Against Pluralism

zhao

there are no accidents
"Against Pluralism" is an essay by Hal Foster in the 1980s in which he makes the case that the current "all is permitted, nothing means jack-shit" supermarket-mentality of the art world is falsely liberating; that it is an illusory freedom; that it actually cloaks sinister conservatism and even fascism just beneath the variety-show surface. an image of art finally and completely succumbing to consumerism, losing all of its vitality, much less subversive power.

some may consider Hal to be a rigid old modernist who needs to "lighten up", but to me this piece of writing is as crucial as ever now in 2006:

my mind keeps going there when I'm in some new gallery space staring at paintings that look like T-shirt graphics, or photos of drunk people, or installations involving hundreds of ball-point pen portraits drawn on bar napkins...
 

zhao

there are no accidents
henrymiller said:
isn't he underplaying it a bit?

do you mean to say that he is exaggerating? (sometimes difficult to read levels of sarcasm on this board)

well it's ironic innit? the collapse of cohesive discourse in the academic establishment signaling fascism... but it kind of makes sense to me.

my through and through populist friends diagree completely. to these anti-academics who are quick to shout "Elitism" and "Ivory Tower", the current "whatever it's all good" art world is an image of the triumph of the common man...

but is it?
 
a certain kind of institutionalised art (the type that applies 'theory' to rubbishy conceptual pieces in particular) seems to get massive amounts of money chucked at it these days, despite being no good. Clearly at the same time there are loads of poor good artists doing various interesting projects. Tons of clever folk I know get money out of the art world for various kinds of writing just cos there seems to be so much of it floating about...julian stallabrass is very good on the current poverty of the British art scene in particular in these regards.

The worst people tho....'freelance curators'...I mean, c'mon...people who think getting a couple of people in a room together to discuss a film whilst someone plays records...that aint curating anything but a false sense of your own importance....
 

John Doe

Well-known member
confucius said:
"Against Pluralism" is an essay by Hal Foster in the 1980s in which he makes the case that the current "all is permitted, nothing means jack-shit" supermarket-mentality of the art world is falsely liberating; that it is an illusory freedom; that it actually cloaks sinister conservatism and even fascism just beneath the variety-show surface. an image of art finally and completely succumbing to consumerism, losing all of its vitality, much less subversive power.

some may consider Hal to be a rigid old modernist who needs to "lighten up", but to me this piece of writing is as crucial as ever now in 2006:

my mind keeps going there when I'm in some new gallery space staring at paintings that look like T-shirt graphics, or photos of drunk people, or installations involving hundreds of ball-point pen portraits drawn on bar napkins...


Hmmm, I don't know that essay Confucius, but it sounds interesting and provocative. As Infinite Thought mentions, Julian Stallabrass, an art critic on these shores, has taken up (I'd guess) some of Foster's arguments in a couple of recent books. I read his 'High Art Lite' a couple of years back which is a critique of much recent art by British Artists of a certain tendency who, in the mid-90's were labelled the Young British Artists - the Hirst's, Lucas's, Whiteread's, Emin's, Quinn's, Turk's et al. The books says, basically, that the post-conceptual work they create is not 'high' art at all but something which looks like high art and which has come to occupy the place of high art to the detriment of us all (this is the 'high art lite' of the title); and that it is no coincidence that such art has been collected, promoted and disseminated by Charles Saatchi, an advertising mogul, because art such as theirs is perfectly suited to the tastes, prejudices and preferances of an advertising man. It is, in short, artcommodified perfectly for a market dominated by the practices of consumerism.

Personally, I have a number of reservations about this argument: he seems to work with a simplistic and rather common sense notion of 'high' (and consquently 'low') art, and, I think, dismisses some work I find both procative and valueable (the earlier Hirst in particular). Also, he seems to assume that there is this mythical zone labelled 'art' (or perhaps 'integrity' or whatever) that exists in some pure zone outside of our time and space in which a practice can be formulated somehow (naively) free of the implications of operating within the system of late capitalism. I also don't get this tendency to visit, say, a exhibition of new work and dislike or disapprove of it, and then make the conceptual leap of dismissing all 'modern' or 'contemporary' or whatever-you-want-to-label-it art of the present moment. As ever there's good work, an awful of lot of mediocre work and a fair amount of bad around. I'm not sure if the likes of Foster and Stallabrass aren't, in some ways, tilting at windmills: is there really, as you say Foster says, an "all is permitted, nothing means jack shit" supermarket mentality? I often find such arguments emanate from Marxists who are, in one way or another, attacking post-modern practice in the hope restoring a political, utopian role for an art practice they still formulate in terms of an avant-garde as evidenced in early modernism...

