Generations, art and art history

There is an obvious application of generational theory to art and art history.  Artists and art historians belong to particular generations and their art and critical analyses also belong to the major ideas and movements of their generation.

To go deeper into this application is to see the blindness that generational insight includes.  There are also specific expectations and assumptions freighted with a generational point of view.  Generations also generate value systems specific to their circumstances and historical position in the cycle of generations.

This doesn’t mean that every generation has a completely different set of values, though some generations are known for launching a value system or for launching a rebellion against established values.  The postwar period saw the establishment of an American art scene by Americans and expatriate Europeans that overtook Paris’s preeminence during the 19th-century and prewar period.  In Strauss and Howe’s terms, the postwar was a High, a time when values got established, including the value put on the New York art scene.

This High was questioned and began to be dismantled by the artists and art critics who came of age in the Awakening of the late 1960s.  The WWII baby boom, which was heralded as an influx of life after war, was the condition under which the art world, as a subset of the world overall, began to change.  The challenge to the art establishment of the 40s and 50s by younger artists was many faceted, so I will only be able to address a few aspects.  Perhaps the most obvious change is the shift away from abstract expressionism, which was the first U.S. movement to be recognized.  The challenge took the form of art that was narrative, performative and conceptual — art that challenged the autonomy attributed to the abstractions of the 1950s.  Clement Greenberg, champion of Jackson Pollack as primary exemplar of the Abstract Expressionist movement, counseled the would-be art connoisseur to acquire his taste merely by seeing.  Don’t learn about art.  Don’t mix ideas with art.  Art is a thing unto itself.

What Howe and Strauss can reinforce for us is the intuition that the revolutionary stratagems in the art and political worlds of the late 1960s were not exactly evidence of the dawning of an entirely new age.  As a rebellion against the established order of only a couple of previous decades, Aquarius was, instead, part of a larger piece of history and in many ways continuous, though quarreling, with the 50s.

Generation is an identity

Generation is an identity, just as gender, ethnicity and class are identities.

Generation is an identity that is recognized in terms of relative power and status.  You have more powerful generations and more powerful genders, ethnicities and classes.

You can advocate for generational equality just as you can advocate for gender equality or for other identity-based equalities.

Members of a generation may feel that their membership is stronger than other identities or weaker, depending on the relative strength and status of the generation’s identity.

Members of one generation may feel their membership in that group more strongly than members of another, weaker generation.  A Boomer tends to feel his or her membership in that generation more strongly than Gen X feels it.

William Strauss and Neil Howe, prophets

William Strauss and Neil Howe, who have written eight books on generations starting with Generations: The History of America’s Future (1991), have identified four archetypes of generation in the U.S., which correspond to four archetypal periods or “turnings”:  “Just as history produces generations, so too do generations produce history.” Over the eight books, the names change, but the concepts and the analysis stays more or less the same.  The summary in Wikipedia, attributed to Strauss, William; Neil Howe (1997). The Fourth Turning. Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-0046-4. is good:

“Turnings last about 20 years and always arrive in the same order. Four of them make up the cycle of history, which is about the length of a long human life. The first turning is a High, a period of confident expansion as a new order becomes established after the old has been dismantled.  Next comes an Awakening, a time of rebellion against the now-established order, when spiritual exploration becomes the norm.  Then comes an Unraveling, an increasingly troubled era of strong individualism that surmounts increasingly fragmented institutions. Last comes the Fourth Turning, an era of upheaval, a Crisis in which society redefines its very nature and purpose.”

The entry goes on to describe the four personality types whose births occur during the same 20-year spate, just like the turnings:

• “Prophets are values-driven, moralistic, focused on self, and willing to fight to the death for what they believe in- and they can convince other people to join them in the fight. They grow up as the increasingly indulged children of a High, come of age as the young crusaders of an Awakening, enter midlife as moralistic leaders during an Unraveling and are the wise, elder leaders of the next Crisis. The Boomers are an example of a Prophet generation.

• Nomads are ratty, tough, unwanted, diverse, adventurous, and cynical about institutions. They grow up as the underprotected children of an Awakening, come of age as the alienated young adults of an Unraveling, become the pragmatic, midlife leaders of a Crisis and age into tough, post-crisis elders during a High. Generation X and the Lost Generation are examples of Nomad generations.

• Heroes are conventional, powerful, and institutionally driven, with a profound trust in authority. They grow up as the increasingly protected children of an Unraveling, come of age as the Heroic, team-working youth of a Crisis, become energetic and hubristic mid-lifers during a High and become the powerful elders who are attacked in the next Awakening. The G.I. Generation that fought World War II is an example of a Hero generation. Millennials are expected to emerge as the next generation of this example.

• Artists are subtle, indecisive, emotional and compromising, often having to deal with feelings of repression and inner conflict. They grow up as the over-protected children of a Crisis, come of age as the sensitive young adults of a High, rebel as indecisive midlife leaders during an Awakening, and become the empathic elders of an Unraveling. The Silent Generation is an example of an Artist generation. The New Silent Generation, also called Generation I, or iGeneration (the term coined by Larry Rosen in his book Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn) is expected to emerge as the next generation of this example.”

