The Man Who Made Artworks in His Head
The Man Who Made Artworks in His Head
Thanks to conceptual art, everybody is familiar with the artwork as idea. So ingrained is this in today’s conceptual artists that not only do they think that the artwork does not need to be made, they wouldn’t even know how anymore. Nowadays they simply pretend to create.The classic ontological proof of God’s existence runs as follows: God is perfect (by definition), being is a perfection, therefore God exists. One of the achievements of conceptual art is to have turned around the central premise of this argument. Rather than being, it is non-being that, for the post-retinal artist, possesses the highest degree of perfection. Conclusion: if art is to be perfect, the artwork does not need to exist.This thesis should be understood as a hyperbolic affirmation of art’s power. In its untouchable sovereignty, the work of art can even dispense with the imperative to be. As true believers know, all proofs of God’s existence are inherently suspicious, since no matter how compelling their logic they inevitably denigrate God’s omnipotence by subordinating Him to the strictures of human rationality. The formula for dematerialized religion was best expressed by Baudelaire: Dieu, writes the poet, est le seul être qui, pour régner, n’ait même pas besoin d’exister, ‘God is the only being who, in order to rule, doesn’t even need to exist.’[1]As is readily apparent in our so-called post-secular world, religion functions perfectly well as a set of rituals and beliefs whether or not God is alive, dead or caught in some other spectral state. And likewise with the art system, which operates all the better once it has been liberated from the old fashioned ontology of the material object. ‘Beyond being’ is an eminently contemporary slogan: perhaps art needs really existing works even less than religion needs really existing gods.
Non-actualization
Sol LeWitt led the way in 1967 in his ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, which set forth the notion that, ‘In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work’, and furthermore, the ‘intervening steps’ which ‘show the thought process of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product’.[2] A year later Lawrence Weiner announced his Declaration of Intent: ‘1.) The artist may construct the piece. 2.) The piece may be fabricated. 3.) The piece need not be built.’[3]Contemporary conceptualism has radicalized these founding principles: the piece not only need not but should not be built. The superior work is the one that maintains itself as a set of virtual possibilities, mental processes whose various trajectories and components happily avoid culminating in any kind of tangible finished thing. Nietzsche’s dictum about ‘the melancholy of all things finished’ is thus put into practice: rather than chiselled objects, painted scenes, scripted performances, and completed texts, we are offered notional beings borne by an ever-changing and seemingly inexhaustible mental energy.As a historical matter, the principle of non-actualization – ‘the piece need not be built’ – hardly signalled the end of artistic activity. On the contrary, it has proved a highly productive one, spurring a whole industry of mentalistic art. LeWitt’s privileging of process over product finds a key forerunner in the aesthetic theory of Paul Valéry, who reversed the standard metaphysical definition of art in terms of poetic creation (poiesis). For Valéry the true work of art is not the finished product, but the process of creation itself (for this reason, he privileged dance over the plastic arts). ‘The execution of a work of art is itself a work of art and … its material object, the product of the artist’s fingers, is only a pretext, a stage ‘prop’ or, as it were, the subject of the ballet.’[4] Poiesis is here grasped as an end-in-itself, and the ‘poetic’ work downgraded to a mere pretext or stage prop, one might even say: a distracting idol. Art in all its forms is essentially performance, and the product a by-product or offshoot of the aesthetic endeavour and not its final goal; from the standpoint of creation, it is merely the accidental interruption of a process that, in principle, infinitely exceeds it.This contingent view of fabrication is no doubt a beautiful and unlikely way of understanding artistic creation. As an artist I am not trying to achieve or make anything, it is simply that, while working, it happens from time to time – I cannot help it – that something is produced. And once I have grasped the truth of my way of working, the challenge then arises of incorporating this insight into the work itself, to accidentally produce something that would announce itself as an accident, a thing that despite its inevitable borders and fixed determinations would be an ongoing, unfixable process, ‘definitively unfinished’.
