The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist
| Author’s Comments on The
Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist Donald Kuspit The Cult of the Avant-Garde
Artist is an attempt to reevaluate avant-garde art in psychological terms,
which has not been done in 20th century American art history.
It tends to be naively positivistic when not ideologically driven, and
in general resists the psychological understanding of art as a kind of
degradation of its sublimity, however much, self-contradictorily, there
is a fair amount of talk about the artist’s “attitude” and Weltanschauung,
usually derived from some notion of the Zeitgeist. It is worth noting that
this repression of the nt-Garde Artist by Will Wadlington Index of back
issues ©Critical Review, 1996. All rights reserved.ved. ases with
a joke about articulation, the painterly process of transforming a ng a
he Peircean tradition, but that nowadays the term 'semiotics' is more likely
to be used as an umbrella term to embrace the whole field (Nöth 1990,
14). The most common brief definition of semiotics is 'the study of signs'
(or 'the theory of signs'). It
involves the study not only of what we refer to as 'signs' in everyday
speech, but of anything which 'stands for' something else. In a semiotic
sense, signs include words, images, sounds, gestures and objects. Such
signs are studied not in isolation but as part of semiotes” of art, to
again use Wölfflin’s words. The indifference of American art historians
to such values, or more broadly to the psychological process in history—it
is a general problem for historians, as Peter Gay’s Freud for Historians
makes clear—has ultimately to do with American society’s elevation of social
issues, and social reality, over psychological issues, and psychological
reality, and above all the refusal to see any connection between them.
In art history as in the society at large, there has been a reluctant and
somewhat shallow, if at times loudmouthed yeasaying of emotional values.
They have been most acknowledged in studies of Italian mannerism, which
was systematically analyzed for the first time, and upwardly re-evaluated
in contrast to the Renaissance art it follows—it was regarded as overemotional
and thus decadent in comparison to Renaissance art—and in studies of avant-garde
art, which was recognized as involving not only a major change in formal
values but, correlatively, the emotional values the new forms struggled
to express, and often involuntarily did. Avant-garde art seemed to be mysteriously
subjective—a regressive explosion of the irrational and unconscious—in
contrast to Renaissance art, which was transparently objective, consciously
social, and progressively rational. But the psychological language the
art historians interested in mannerism and avant-garde art—one prominent
art historian, Arnold Hauser, finds the root of the latter in the former—used
to understand their emotional values and issues is remarkably impoverished
not to say inadequate and banal. It was even less revelatory than—simplistic
in comparison to—the terms the 19th century German art historians used,
which were derived from philosophical psychology and the Geistesgeschichte
investigations of such figures as Dilthey and Simmel. What I am saying
is that my work involves a regression to a Geistesgeschichte conception
of art history, but involves a more updated—more theoretically sophisticated
or at least elaborate psychology, namely, psychoanalysis—than that used
by the 19th century German art historians and Geistesgeschichte theorists.
More particularly, I have tried to use psychoanalytic concepts—no doubt
in a fashion many of you will find too eclectic, although you will note
a tendency to use object relational and self psychological ideas—but also
to let the artists and their works speak for themselves, if interpreting
what they say psychoanalytically. Thus, my basic thesis—that avant-garde
art is therapeutic in intention, which is part of what gives it its authenticity,
and motivates its stylistic innovations, while neo-avant-garde art has
lost or rather forfeited that intention, which is part of why it is inauthentic—derives
from the avant-garde artist’s recurrent, stated fear of decadence and disintegration
in the modern world, which is what leads him or her to search for self-renewal
and rejuvenation through the innovations of avant-garde art, and from the
neo-avant-garde artist’s explicit acceptance of the decadence and disintegration
of avant-garde art, involving its institutionalization or socialization
and academicization, and his or her determination to benefit from this
ironically decadent institutionalization. Where the avant-garde artist
feared for the relevance of art in the modern world of science and technology—did
it have any place in such an enlightened, demystified world?—the neo-avant-garde
artist realizes that art is an important, major way to fame and fortune,
that is, social success in the most grandiose terms—one becomes a part
of art history—which is partly why it is conceived of as the ultimate cure
for all emotional ailments. More broadly, I trace the emotional values
underlying the shift in attitude from avant-garde to neo-avant-garde. I
argue that the avant-garde artist’s therapeutic intention is socially empathic,
if also involving the notion of art as self-healing, while the neo-avant-garde
artist is essentially narcissistic, for all his cynical social attunement.