A note on generational thinking

Generational thinking is a particular form of historical thinking.  Its particularity is in the fact that it doesn’t peg an analysis to to an event or idea without recognizing the coincidence between those events or ideas and the experience of age-based groups.  Generational thinking looks for these pegs to group experience as a way of explaining events or ideas in context.  While contextualizing ideas is a necessary and common practice, this form of generationally focused contextualization discovers unforeseen linkages, especially to the way that ideas and events arise as a result of power struggles between generations.

A provisional definition of a generation: generations are groups whose self-consciousness about their generational identity depends on their shared experience of particular, usually traumatic events.  The Vietnam War is such a shared event for Boomers, especially Boomers of the first cohort who were in their teens at its inception.  Similarly, the 9/11 attacks are formative for the current rising generation of twenty-somethings.  These are events that get imprinted on a group at a young age when identity in general is forming.  Age-based groups cohere through other types of experience, of course, including the now-universal experience of being placed in strictly delineated age-based grades in school.  Also, simultaneously undergoing the effects of increased sex hormone production and other internal changes at puberty gives a group a sense of a shared destiny.  The larger “historical” experiences represented by wars or other trauma are like these internal or local experiences.  Generational identity is thus formed internally and externally, locally and nationally (or on even broader levels).

Appropriation & generation

Appropriation, I want to argue, is an art strategy that surfaced during the final years of the last High and extended into the Unraveling of the 1980s.  Thus, during the time when the generational cohort originally labeled as “X” was coming of age, appropriation was being handed down as a kind of legacy.  The way that the later boom cohort took on appropriation as a technique and a deconstruction (they also took on the practice or philosophy of deconstruction) differed from the way that X took it on.

Boomers were young adults during the High of the 60s and 70s, and even the ones who were born in the final years of the cohort have a conscious memory of the hope of the early years.  Appropriation, like other cusp developments, is therefore split in its applications, its meanings.  Initially, appropriation as a strategy was an intellectual and artistic continuation of the activism and experimentalism of the 60s and early 70s.  As time went on, the nihilism associated with the younger generation crept in.  With the maturing of X and the beginning of the Unraveling period that started, according to Howe and Strauss, in 1984, deconstruction became an ever-darkening practice.  It was a style of life, an aesthetic.  Appropriation, whose development I see as parallel and linked with deconstruction’s, developed a similarly negative cast.  In AF’s work, this became the “grotesque.”

More on Isabelle Graw’s phrase “Incorporating Appropriation”

Graw’s description of Untitled as a strategy of incorporating appropriation is generationally determined, since it begs off total identification with the appropriation strategies of the late ’70s and ’80s.  The term “incorporation” locates Graw in the post-appropriative moment, when, as John Welchman demonstrates in his Art after Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (2001), appropriation strategies were reinterpreted and reworked by a younger generation.  AF and Graw may have begun their careers as artist and critic respectively during the appropriative moment, but Untitled – and its response – belongs to its aftermath.

Appropriation’s reworking did not necessarily mean that art changed form in any dramatic sense.  It meant, instead, that there was a new(ish) standard to which it began to be held: what you might call the standard of performance.

One book’s reception can also stand in as a major sign of the standard’s arrival.  Judith Butler’s 1990 book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, was received as a paradigm-shifter.  Almost immediately after, it became widely criticized for the book’s overvaluation of an individual’s ability to subvert identity, and its inattention to the limitations of the body.  The subversion of identity, achieved through copying — aka “a stylized repetition of acts” — was a form of verbal and/or literal transvestism.  Like Aristotle, who attributed character to acts, Butler defined identity as performance.  She articulated something that had been long “in the air”: the idea that political action could be a matter of playing with the established codes of normative identity.

She was also, in effect, describing the artistic strategy of Levine and others in the visual arts, though her emphasis was not on traditional artworks but on the traditional gestural vocabularies of heterosexuality.  In any case, both were establishing a distance from tradition-as-power.

Butler addressed her critics in her 1993 follow-up to Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and her revision or restatement of her original thesis can stand here as a general revision of the notion of appropriation.  Through the rising academic discourses of performance, the body was renewed as a limit on the freedom to choose one’s identity — and to ironize the identities that have held us supposedly captive.

AF, generationally speaking

In a review, Isabelle Graw, an arts editor and curator in Germany, writes that

Untitled…is clearly in keeping with a risk-laden artistic investigation that began in 2001 with two pieces: Kunst muss hangen (Art Must Hang), Fraser’s re-creation of an impromptu 1995 speech by Martin Kippenberger, and Official Welcome, a performance that had been criticized for its “exhibitionism,” since Fraser strips in one part.  With Kunst muss hangen, Fraser had announced a new phase in her methods of what I would call “incorporating appropriation,” performances in which the line between “being” and “acting,” between authenticity and imitation, is no longer drawn….It is a testament to Fraser’s impersonating capacity that this carefully scripted role-playing doesn’t veer into irony.  Rather, one has the impression that she lives and breathes the modes of speech she appropriates. (Artforum, December 2003)

A generation view of this performance style begins with Graw’s reference to appropriation, the 80s keyword that celebrated postmodern borrowings of style and content in art — a strategy that, in the visual art world, will probably always be exemplified by the work of re-photographer Sherrie Levine.