Then again, I'm not an aritst, just someone who likes to muse on such matters. I wonder what you, as a practising artist, make of such arguments... (and do you have, say, a link you could post where I could see some of your work? I'd be very interested in having a look, if at all possible...) Thanks...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"...also don't get this tendency to visit, say, a exhibition of new work and dislike or disapprove of it, and then make the conceptual leap of dismissing all 'modern' or 'contemporary' or whatever-you-want-to-label-it art of the present moment"
I don't think that Stallabrass goes so far as to dismiss all "modern" art (certainly not in High Art Lite). He makes a specific attack on a group of artists who use pseudo-philosophy to justify their actually meaningless art. I think he makes some valid points about people who make work that looks at first as though it is conceptual (ie, it's not a painting or sculpture and has a big description) but has no concept.
Touched on this briefly I think in the continental/analytic thread about a quarter of the way down the page.

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=3877&page=2&pp=15
 

John Doe

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
I don't think that Stallabrass goes so far as to dismiss all "modern" art (certainly not in High Art Lite). He makes a specific attack on a group of artists who use pseudo-philosophy to justify their actually meaningless art. I think he makes some valid points about people who make work that looks at first as though it is conceptual (ie, it's not a painting or sculpture and has a big description) but has no concept.
Touched on this briefly I think in the continental/analytic thread about a quarter of the way down the page.

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=3877&page=2&pp=15

No, I quite agree with that. Stallabrass's target seems to me to be primarily the YBAs and their promoter/collector Charles Saatchi and the post-conceptual tendency (if that's the right way of putting it) they represent which, as you say, may well allude to certain big ideas (or certainly big thinkers) without ever arranging their artistic practice into anything approaching a coherent take on the ideas and thinkers they supposedly reference. I don't think it ends there though: as I said in my earlier post I also think Stallabrass is very much attempting to discredit the ideas certain post-conceptual artists might be drawing on (however incompetently) by attacking their (mis?)use of them. I think he still has a somewhat didactic attitude towards art and (to put it very reductively) still wants to mobilise art as weapon in a utopian emancipation project - or certainly as a vehicle of critique. Those that take a contra view might counter that the process of commodification under late capitalism has liquidated many of the catagories and possibilities Stallabrass attempts to (re)claim for 'art' and thus, like so much of contemporary culutural practice, leaves a fairly severe legitimation crisis to come to terms with (although, as I say, it's a couple of years or so since I read the book and, to be honest, I can feel my take on it has got slightly fuzzy over the years so I wouldn't want to make too detailed a critique of his critique as I could well end up making an arse of meself). I mean, to put it another way, the argument against (post)'conceptual' art for its supposed incompetance at articulating the concepts that justify it seems to me to be very close to those Tom Wolfe made in The Painted Word way be back in the very early 70s when he said that such art, order to be legitimate, must have some sort of theory or word to justify it (as, evidently, it cannot simply justify itself in and thorugh its own representation). I've always thought that such points have some validity but don't entirely suceed in dismissing or underming the enterprise they seek to attack. It seems evident to me that all of those involved in art practice and criticism today, for better or worse, continue to struggle with the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, and the rivers from the Fountainhead continue to flow right through to our own times ... :)
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Maybe so, but whatever his further aims I think it is worthwhile to point out that some of the most successful artists around at the moment are charlatans and have been able to walk down the street naked without anyone saying anything. I think that's what was annoying Confucius in the first post and it annoys me too.
 
O

Omaar

Guest
Hey confucius, you don't by any chance have a link to that essay do you? Thank you.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
from the second part entitled "A state of Grace?":

... (Pluralism) is a situation that grants a kind of equivalence; art of many sorts is made to seem more or less equal - equally (un)important. Art becomes an arena not of dialectical dialogue but of vested interests, of licensed sects: in lieu of culture we have cults. The result is an eccentricity that leads, in art as in politics, to a new conformity: pluralism as an instituion.

