined group exhibitions over the last few years – the exhibition as essay, authorized by the curator – has recently also resulted in critical reinstatement of monographic thinking in the more adventurous, forward-looking sectors of the global art establishment. Over the entire past year, Witte de With contemporary art centre in Rotterdam consistently and rationally devoted itself to ‘the author’, both in its exhibition programme (a single collective was celebrated this year, but even that had a personal name: Claire Fontaine),[5] and in its lecture schedule. The Cornerstones lecture series is not only about heroic artists who stand out from the crowd (John Baldessari, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Jeff Wall), but also about the heroic individualism of the critic as intellectual Einzelganger.The trademark names of Matta-Clark and Smithson – both subjects of a recent series of retrospectives in the United States – are here (naturally) no coincidence. The disproportional attention enjoyed by their relatively limited oeuvres, and which clearly coincides with their status as artist’s artists – the kind of artist who sets other blue chip artists, such as Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, Renée Green or Joachim Koester to barely disguised homage – can probably not be considered apart from their iconic appeal as the type of hero who dies young and does not shirk (at least in Smithson’s case) from offering up his life for the sake of Art – with the capital ‘A’ written in his own blood. Is it not precisely this that is one of the central preoccupations of what we in recent years have come to call ‘romantic conceptualism’? Does it here not specifically concern a rereading of conceptual art in which it is not the system of art that is at the core of things, but the artist as tragic individual engaged in an historic battle with the elements (Bas Jan Ader, Smithson), with architecture (Matta-Clark), or with art history (André Cadere, Blinky Palermo)?[6] Certainly the remarkable posthumous career of Bas Jan Ader, by now approaching saintly proportions, and which, while he was alive and in good health and in the two decades that followed his mysterious disappearance at sea, was little more than a curiosity in the annals of the twilight zone between performance and conceptual art, can in this context certainly be deemed exemplary. It is his premature, James Dean-like end[7] that gives his life and work (or preferably, his life as work) that extra bit of heroic allure that has proven to be so crucial in the public acceptance of what two decades ago, during the heyday of everything-in-perspective, relativizing of postmodernism, was still simply being called ‘the expressive fallacy’.[8]Just last year, could the expressive fallacy of this romantic conceptualism have imagined a more rewarding blockbuster than Caspar David Friedrich: Die Erfindung der Romantik? David’s endlessly reproduced Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer – in my library alone, it adorns the covers of three different books and even more record albums! – has in the current cultural climate regained its pre-war, long unmentionable, allegorical character. The Wanderer is no one other than the Artist, who looks down with Olympic detachment right through the cloud layers of all kinds of systemic detour manoeuvres – economy, history, ideology, politics, the entire Foucaultian grab bag – onto the turbulent masses and multitudes at the foot of his or her mountain.
After all, mea culpa
From which Olympian perspective might all this indeed be perceived? To whom does this (I might hope merciless) diagnostic voice ultimately belong? Indeed, it belongs to an author like any other. He is one, ironically enough, who has for some time enjoyed a reputation, however humble, thanks to a devotion to the monographic cause (catalogue essays and art magazines with monographic orientation), to the immortal myth, or in other words, to the practice of art as ultra-individualistic ‘project’, to the principal that the artist is that particular type of individual who can define himself in society by calling on an absolute, for many unthinkable degree of freedom. All this is given that, at least since Duchamp’s introduction of the ready-made as the definitive symbol of the omnipotence of the signature, everything can be art, and the artist is therefore free to do something. He or she is freer than any other (active) member of society. It is here that this writer finds grounds for his own humble claims of freedom. Because, if the artist can do something about something, then so too can I (to a certain degree) write something about him or her, about his or her work.All of us count on the freedom of the artist, that heroic, emblematic individual whose authority cannot be curbed by either politics or systems, in order to indirectly guarantee and safeguard our own freedom as cultural consumers and producers. This also explains our belief in the eternally returning myth of the sacrosanct individual (artist) surviving on pure charisma, who will not be put down by any deconstructive programme whatsoever. We need this myth to continue in order to justify our fragile belief in the illusion of a free existence. ‘I am America, and so can you.’
Post scriptum: Beuys, the One Man Art Movement
Berlin is currently hosting the first major Beuys retrospective in 20 years – and the crowds are coming! In order to ensure the suspicious, sceptical elements within the amply turned out audience that we have not fallen back into old-fashioned idolatry (an old German sore spot), the Hamburger Bahnhof, currently transformed into a Church of Beuys, is simultaneously also holding a ‘critical’ exhibition about the myth of the artist – in which the mythology of individual genius, the cult of signature, the aura of the author, etcetera, are being angrily deconstructed. Whether the curators of this double exhibition envisioned a contest or an exercise in balancing polemics is something I do not know, but Beuys comes out of the fray quite undamaged, as creative jack of all trades, homo universalis, pedagogue, politician, performer, all-around Godfather of art, not so much a one-man band as a one-man art movement. Perhaps for that reason, Beuys is (once again, or still) the most emblematic, influential artist of post-war Europe. Beuys, in fact, the myth of Beuys, feeds the profoundly felt, universal social longing for an illusion of individual freedom, of individual expression, and whether that illusion should be cherished or unmasked is not the point. The desire for it exists, and that is enough.The individual myth of the artist thus far remains intact and operational, however implausible it has become in the current industrialized (art) economy, because more than ever, the public wants to be reminded of the possibility, however hypothetical, of an autonomous, even autarkical existence. Dieter Roelstraete
Dieter Roelstraete