Coming to the fore during a moment in the U.S. art scene when ur-models of all kinds were being debunked or mocked through repetition, Levine photographed the work of others and offered the results as her own artworks.  Her appropriation of “After Walker Evans,” famously condemned by the Walker Evans estate, was cast by the critics as, at once, a violation of copyright and a challenge to the idea of authorship.  This was the moment, too, when Barthes’ short essay, “Death of the Author,” first published in English in the late 1960s, was becoming read widely within academia, the title also becoming a catch-phrase for the modern looseness around the ethics of copying.

The turn of the 1970s was also a turn to a heightened political consciousness about the effects of representation, and the critics associated with the newly formed magazine, October, were the first to frame this praxis of re-presentation in terms of its challenge to power.  Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster both wrote in support of Levine’s oeuvre, claiming her approach as a “deconstruction” of Western discourses of originality.

Artists, especially artists in New York art world, of the following decade reworked appropriative strategies, in part as a response to the critic’s praise for politically conscious material, and in part because education for artists started to change such that artists, in order to be successful, had to read criticism.  Art became critical to the extent that art education, both casual and formal, got caught up with the critical discourses that purported to analyze it from a distance.

AF, whose career took off when she was in her early 20s, has always used appropriation in some manner.  Her early docent tour of museums and galleries, published in October magazine in 1991 as Museum Highlights, was a concatenations of quotes, delivered with a varied, theatrical affect approximating the self-presentation of these museum volunteers.  Unlike the professionalism mocked by The V-Girls, AF’s docent was a kind of hostess, and her affect was stiff and congenial, welcoming visitors into a space of ersatz worship.  AF called her Jane Castleton, but in a footnote to the text of her performance specifies that

While Jane is a fictional docent, I would like to consider her less as an individual “character” with autonomous traits than as a site of speech constructed within various relations constitutive of the museum.  As such, Jane is determined above all by the status of the docent as a nonexpert volunteer (Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser 111).

AF’s appropriations — quotations — are taken from several types of historical sources that promote art and its display, usually in the name of the public good (such as The New Museum and Its Service to Philadelphia, a publication of The Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art from 1922).  Mixed in with these are quotes exemplifying other ways in which experts and others empowered to do so wrote or spoke about public services, including the Report of the Committee on Municipal Charities of Philadelphia (1913)  and a pamphlet of the Department of Public Health and Charities of Philadelphia called The Degenerate Children of Feeble-Minded Women from 1910.  (Museum Highlights was originally developed for performances at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, thus the research was conducted in the museum archives.  The script, however, remained constant even as AF performed the piece – and had it performed by others – elsewhere around the world.)

AF’s career, which took off in part as a result of the positive reception of the docent tours, has most often been associated with institutional critique, but it’s significant, at least when speaking generationally, to understand her beginnings as more of an appropriation artist, influenced by the late ’70s/’80s culture of imitation-as-critique.  Appropriation, in this case, meant appropriating the gestures and attitudes of a class of human that she, as an artist, was in some way “above.”  Jane Castleton may have been (merely?) a site of speech, a human nexus for the crisscrossing of discourse, but her nonprofessional outsider status as an appreciator of art rather than a creator of it or an expert on it meant that she was not AF nor was she anything AF ever wanted to be.  In addition, AF became uncomfortable with the differentiation imposed on the audiences of these museum and gallery performances, since, more often than not, they were performed upon unsuspecting visitors.

Imitation may be intended as questioning, respectful or even reverent, but it always also opens up the possibility of parody and differentiation:  in other words, rejection.  There has always been hostility embedded in appropriation, especially hostility to Tradition.  What AF moved on to, at least for a time, was service-oriented projects that involved more research and writing than performance.  By the time she came back to performance with Official Welcome and other pieces, she does so in ways that put herself on the line. Graw’s response to AF’s work can be seen as an assurance that AF had not merely returned to the irony and parody of appropriation, but was (also) using her body in a way that was invested on a personal level.

What do I mean by “second-generation transgression?”

The term “second-generation transgression” refers to the content of The V-Girls’ final performance, Daughters of the ReVolution, which grappled with our debt to ’70s feminism.  In fact, the generational legacy was complicated by the fact that our elders, the Boomers, were divided into two cohorts – the Generation of ’68, and the Theory Generation, let’s call them, a group about ten years younger than the first (and ten years older than we were).  If the first cohort of feminist radicals championed a women’s movement based on sharing experiences of oppression by males, the second, university-based group questioned this basis on political grounds of its own.  As the women’s movement moved into the university, Women’s Studies and then Gender Studies moved away from the evidence of experience and towards critique: the critique of the idea of liberation, to begin with, but also the idea of oppression as a male arena, the idea of gender as a category of identity, and the idea of identity itself.  To be a graduate student in the early 1990s was to adapt critique as a value in itself.

Daughters of the ReVolution started from a place of gratitude, paying a debt to the women’s movement of the 1970s.  Marianne Weems begins by reading from The Handbook of Women’s Liberation, by Joan Robbins (1970):

“Consciousness-raising, in which you will talk about personal experiences without broad analysis, will accomplish the following:
1. Clean out your head.
2. Uncork and redirect your anger.
3. Teach you to understand other women.
4. Discover that your personal problem is not only yours.”