Posed as a freedom to choose, the pluralist position plays right into the ideology of the "free market" ... Indeed, the freedom of art today is announced by some as the "end of ideology" and the "end of the dialectic"- an announcement that, however naive, makes this ideology all the more devious. In effect, the demise of one style (e.e., minimalism) or one type of criticism (e.e., formalism) or even one period (e.g., late modernism) tends to be mistaken for the death of all such formulations. Such a death is vital to pluralism: for with ideology and dialectic somehow slain, we enter a state that seems like grace, a state that allows, extrordinarily, for all styles - pluralism. Such innocence in the face of history implies a serious misconstrual of the historicity of art and sciety. It also implies a failure of criticism.

When formalism prevailed, art tended to be self-critical. ... When formalism fell, even this attitude was largely lost. Free before of other discourses, art now seemed free from its own discourse. and soon it appeared that all criticism, once so crucial to art practice, had lost its cogency. ... We are free - of what, we think we know. But where are we left? The present in art has a strange form, at once full and empty, and a strange tense, a sort of neo-now moment of "arriere-avant-gardism." Many artists borrow promiscuously from both historical and modern art. But these references rarely engage the source - let alone the present - deeply. And the typical artist is often "foot-loose in time, culture and metaphor": a dilettante because he thinks that , as he entertains the past, he is beyond the exigency of the present; a dunce because he assumes a delusion; and a dangling man because historical moment - our present problematic - is lost.

Modern art engaged historical forms, often in order to deconstruct them. Our new art tends to assume historical forms - out of context and reified. Parodic or straight, these quotations plead for the importance, even the traditional status, of the new art. In certain quarters this is seen as a "return to history"; but it is in fact a profoundly ahistorical enterprise, and the result is often "aesthetic pleasure as false consciousness, or vice versa".

This "return to history" is ahistorical for three reasons: the context of history is disregarded, its continuum is dsavowed, and conflictual forms of art and modes of production are falsely resolved in pastiche. Neither the specificity of the past nor the necessity of the present is heeded. Such a disregard makes the return to hsitory also seem to be a liberation from histry. And today many artists do feel that, free of history, they are able to use it as they wish. ...

To be unaware of historical or social limits is not to be free of them; one is all the more sujected. ... So it is that the freedom of art today is forced (both false and compelled): a willful naivete that masquerades as jouissance, a promiscuity misconceived as pleasure. Marcuse noted how the old tactics of (sexual) liberation, so subversive tin a society of production, have come to serve the status quo of our society of consumption: he termed this "repressive desublimation." Similarly, pluralism in art signals a form of tolerance that does not threaten the status quo.

... Art became skittishly stylish - everyone had to be different... in the same way. ... as Adorno remarked, "the official culture's pretense of individusalism...necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual." Meanwhile, the conventions of art are not in declie but in extraordinary expansion. ...

... an art of "effect"... cannot escape its own condition of hysterical futility. It strains for effects only to degenerate into postures, and these postrures have no relief: the emerge flat and ephemeral...

... The victim here is not the historicist model of an autonomous, causal line of "influence," but rather the dialectical model that demands radical, materialist innovation. It is this history that tends to be denied, only to be replaced by history as a monument (or ruin) - a store of styles, symbols, etc., to plunder... Rather than explore theis condition of cliched styles and prescriptive codes (as Barthes and Derrida have done), many artists today merely exploit it, and either produce images that are easy to consume or indulge in stylistic references - often in such a way that the past is entertained precisely as publicity. The artist innocent today is a dilettante who, bound to modernist irony, flaunts alienation as if it were freedom.

___________

the next part "An Arriere-Avant Garde?" is pertinent as well... makes very key points about the Criminal and the Dandy of earlier last century and what has become of them... but I'm going to stop typing now, lest like poor John Eden I also get RMI :(
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
this essay has made me realise that in recently years, just as often as I have been disgusted with so much crap being shown, that I have been too easily seduced by the superficially tasteful and pretty.

what's more, I realize that I too have delighted in the irresponsible plunder of history, and the thoughtless mix'n'match of signifiers for mere effect.

I too have felt the "illusory freedom" afforded by this state of affairs - "hey look I can just put these Victorian patterns on top of these images of break-dancers and it looks cool and it's OK!"

________

my personal work is not that frivolous... but I usually describe it as Richter meets ancient Chinese landscapes... with a touch of 60s psychedelia. (horrible, horrible lazy description)
 
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