museums

Hal Foster’s critical turn

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There’s a good review by Jeffrey Petts over at the low-key online publication Marx and Philosophy of Hal Foster’s excellent The Art-Architecture Complex (2011). Currently I’m writing a double-review of Foster’s book along with another very good book, Gevork Hartoonian’s recent Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique (2013) for the LA Review of Books. Petts covers all the major points of Foster’s study with clarity and concision; I especially appreciate the way he elucidates the connection with Kenneth Frampton’s advocacy of “critical regionalism.” Indeed, the opposition between image and building, the visual and the tactile, the scenographic and the tectonic — frames the entire discussion. (Same goes for Hartoonian, incidentally).

But one thing I’m really grateful to Petts’ review for was its reference to criticisms Foster has recently leveled against the post-Marxist philosopher and aesthetic theorist Jacques Rancière. He cites an November 2013 review Foster wrote of Rancière’s Aisthesis, just translated into English by Zakir Paul and published by Verso. You can read that review in PDF form here. Rancière has been enthusiastically embraced by art critics and practitioners alike for too long. It’s high time that he be properly critiqued. And so below I am reproducing an article Foster wrote in December 2012 for The Brooklyn Rail on “post-critical” theory, focusing on Rancière and the French philosopher Bruno Latour. This represents Foster’s latest move away from his earlier promotion of aesthetic postmodernism in The Anti-Aesthetic (1981), a collection of essays he edited.

Post-critical

Hal Foster
Brooklyn Rail
12.10.2012

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Critical theory took a serious beating during the culture wars of the 1980s and the 1990s, and the 2000s were only worse. Under Bush the demand for affirmation was all but total, and today there is little space for critique even in the universities and the museums. Bullied by conservative commentators, most academics no longer stress the importance of critical thinking for an engaged citizenry, and, dependent on corporate sponsors, most curators no longer promote the critical debate once deemed essential to the public reception of advanced art. Indeed, the sheer out-of-date-ness of criticism in an art world that couldn’t care less seems evident enough. Yet what are the options on offer? Celebrating beauty? Affirming affect? Hoping for a “redistribution of the sensible”? Trusting in “the general intellect”? The post-critical condition is supposed to release us from our straightjackets (historical, theoretical, and political), yet for the most part it has abetted a relativism that has little to do with pluralism.

How did we arrive at the point where critique is so broadly dismissed? Over the years most of the charges have concerned the positioning of the critic. First, there was a rejection of judgment, of the moral right presumed in critical evaluation. Then, there was a refusal of authority, of the political privilege that allows the critic to speak abstractly on behalf of others. Finally, there was skepticism about distance, about the cultural separation from the very conditions that the critic purports to examine. “Criticism is a matter of correct distancing,” Benjamin wrote in One-Way Street (1928). “It was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to adopt a standpoint. Now things press too urgently on human society.” How much more urgent is this pressing today? Continue reading →

The significance of art for the #Occupy movement

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Here’s the panel organized by Chris Mansour of the Platypus Affiliated Society on “The Significance of Art in the #Occupy Movement,” on which I spoke with Maria Byck and Noah Fischer at the Left Forum.  Karen Archey, Pam’s old friend and roommate from Chicago, was originally supposed to be on the panel as well — and I would have paid good money to see her go at it with Noah (after their much-publicized feud in the media) — but she ended up getting a paying gig in London while the Left Forum was going on.

Some of the audience questions were great, especially on the communicability of art in the service of politics, the ideological function of art (i.e., as performance piece, as agitprop, as a beautiful object), the viability of art in an administered vs. a stateless society, and the problematic formulation of a “return to realism.”  Thanks to everyone who came out, either as audience members or as panelists.

Below is the text of my opening remarks.

Luigi Russolo – “Rivolta” (1911)

Of Guilds and Musea: An Inquiry into the Historical and Political Dimensions of Art in #OWS

Early in the first chapter of his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx observes that

just as [men] seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.  Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.

It is thus perhaps to be expected that during our present moment of political upheaval, we should look to the struggles of a bygone age for guidance.  What distinguishes this crisis from the other great outpourings of popular unrest witnessed over the last few centuries, however, is the rather jumbled and confused manner in which the past is being reappropriated.  The detritus of dead epochs is dug up for all to see, whereupon it is hastily sifted through in search of anything that might admit of creative reuse.  Recycled revolutionary catchphrases appear hoisted above the scattered throngs of protestors.  Placards demanding “All power to the General Assemblies!” are held up beside banners reading “The Oakland Commune.”  Some signs advise us to “Be realistic — demand the impossible,” while others inform us that “Another world is possible.”  Slogans of more recent coinage can also be seen: “People before profit!” and “We are the 99%!” Sewn together from disparate sources in the history of the Left, #Occupy almost seems to represent a veritable Frankenstein’s monster of the radical imagination.  Here might lie the unconscious motivation behind the highly publicized “zombie march” that took place in those early days of #OWS, even if the marchers understood themselves as portraying the brainless dupes of corporate greed.  At this point, however, the ahistorical residue of postmodern consciousness takes its revenge on history: the past becomes pastiche. Continue reading →