We go around, taking turns, starting the process of sharing

A little later, in the same vein, AF reads an excerpt from the group Radicalesbians:

“It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women
creating a new consciousness of and with each other which
is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the
cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and
validate our authentic selves. As we do this… we find receding
the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behind
a locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is
inside. We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with
ourselves. With that real self, with that consciousness, we
begin a revolution to end the imposition of all coercive
identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in
human expression.”

The intense way that AF reads this brings a quiet thrill to the lines.  The sense of togetherness invoked in the lines is moving, especially since many of us have been hurt by other women.  The abolishment of alienation is an exciting promise in spite of the fact that we have all been taught to believe that alienation is at the heart of identity.

Lacanian psychoanalysis, one prong of a two-pronged Theory guiding the culture of critique, posits a fracture within consciousness itself.  No identity politics could survive if it is open to the idea that the self is split between the ego of his or her consciousness and the diabolically undermining business of the repressive and crafty unconscious.  Above all, the truth of experience was to be questioned, and thus the solidarity of groups based on shared experience.

Though the Theory Generation’s intellectual assault on hippie positivism might have been put into a dialectical, and perhaps productive, relation with it, in fact the fight was fought in a series of territorial battles.  For a time, the younger group were the winners of this fight, probably because they were the only ones fighting.  They were fighting the influence of their elders as their elders had fought the influence of the World War II generation.  The older group’s focus on pleasure and collectivity also meant that they had little of the Theory group’s ferocity about definition.  As a result, they were labeled naive.

Daughters of the ReVolution is a performance that attempts to instate that dialectic.  Schooled in the Theory group’s vast seriousness about the politics of meaning, it was in some ways hard to reclaim the deeds of the earlier, more idealistic, group without feeling naive.  We had a lot of fun, though, working through some of the contrasts between what was, first and foremost, a commonsensical approach to political action on the one hand and, on the other, a cryptic set of rather intimidating negations of common sense.

In response to the Radicalesbians reading:

Erin: What are we doing here? Are we acting out some kinky fantasy of wholeness? Do we really believe that consciousness-raising will restore us to some authentic self? All right, before we go any further, I want to ask you guys something: does anybody here actually believe in the self? Could I see a show of hands?

[nobody raises her hand; finally Martha’s hand goes up timidly]

Martha: Uh, I do. Not myself. But I believe in some of yours.

This kind of questioning would have sounded bizarre at any other moment, historically.  But we were coming off of an academic moment when the self – identity – was “put into question” along with all the other shibboleths of the Western philosophical tradition.  At that time, it had become almost impossible to write an academic text without putting into quotations most words signifying a whole of any kind including the self.

At the same time, The V-Girls were also experiencing intergroup conflicts sparked by ego, and it felt humbling and true and very funny to come out and point out these insecurities and territorial spats.  We pointed them out as a way of understanding the kind of idealism implicit in the deconstruction of identity.  Although we were smart, we were not smart enough to dismantle our own issues.  The deconstructions and psychoanalytic analyses that had felt, in the 1980s, so liberating themselves no longer felt so.  These had taken words seriously, deepening the conversation and lifting the smart from the sappiness of 60’s idealism with a questioning, probing attitude towards the certainties of that generation.  What the smart had discovered, though, was that the 80s had gotten — not sappy, but rote, with younger people parroting deconstruction itself, turning it into a mere compendium of crotchety shibboleths.

Second-generation transgression: The V-Girls

The V-Girls, performing Daughters of the ReVolution in Vienna, at the Generali Foundation Gallery.

Transgression, the legacy

Seeing this photo, I am brought right back to the mid-1980s, when The V-Girls were starting up.  We were starting up the engine of our cult status as alt-academics.  We satirized academics, from within academia.  We made fun of professors, I liked to say, and they liked it.

Well, not all of them liked it, but the ones who did flocked to our panel-performances: Academia in the Alps: In Search of the Swiss Mis(s), Manet’s Olympia: Posed and Skirted, and Daughters of the ReVolution.  While the first two were organized as mock-panels, with papers read quite seriously, at least in the beginning of the performance.  The last, Daughters, was more sincere.  In this performance, we presented ourselves in circular formation, recreating a seventies-style consciousness-raising session.

The formation was everything.  We started with that idea, that the formation organized the authority of the group members and the audience, either enabling or disabling speech.  The academic panel formation stages the authority of the speakers, which is enhanced by the presence of a long table.  The consciousness-raising circle, used as a grassroots political tool, was meant to encourage equality among speakers and eradicate differences between audience and speaker.  Our performances, which continually pointed to the architectural, also disrupted its influence.  The panels began as a proper simulation of the orderly academic process, ended in chaos, poetry, music.  The consciousness-raising session, which was a reenactment of a private attempt at recreating a session from a manual written almost thirty years before, was performed in front of an audience of non-participants.