My book is not simply an intellectual exercise: I see a psychomoral lesson—indeed,
a basic psychodynamic paradigm in modernity—in the shift of attitude from
avant-garde to neo-avant-garde. I think the avant-garde artist discloses
an ironical truth about the modern world: one’s mental health in it is
necessarily paradoxical—at least if it is health in a meaningful sense—in
that it reflects one’s way of dealing with one’s recognition of the pathology
of one’s social situation, symptomatic of the larger social pathology of
modernity. In modernity one becomes truly healthy emotionally by recognizing
and making the best of one’s abandonment by society. More particularly,
mental health involves using a kind of artistic cunning to come to grips
with and survive the anguished experience of existential groundlessness—the
profound annihilation anxiety or disintegrative effect of recognizing that
modern society gives one no reason for being and is indifferent to one’s
particular being, except as an instrument of its larger purpose. In modernity
one’s instrumental value replaces what traditionally was conceived of as
one’s transcendental value. To become aware of this, to experience and
not deny it and the anxiety it arouses, which most people for good reason
dare not do—it is the true existential shock of recognition in modern life—is
to be awakened from one’s naive, somnabulistic relationship to the modern
lifeworld, and to try to respond to it critically and creatively, in order
to survive in it. I may be idealizing them, but I think avant-garde artists
were individuals who experienced such existential agony and awakening.
Their innovations were attempts to critically and creatively cope with
that disillusioning, debilitating experience symbolically—that is, to make
new symbols (and thus new selves) of the experience and its “existential-artistic
solution.” In a sense, they make clear that whatever else it may be avant-garde
art is a response to a destructive, psychotic experience of modern society,
which itself is destructive and psychotic, as it were, in that it does
not recognize the inherent value of real individual life, but reduces it
to an instrument of collective purpose. Avant-garde art is the most important
artistic development since the Renaissance, a genuine change of sensibility
and reconceptualization and reorientation of art. We are now witnessing
its demise, corruption, and exploitation—appropriation is the fashionable
term, or ironic repetition (masking compulsive dependence on it)—in so-called
neo-avant-garde or postmodern art. As I have suggested, the irreconcilable
difference—stylistic and attitudinal—between them is emblematic of a basic,
seemingly unresolvable (or at least ironically resolvable) split in our
culture. The former stands to the latter as the seminal to the decadent,
the insecure original to the contented copy, the creative to the pseudo-creative,
anxious nonconformity to eager conformity, the search for integrity to
cynical indifference to inner integrity as an impediment to social success,
the true self to the false self. According to Harold Rosenberg and Clement
Greenberg the avant-garde—the “famous break with tradition”—lasted for
about a century: from, as Rosenberg wrote, the time when “Baudelaire invited
fugitives from the too-small world of memory to come abroad for his voyage
in search of the new” to the time when, as Greenberg said, it became institutionalized,
that is, when art that was once considered unfit to be shown in a museum
became the only kind of art one could see in it. As Greenberg said, when
everyone is a revolutionary the revolution is over. Or, as Rosenberg put
it, when a revolutionary “new look is ... a professional requirement,”
the new is not only a tradition, but no longer meaningful. The avant-garde
artist was a genuine “antenna of the race,” to use the felicitous phrase
Ezra Pound used to describe the artist at his or her best. He or she was
attuned to modern society, which was still fresh and surprising and not
the unsurprising cliché it has become—Baudelaire thought that art’s
purpose in modern society was to convey the surprise of the new, but today
the new is no longer surprising but peculiarly stale. The unpredictable
is predictably manufactured. The avant-garde has become a tyranny. That
is, the avant-garde artist registered, in his or her own individuality
and art, the pressures and threat to individuality and mental health a
new, modern society presented. The avant-garde artist wanted to be of service
to this society, if only by suggesting various ways of critically and creatively
working it through. In contrast, the neo-avant-garde artist conceives of
his or her relationship to society and the purpose of art in a completely
different way. He or she is an ironical conformist, using art not only
to become part of the establishment, but as an empty fetish—commodity.
For the neo-avant-garde artist art is a cynical career rather than a desperate,
uncertain calling. I use various exemplary artists and their art to
make my psychosocial point. I deliberately cut across conventional stylistic
categories. On the avant-garde side, I combine Picasso and Duchamp, Mondrian
and Malevich, and Expressionism and Surrealism. Each double unit represents
a different solution to the problem of being anxiously modern—the feeling
that to be modern is to be inherently sick. Each avant-garde innovation
is conceived of as a different therapeutic technique, if also articulating
the pathology of modernity. On the neo-avant-garde—or pseudo-avant-garde—side,
I use Warhol and the appropriationists, with Beuys as transitional between
avant-garde and neo-avant-garde attitudes. My entire discussion is
framed by a deconstruction of the modernist myth of the artist as having
unique power of perception, unique spontaneity, and as a revolutionary
transmuter of negative into positive values. I show the ironies of the
myth, and debunk it, even as I argue that it was the sustaining myth of
the avant-garde artist. I regard Picasso as instituting perceptual distortions
and Duchamp as instituting conceptual distortions—a deliberate destructive
use of deformation or “negation” or contradiction for subliminally constructive,
therapeutic purpose. The shock value of their work—its frequently black
humor—had paradoxical proto-curative effect, for it shook one out of one’s
conventional assumptions about perception and the possibilities of art,
making one critically conscious of both and the critical consciousness
invested in both at their best. I argue that in Mondrian and Malevich,
on the one hand, and Expressionism and Surrealism, on the other, avant-garde
art becomes explicitly therapeutic in purpose. The former represent what
I call the geometrical cure, the latter what I call the expressive cure.