Fictional artwork
Jorge Luis Borges once said (I’m paraphrasing), ‘Why write a 500 page novel when one can express the idea of the novel in a single paragraph?’ (Or perhaps the suggestion of such a paragraph would already be sufficient; who today is the poet of rumours?). Fictional artworks are of course one of the mainstays of romanticism, from Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece to Mallarmé’s Book. But these inexistent creations are too totalizing and too sublime for contemporary standards. What contemporary art teaches is that it’s not only the Absolute that doesn’t need to exist; stupid, banal, everyday things can be non-existent too. Fictionalism has democratized the ideal of non-reality and emptied it of its romantic pathos: invented artists, fake institutions, excerpts from non-existing texts, announcements for events that never take place, elaborate branding for imaginary products, exhibitions without works… such is the ether of the times. But all this meta- and para- and infra-artistic activity has not passed without a certain regret. As Stuart Bailey remarks in an unfilmed episode of a hypothetical television series: ‘I want to know why we always seem to be making trailers for films that don’t exist, writing fragments of novels that have no beginning or ending, organizing performances for fictional bands. On the surface, at least, isn’t it because we’re too lazy, scared or just incapable of making anything real? The work is an excuse in lieu of a real piece of work that will never exist; a series of checks waiting to bounce.’[5] This is a highly symptomatic statement. One can observe today the co-existence of two apparently contradictory trends: an ecstasy of the inexistent and a passion for the real, a fascination for hoaxes, ghosts, fakes, simulations, invisibility, rumours, and as-if’s, plus a yearning to produce something real, a crafted product that would not be infinitely postponed or mystified, in short, a well-made work, or if not well-made, at least something consistent, an object that really is. Perhaps the incapacity of ‘making anything real’ (Bailey) is not a psychological or moral weakness on the part of artists, but the positive condition of the current state of art. We can understand this better by briefly situating it in historical perspective. The culture industry produces an endless array of impeccably finished and easily consumable products. Modernism reacted against this flood of pleasing things by creating dense, opaque, indigestible objects; works which, unlike perishable commodities, can never be sucked dry or used up. Cultural commodities are like a parade of prostitutes willing to perform for a price, whereas the artwork is the one true Woman the depths of whose love can never be exhausted, or, more to the point, understood. This cult of the enigmatic and cruel Lady eventually gave way to a quite different sexual-intellectual regime: postmodernism discovered love not as fidelity to the inscrutable partner but as a polymorphous pervert field of interchangeable organs and partial objects. Distinctions were levelled and all culture treated as a vast mixing board, a heterogeneous ensemble to be sampled and remixed ad infinitum. No product is ever complete, none a finished whole; there is only a single fluctuating stream of material to be experimented with, rearranged, and diverted anew. Following on these developments, our contemporary conceptualists add a new twist: they play at creation, they mime culture without actually making it. Art is now the domain of suspended culture, a kind of intimate distantiation where one pretends to fabricate things but without the satisfying substance, a fictional machine whose ‘real’ product is ultimately the pretence of making itself. After the stormy romance of modernism and the libidinous promiscuity of the postmodern, art has taken a strangely prudish turn, which actually fits well with the sexual climate of neoliberalism: it’s become a tease.
Conceptualists
The term ‘conceptual art’ nowadays names in a very loose way contemporary art as such. It is sometimes said that all artists are conceptualists, which usually means nothing more than they are supposed to be very smart. Not only or even primarily gifted at the use of materials and forms, capable of creating new sensations and effects through the manipulation of time and space, image, sound, and texture, artists are first and foremost defined as wits, skilled in the techniques of paradox and reversal. The model artwork contains or thematizes certain ideas which are in implicit or explicit dialogue with difficult philosophical notions, the most prominent being non-identity (nothing is what it is) and the simultaneity of time (a loop, a spiral, a labyrinth, a virtual matrix, time is anything but a forward shooting arrow). This species of art has something in common with the aesthetic aspirations of its socialist ancestors: it is propaganda in the service of the paradoxical. But apart from this generic usage, we could define the term ‘conceptual’ in a more precise way. In today’s concept art it’s the idea of making things that matters. What conceptual designates is thus not the intellectual content or message of the artwork, nor the idea that inspires it, but its presentation of the act of production and the creative process as themselves the primary matter for display. In this self-fictionalizing practice, the object produced is a kind of offshoot, a secondary effect, an afterthought. It is the least important thing, and always essentially missing. Even if, for example, an artist were to make and distribute the perfume for which he has designed a fake advertisement video, this product would still be a hoax-product, a quasi-thing whose thought has more substance than its reality. One can observe here another important shift. While the means employed in such projects can be modest, povera, following a certain critical tradition, they can also approach the slick, high-end production values of mass culture. What matters more than questions of quality or material is the theatricalization of the art process, which doubles and falsifies culture rather than rivalling or remixing it. It is a tremendous impersonating act, a kind of variety show, whose sometimes fascinated, sometimes irritated audience members are yet another ideal element in its own poetic performance.
Process-obsessed
One of Patricia Highsmith’s short stories recounts the fate of ‘a man who wrote books in his head’. ‘E. Taylor Cheever wrote books in his head, never on paper. By the time he died aged sixty-two, he had written fourteen novels and created one hundred and twenty-seven characters, all of whom he, at least, remembered distinctly.’[6] A pristine literary accomplishment: Cheever’s richly detailed creations were so perfect that he felt no need to commit them to paper, and in the end the non-writing writer dies imagining himself being buried at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Cheever is another one of Highsmith’s signature psychotics, but his singular practice enlightens us as to the extreme consequence of dematerialization and fictionalization: the process-obsessed author as pathological conceptualist. Perhaps it won’t be long before some curator proposes an exhibition taking place entirely inside an artist’s head; with enough formal subtlety, the visitors might even forget that they’re only mental projections caught up in someone else’s delusion.Aaron Schuster is a philosopher, Berlin/Brussels
Aaron Schuster