Our transgressions of form, our transgressions of content had more than one source, including the culture of academia itself which was, in the mid-to-late 1980s, deep in the process of forming the tenured radicals Roger Kimball complained about in 1990.  It was an uncomfortable accusation, launched from a book title (Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education).  It was uncomfortable, at least for those of us who were students at the time, probably because of our position.  What those of us who were students could feel that our teachers, the so-called “tenured radicals” could not, was the oddness and untruth of a handed-down radicalism. While our teachers could take up the flag of radicalism as innovators and reformers, we were being schooled in the same radicalism as a form of pedagogical legacy.

In graduate school, we were trained in both the techniques and objects of critique.  The radicalism we learned was not de jure applicable to any old power (as in the “question authority” of yore), but only to the powers that our immediate elders had faced.  We were taught to question the authority and prejudices of the World-War-II generation.  That this radicalism was de facto applicable to the authority and teachings of our professors never really came up.  Thus, our radicalism was second-hand.  We had to continue to resurrect the demons of yore in order to deconstruct them.  It’s not that racism, sexism, logocentrism and the like weren’t still real, but we were never encouraged to see them as in an evolving relationship with our current reality.  Instead, we were pupils of a kind of scholastic reconciliation between a specific radicalism and its scholarly opposite — between the rebelliousness of the generation of ’68, and the traditionalism of the university.

It doesn’t seem surprising, then, that irony would be the dominant mode of our generation, not because we understood this second-hand radicalism as our assigned stance, but because our passions, though we may have labeled them as political, never felt like they were really ours.  The V-Girls used humor, initially parody, to bring out the contradictions of this position, this feeling of radical excitement coupled with impotence.

Marina Abramovic vs. Andrea Fraser

I take this opposition from an article by Phelan, published in Theatre Journal in 2004, “Marina Abramovic: Witnessing Shadows.”  Phelan’s article is about the newfound celebrity of Abramovic, a performance artist whose heyday was the 1960s/70s – “still performance art’s most serious and daring decade” according to Phelan.   Phelan describes the new attention:  Abramovic’s 2002 performance, The House with the Ocean View won a Bessie and another award from the International Association of Art Critics.  The same performance was also recreated on an episode of HBO’s Sex and the City in 2003 and, around the same time, the New York Times ran four pieces about the performance.  Initially, Abramovic had been celebrated for her pain and endurance, and for the elegaic qualities of that difficult work.  Her long walk across the Great Wall of China in 1986, a collaborative performance with Ulay, her artist-lover, was a ceremonial good-bye to their relationship.   Another performance, Balkan Baroque (1997), won an award at the Venice Bienniale.  Brought up in Belgrade under communist rule, Abramovic’s sad meditation on the Balkan disaster had a particular impact.  Other work, in which she puts herself in danger by cutting herself or otherwise subjecting herself to torture, are similarly poetic because they express a kind of death within life.  She allows the audience to watch as she slowly comes close to death and then, like Houdini, revives.  Unlike Houdini, her attitude is seriously serious rather than mock-serious.  The show demands that the audience not applaud her virtuosic ability to resist death, but her willingness to resist it for us — for art.  Her performances are framed as gifts.

That much said, she had begun, according to Phelan, to accrue a kind of celebrity that seemed to Phelan to be incongruous.  In particular, she mentions a photograph of Abramovic in which she is “romping on a beach” that got reproduced on coffee cups that were put on sale “sometimes on eBay.  She writes:  “Abramovic’s fame and its ties to the market — while not entirely unwelcome, I’m sure — sit uneasily with some of the premises of her art.”

This uneasy seating is mentioned in the paragraph just previous to the one that introduces AF’s Untitled – as representing the situation today, when “art and capital have become ever more intimate.”  Her description of the piece makes it clear that she believes that the piece was all about individual satisfaction and financial gain rather than aesthetics.

To be continued…

The artist as object of the gaze

When I met AF in the 80s, she was living with a psychoanalyst who was more than twenty years her senior.  He lived in a lovely and very grown-up TriBeca apartment, saw clients at an office elsewhere, and was active in a highly cultured group of literate analysts whose practice had been influenced by the thinking of Jacques Lacan and other European writers.

AF was the pretty woman, object of the gaze.  She was then in her early twenties and, though her knowledge of psychoanalysis exceeded that of her analyst boyfriend’s (so he said), their relationship still resembled that of a man and his mistress, a teacher and his student.  It was because of their age difference and because he supported her financially, at least in part.  She was brilliant and childish, both, and, though he sometimes chafed at what he saw as the immaturity of The V-Girls’ satirical performances, he also adored her, supported her work and showed her off.   He tried to raise her cultural standards.  He was more modernist than postmodernist.  He pushed her to read The New Yorker.

This sex-and-sponsorship mix, which was not without love and lots of other sorts of good relationship aspects, has been a facet of AF’s personal and artistic life ever since I’ve known her.  She has been supported, in part, by men, a fact that cannot be without relevance to Untitled.  Sure, you might say, it has some kind of relevance in the sense that she was recreating the conditions of her “patronage.” Her recreation was, in a way, also an angry parody.  Though she may not have thought about it that way, Untitled repeated her relationship with men as, itself, the artwork.  Her relationship to men extends, of course, to the dealers, collectors and gallery and museum personnel with whom she comes into contact.  While not all are men, that world like the world in general, is still overwhelmingly led by men.  Untitled can be read as a response to that situation, and as a parody of the idea of herself as a service worker, a moniker she has often used to describe her project work.