They are opposite in character, but in both cases cure involves contact
with the primordial—in the first case primordial detachment or transcendence,
represented by abstract geometry, and in the second case free, spontaneous
expression of primordial emotions, whether by means of automatist gestures
or dream images. Cure, in other words, is effected by contact with and
articulation of what is fundamental in existence—the absolutely “higher”
and absolutely “lower” are equally fundamental—which is understood as liberating
one from the unessential pathology of the modern, everyday lifeworld, with
its banality and indifference to individual existence. The tenor of my
argument changes as I move to Warhol, who signals the end of the avant-garde
attitude and the beginning of the neo-avant-garde attitude. Warhol is explicitly
indifferent to therapy—he in fact hates and dismisses it, suggesting watching
television as an alternative—and concerned only to become famous, which
he achieved. I examine the narcissistic effect of this wish and achievement
on Warhol’s life and art97-it is largely devoted to portraiture
of famous people—as well as the ironical emptiness involved in fame and
narcissism. I also show that his art represents an abandonment of avant-garde
innovation and a return to banal, everyday means of representation, confirming
the social status quo of perception, “art,” and importance or value. As
such, it is postmodern—nontransformative or minimally transformative. Overinvested
in fame, Warhol becomes a non-person, that is, a machine, as he himself
said, no doubt unaware of Tausk’s influencing machine and von Bertalanffy’s
idea that a conflict basic to modernity is between the closed system robot
and open system organic model of human being. (He thinks the former is
demonstratably false.) I also distinguish between fame and celebrity, arguing
that the latter, which is dominant in the everyday postmodern lifeworld,
has bankrupted or at least corrupted the meaning of the former. I then
discuss Beuys, whom I regard as transitional between avant-garde and neo-avant-garde
attitudes, and between a modern and a postmodern lifeworld. I conceive
of him as a tragic victim of his own therapeutic ambition. His art is addressed
to a postwar German audience, which it hopes to heal—I argue that all his
art, which is essentially a performance art, symbolizes the healing process—but
it increasingly tries to reach its audience by using methods, objects,
and images derived from the everyday modern lifeworld, as well as by manipulating
his own position as a celebrity. As his art became more accessible, it
loses its therapeutic power. That is, Beuys begins as an avant-garde artist
and ends as a postmodern artist—begins, as he himself said, as a shaman,
and ends, as he was aware others thought of him as being, a showman. He
was caught on the horns of a dilemma, realizing that in both the modern
instrumental and postmodern cynical, all too knowing worlds a shaman with
therapeutic intention could not help but be regarded as just another kind
of manipulative showman and celebrity. “Trickster” has an unresolvable
ambiguous meaning in both modernity and postmodernity. Finally, I conclude
by examining appropriationism, which has become, wittingly or unwittingly,
the dominant mode of artmaking in postmodernity. Quoting another artist,
especially an avant-garde one, and in the process denying his or her therapeutic
intention, trivializing his or her creativity and innovations, and supposedly
deconstructing his or her art—showing that it means the opposite of what
it was thought to say, and turning it into an ironical cliché or
shadow of itself—has become de rigeur in many quarters, a supposedly major
conceptual achievement. I analyze appropriationism as the ultimate cynicism
about art in general and avant-garde art in particular, as well as about
creativity, and distinguish appropriation from influence, finally arguing
that appropriationism signals a creative deadend—a feeling of the futility
of creativity to effect any change in the lifeworld, and thus a failure.
In appropriationism critical consciousness capitulates to the status quo,
ironically but also smugly. Appropriationist art is neither transcendentally
abstract nor spontaneously expressive, nor is it addressed or of service
to anyone, but simply confirms the status quo of media consciousness, there
for the asking by everyone. Appropriationist art is a kind of historicist
spectacle or show with little or nothing to tell—the ultimately decadent,
indifferent art, blending almost seamlessly into the pathological Potemkin
Village media facade our culture increasingly depends upon for its “self”-consciousness.
I do suggest that certain appropriationists who work in a comic way offer
what seems to be a critical consciousness of art’s and society’s tragicomic
situation, but I am not sure I am right, although I believe that comedy
is ultimately more therapeutically effective than tragedy. As Freud suggested,
humor is a sign of ego strength, and it was the strength of the individual
ego in the face of a society that weakened it through its indifference
and failure to be an existentially facilitating environment, and that they
thought would sooner or later destroy itself, that was of basic concern
to the first avant-garde artists. They wanted to save
people from society, not society from itself, however much some of them
fantasied a social utopia in which reason was triumphant. Thus, the comic
appropriationists may be the new avant-gardists, if that idea makes any
real sense these days. I think there is a larger lesson to be learned from
the change from avant-garde, modernist to neo-avant-garde, postmodernist
art—a lesson about creativity: it is not a guarantee of criticality, |
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