What Will Happen Next (CAW 6.9.08)

[In attendance: Manol G, Anna L, Christa R, E. Capper, Christina ? (visiting DOVA scholar), Stephanie B, Lisa Z, Daniel (MAPH), Darby E, Matthew JJ, Ian B]

(Christa) What about the avant garde? Why don't you mention them? Do they need to be mentioned? Maybe it's more exciting to leave that formulation out of it?

This strikes me as useful because it's so closely related to what I had in mind by defining the field of my project, or the object of my attack, as "politicizing art history." That framing and the AG are not synonymous, but they are clearly related, depending on how specifically one defines the AG (on the most general end, it could be something like "politicizing art;" on the other, closer to P. Burger, it could be art that takes the goal of its politics to be the interruption of the autonomy of art).

I'm not sure its an egregious omission (I was already self-conscious about focusing too much on Buchloh; there is some usefulness to ignoring their work, if the goal is to make some space outside of or around it). But conversations around the AG has monopolized the politic conversation around art, to the extent that Ranciere develops an elaborate theory whose point is to overturn that story of modernism, to set the clock back further into the 19th c, to prioritize realism, to evacuate the false efficacy of the distinction between art and life. At the very least, re-reading in this area is going to be essential for the next draft (H. Foster, more Buchloh, A. Fraser, P. Burger; see also Crimp's refusal to deal with the AG).

In that spirit, I re-read H. Foster's "Whose afraid of the neo-avant garde?" this morning. It's an attempt to recuperate P. Burger's theory of the AG from its simplistic, and disastrous temporality. Burger defines the AG by its efforts to resist the assumed autonomy of art. In that, the project was always going to fail, but it was a heroic failure. Foster's concern is with his dismissal of the neo-AG (c. 1970) as a dismal repetition of the AG, a failed attempt to repeat the gestures of the original AG. Farce following tragedy. Foster wants to clear space for a better, more hopeful model of repetition, and a model of critique that can understand a return as something more than a failed recuperation attempt. Where he arrives is a traumatic model of history, where the "historical AG" (as he calls it) produces a trauma in the Real that subsequent artists and AGs are forced to work through again, to expose as traumatic or repair. So the temporality in his terms is a return that happens from the future; the neo-AG returns to work through the historical AG, to push it further or make it right or just reveal its traumatic structure.

The temporality Foster takes issue with is one that sees the present as a failed version of the past. He wants a temporality that allows for a more efficacious present, one that has the power to deal with the past, to work it through, improve on it, not repeat it.

This is not what I call a retrospective temporality, which returns to the past in order to freeze it in place, to "copyright" it, mark it as failed, reveal the ongoing victory of the Culture Industry. Although Foster employs this temporality when he makes a distinction btw an early and a late neo-AG, the early (e.g. Rauchenberg) being a failure and the late (Buren and of course Broodthaers) being a successful institutional critique. Why, if his thought is to empower a temporality of return, to let the present re-work the past for its own ends, bother relegating a moment in the past to failure? Mightn't that moment simply contain a trauma that Foster himself can't work through yet? By what standard does it fail? I think another problem here is an incompatibility between Foster's model of critique and the mode of temporality he tries to elaborate here. Critique for him still contains the possibility of total failure, where failure is something like Buchloh's model: a work that, in its myopia, its narcissism, its uncritical love of culture or money or industry or institution or pop anything, makes things worse, which usually amounts to failing to see the conditions of its own capitalist enmeshment. Thus, the work that Foster calls failed doesn't fail formally, it fails because it fails to successfully critique the institutions of art. Maybe the problem, then, is not critique itself, and certainly not negativity itself (this has been hanging me up for a long time), but the concept of failure. Maybe Foster and Buchloh's conception of failure is too totalizing, too generalizing, and too beholden to a particular model of the Culture Industry as THE only worthwhile object of aesthetic critique. This would be related to a problem of restricted, restrictive temporality (failure is related to a work failing to achieve what the future defines as the most incisive AG tactic of attacking the CI and the institutions of art; e.g. Rauchenberg fails according to standards set by Buren and Broodthaers; this happens in Buchloh as well), but not reducible to it entirely.


(Matthew and Darby) Your discussion of Buchloh seems right on, but your discussion of On Kawara seems not to have taken on the implications of your own argument, i.e. seems not to be benefiting from the more agile structure of temporality you advocate. Matthew went on to say that maybe the problem is that I just don't have the vocabulary to apply my argument to artworks yet, and maybe the problem is that the artworks I choose are too canonical. Darby differs here slightly in that he wouldn't reject the canonical out of hand, but does advocate a more careful working through of Kawara's formal aesthetic tactics. A more specific, careful address to the art. They both agreed that my space-clearing gesture would be stronger if I spent some time with the conventional reception of artists like Kawara and Darboven, discuss how their work has become reducible to the discourses about them (Matthew says "absolutely equivalent"), and as such, their work has become indissociable from a broader argument about historical modernism.

(Darby) In discussing On Kawara, think about the role of leisure vis. work (reading the newspaper); also think about the newspaper in its role as evidence (this painting actually did happen here; even sometimes when it did not; e.g. he often started a painting in one city, but finished it in another).
(Emily) Also might think about the different fonts he uses.

(Lisa and Christa) What is my own privilege in looking at On Kawara? Does my reading of temporality rely on a certain citing that is extra-insitutional, e.g. knowing the he often doesn't finish a painting in a day? And if so, what does this say about the "ordinary" experience of seeing an On Kawara?

(General) There was still some question about whether or not I had stated my goals clearly enough, forcefully enough, especially vis. copyright law. There seemed to be some consensus that I still hadn't come right out and said that Buchloh seems to work the same way as copyright law does.

I don't know what that means, given that I DO come right out and say that.