If this is true, the title comes clearer.  Why not call the piece Untitled?  In a way, it is, itself, the title of all her other works, whose goal is to put her analytical and other powers to use in service to an art world that often doesn’t understand itself and its own motives.  Untitled distills and gently mocks her efforts, if not also her motives.

Chris Kraus on pretty

What Kraus said, in her totally provocative and brilliant book I Love Dick, is that Lacanian feminist theories about the gaze did not apply to all women, because it was a theory about the allure of beautiful women. Her book is particularly provocative to women for insights like this, in part because they help define and make comprehensible a social scene in the 80s and 90s that was baffling even to some of the people who participated in it. Here was the problem:  the idea that women’s beauty was mesmerizing and should be abolished because of it did not abolish beauty or the power it has wielded or been thought to wield since Medusa.  The social and intellectual scene (the social scene among intellectuals) included women whose weapons of influence included both beauty and theory.  That’s one way to look at it, that feminist theory became one more weapon in the stockpile of feminine allure.

In another perspective, for those who indeed rejected beauty on these feminist grounds, the “bisexual” paradox of the feminine feminist was contemptible.

I loved it when Chris Kraus called Lacanian psychoanalysis something like “theory about pretty women’s problems”

In part, it’s AF’s attractiveness is what makes her exhibitionism a question.  If she were unattractive, then she might be applauded for her bravery in showing herself.  She might be applauded for “proving” that women come in all shapes and sizes or for demonstrating that she can have pride in an unconventional body.  Her conventionally attractive body makes her conventional in the eyes of those who demand subversion.

There is a kind of general rule that women hate other women who are more successfully feminine, and this rule applies across the board, from Gossip Girl to feminist theoretical criticism.  It applies even within the gay community, at least in the lesbian community (not in the men’s community?), since femme women are generally less sought after.  Their authenticity is questionable in the eyes of the community, though some of course are loved in spite of their lipstick and hose.

Within the intellectual community, it seems to be an exact mirror, with success and femininity a bad match, at least in higher education.  Respect is given to the masculine or androgynous woman.  If you wear your hair long, it’s like a flag announcing heterosexual submission. Of course, this is truer at some schools than at others.  However, at least in the humanities I am hard put to come up with many successful feminine women.  Of course there have been some: Toril Moi was one and it was uncanny to see her talk, as if a living doll had begun to speak in complex sentences.

(These are generalizations, a mode of speech I have come to love in the wake of theory’s obsessive determination to resist overlooking even the most minute of differences.  Generalizations have a mean streak, it’s true, but so does their opposite strategy in theory.  In other words, you can say “feminisms” instead of “feminism,” for example, and still be mean about it.  You can persecute those who omit the -s, treating them as if they are bigots.  You can overpronounce the “s” and imagine that you have liberated feminism from restrictions, whereas all you have really done is make a plural, obvious to the initiated as a sign of initiation, invisible to others who would laugh at the idea that a simple grammatical modification might suffice as a political act.)

Feminine beauty is a source of trouble for feminism, though it has often been taken as simple.  In some feminism, beauty is a performance, a come-on, a collusion with patriarchy.  In film theory in Laura Mulvey’s wake, beauty on screen is a transfixing device that acts as a Medusa spell on the audience, especially on its male members.  Exhibitionism, in that view, might be seen as the flip side of this formula of betwitchery, with the woman who exhibits herself publicly as soliciting this dynamic of the screen.  The revolutionary destruction of pleasure that Mulvey called for has many echoes.  What comes immediately to my mind is the account in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran – a woman is arrested, raped and killed by the powers-that-be because she is too beautiful.  At the height of the revolution, the beauty in itself gets vilified.

Another way to put it is that women’s beauty and sexuality have always had an ambivalent power that transcends deconstruction.  Yes, transcends.  Beauty has power in itself, and even women who are politically against pandering to the male gaze feel the rewards and punishments associated with having or not having it.  Beauty: some women have it, some men imitate it.  Some women have it, some have it and lose it, some do anything to get it, some renounce it and some embrace its lack with either dejection or pride. In the end, it’s a question of status.

So the question of the article has become, not “can art derive from baseness,” but “can art derive from feminine baseness.”

More on exhibitionism

The writing on AF skirts the issue of her exhibitionism, as if it were unmentionable.  Because she is so articulate and frames her work within the critical terminology of the art profession, it seems impossible, maybe, that her goal is so “base.” Those who simply scorn the piece without writing about it, and that is where the scorn lies, not in the pieces written that try to conceptually marry her more analytical works and her naked works. The scorn – “Andrea Fraser is a whore” – comes from those who see it *merely* as base. My question in all of this is: can the base be art? can it be a serious foundation? Of course, the issue with Jeff Koons’ work is commodification, but not of himself.  It’s not news that women’s self-exhibition is condemned differently.

Exhibitionism

This is the main sin of the feminine.  The exhibitionist delights in being seen, perhaps to counter the effects of early shaming, perhaps merely because it gives her pleasure.  (Is there any “mere” when it comes to pleasure? Psychoanalysis teaches that there isn’t.) Marilyn Monroe and Hannah Wilke both reported a feeling of wanting to throw off their clothing from the time they were children.  In the psychoanalytic literature (references tk, perhaps), the narcissistic exhibitionist is a woman who uses her sexuality with aggression, but not for her own pleasure.  Is pleasure in being seen truly pathological?   Or maybe the sin of the exhibitionist is in her betrayal of other women?  Women tend to shun attractive women who are the focus of male attention, even in feminist circles, where they are seen to be pandering to an audience.  The betrayal is in the idea that there is only a certain amount of attention to go around, and that that woman has sucked it all up by artificial means.

Hannah Wilke

Hannah Wilke, So help me Hannah (snatch shot with ray guns), 1978

I think irony backfired for Wilke, who showed her body in her photos freely, though in jokey poses like this one.  In her scarification series, she is covered with chewed bits of vaginal gum-wads.  The vagina is thus not a scar but a decoration and a kind of female branding. In this So help me Hannah series, she acts out a naked thriller tale.

Wilke had the last word against those that condemned her work as narcissistic:  In her final work, a series of photographs documenting her progress towards death from lymphoma, she seems to smile in triumph.  She smiles with good humor, but there’s also a sense of “see, I can be ugly too.”  She was, after all, always showing what she was, and isn’t that a legitimate goal for art?

More notes from the (private) viewing

When I had been left alone in the Petzel Gallery, I turned to the computer where the video was ready and hit play.  On screen, almost immediately we are into the promised action.  The man, the john or collector, apparently arrives, though the door is not visible.  The camera is trained on the bed with little room for the somewhat larger narrative of entry and exit, hello and good-bye.

AF pours wine and they sit down on the bed, nervous but ready for what has been planned.  Is he possessive of this experience, I wonder.  He bought it, or rather he bought the artwork that will result- meaning the recording that I am looking at, which was made available in a limited edition of five.  He bought an opportunity to make a work of art with a known artist is how AF put it in the planning stages.  Later, she became concerned for his vulnerability as a performer in the recording.  She became concerned, because he was also putting himself on the line as she put it, and she also emphasized her concern as a way of turning the tables on those who insisted on seeing her as a willing victim.  This older feminist position didn’t make it to print as far as I know – there are no reviews that slam her as a bad feminist that I know of, but AF told me later that this was present in verbal responses, as an assumption or an implication.

One assumes that those interpretations are coming from a second-wave-style feminist group.  This kind of puritan feminism is what Hannah Wilke was smote with when she showed herself naked in her artwork.  The hypocracy is that if a less attractive woman takes her clothes off, the feminist response of this ilk is that she is brave and giving the world a reminder it deserves, the reminder that regular women, who deserve to be loved, exist.  It’s a hypocracy but it’s also a facet of this visual culture in which the perfect ones seem to always be loved.

Did you feel dirty, two of my students at Notre Dame wanted to know.  These Catholic girls, it seemed to me, felt dirty.  I asked AF about this, telling her what the students said, and her email was a laughing one.  In Europe, she said, nobody cares about nudity.  Look at their beaches.  They are so much less uptight.  When I watched her lay herself out before the camera in her bright orangy dress, I remembed that AF was not shy about having her body seen.  I remember she said that she had been working out and that her recent performances, in a sense, were a way of showing off something of which she was proud.  Rightfully proud, I’d say, though the feminazis, as Hannah Wilke called them, might not agree.  They are all for female self esteem, aren’t they?  Or is there a line to be drawn, unspecified yet delineating,  between the good- and bad- looking, which is also in many respects the same as the line between the feminine and the masculine.  In other words, can a good-looking feminine woman like AF be proud of her body?  Can she show her body and show the fact that she is proud of it?  Can she show off her skils of seduction and her sexual skills?  Some of the negative responses that AF received implied that she was no different from a whore.  The conclusion I draw from that implication is that what was understood as missing from her self-presentation was modesty.

Notes from the (private) tape viewing

I contacted the Petzel Gallery about visiting, conscious of AF’s description of them as respectable and high-end (not an exact quote) – in other words, as far from seedy.  AF had described them in this way in order to point out how she had worked to contextualize her project as art rather than porn.

When I got to New York, this impression was confirmed.  I was greeted with the art-world demeanor I with which I had become familiar in the late ’80s and ’90s.  Like the furnishings, the people, their clothes and their demeanor, exuded a utilitarian minimalism:  they were cold but informative.

A reserved young man in expensive casual wear ushered me past empty, white-walled galleries where sound art was screaming.  He closed the door to the library, saying he thought I might not be able to hear the tape because of the voices.  I reminded him that the tape had no audio.  He nodded but still closed the door after himself with a slight smile and an attitude that I interpreted as discrete, like we were in a high-class porn joint and he was leaving the paying client to his solitary perusal of requested material.  I wondered if he had wondered if I was going to masturbate.

I knew from photos that the camera’s position above the bed meant that I wouldn’t be able to read AF’s expression.  That was a shame, since I knew that people had asked if she had had pleasure from the experience.  I thought that if I had been able to see her face, I would know. There have been certain questions that have gone unanswered. Prurient or prurient-seeming ones.

I pictured her getting up on the bed and mounting the camera, fixing the position, testing it, running through what was to come.  I know she is exacting, having edited many scripts with her. The discussions about punctuation and small turns of phrase were long, often exasperating.  Her exactingness also always seemed somehow heroic.  If her great caring about meaning seemed to exceed her care for personal relationships, it was not exactly narcissistic.  The life force in her manifested itself in this way.  That may seem strangely put.

When you perform with someone for ten years as I have, you get to know them in a particular way that’s not necessarily about being friends.  In a sense, we were never really friends, but we spent many, many hours together honing our public presentations, rehearsing and then performing them.  We also always sat in the same arrangement together for every performance.  The arrangement was: AF, me, Marianne Weems, Erin Cramer and then Martha Baer.  We assembled ourselves for photographs in that way and we never departed from that order.  It was a way of taking orderliness too far – and taking it too far as a commentary – but it was also a way of controlling our own inner conflicts about who would sit where and by whom.  The question about seating, therefore, was always already answered and I, having ended up in the only seat near AF early in our career, spent ten years in that seat (1986-’96) with all the interactions that implies.  Sharing space was the hardest part of that arrangement, since AF often feels she doesn’t get enough and, though I may feel the same, I am not so frank in expressing it as she.  So we both might be feeling desperate for another sliver of an inch of table space where we might lay our papers, I was less willing to acknowledge it, more willing to give in, but then more liable to get angry and seem childish.  It was all about “lack, lack, lack” as we said on one of our panels in which we pointed to how plentiful the Lacanian discourse was on desire and deprivation.  In talking about “nothing,” psychoanalysis certainly had a lot to say is what we meant.

Once the subtle and not-so-subtle negotiations were settled between us in a particular venue, however, she was an easy person to play off of because of her intense focus at the prospect of an audience.

Photo from Untitled

Here is AF before she removes her clothes. Of note is the swank, but usual hotel furnishings, her very nice and flattering orange-red dress and, perhaps most importantly, the daylight peeping through the window.  The daylight is unexpected since the scene, including the wine, feels like night.  The whole project, with its on-line sexcapade resonance, feels more like night.

Crying, taking off clothes

AF’s work had turned, so that whereas before the turn she was muted, witty and “experimental,” she then started to get naked in her work.  Nakedness isn’t distinct from experimental, but it is distinct from muted.  She had started to exercise, it’s true, and she was proud of the new physique that it had taken her so long to achieve. 

More important: the turn to the flesh didn’t have an absolute basis in readings or reasoning.  Instead, some gut instinct for self-exposure coincided with her growing irritation at the field(s) in which she was forced to work as an artist.  AF is a woman who cries.  Her disrobing was a form of crying, to begin with.  With the first piece, an introduction, she began taking off her clothes to express vulnerability in front of a crowd.  We who had worked with her in the V-Girls actually squirmed.  It isn’t easy to witness these forms of exposure.  Her crying en group seemed to express something about our group intimacy, especially when we were exploring the confessional aspects of consciousness-raising.   When we were putting together a performance about feminism in the 70s, about its greater emotionality for one thing, almost all of us cried as a result of talking about our investment in theory.  AF’s investment in theory was probably the strongest, though we all felt humbled before its terms and equations, its dampering of affect.  Of all of us, AF was the one who had really set out to conquer it, which she did.  She liked it, as did we all, because it was hard.  But she was the one who could bring out the relevant pieces when they were needed.  By the time we met her in her early twenties, she had already read most or all of Lacan.  (But almost nothing else.  The New York Times, every morning.  But nothing else. )

The crying in this first piece of AF’s was also about an investment, but the investment was in audience approval rather than discourse mastery.  Taking off her clothes, AF seemed to say, this is all that I am, nothing more.  She cried, ultimately, and there was a long, embarrassing silence.  I don’t know if she was embarrassed, but the audience was.  In fact, I think she liked the crying and repeated it later in the same performance.  There was no doubt in my mind that the crying was authentic, though.  There was that long paroxysm of grief that made her speechless.  I think it was the wordlessness of her crying that made it so hard to be a witness.  When people laugh too hard, it can also be difficult.  The key is the word “paroxysm” because what it means is something sudden, like a fit or an attack of one’s animal self.  There she was at a podium, having devolved from a woman rather glibly doling out welcomes and congratulations, sunk to a mere nude sprite who was unequal to the grand occasion.  It changed the whole droll scene with which she began into a sorry mess, a paroxysm of emotion that “the art world” was forced to witness by dint of having invited her.  It was also forced, beyond the embarrassment and perhaps only in retrospect, to the point of an authentic response. 

Untitled was different.  There was nudity, yes, but it was not so raw.  Just after completing the project, AF asked me if I might like to watch the video with her.  She seemed happy for that to happen, but I wasn’t.  She was proud of her work, but I didn’t feel up for witnessing that pride as she watched herself and watched me watching.  The viral quality of watching sex, whether porn or simple kissing, on a screen is that sexual feeling can spread from the screen to the spectator, but worse than that is the feeling of mutual surveillance.  I didn’t want her watching me watch her and, in truth, part of me didn’t want to watch her at all.

Lacan/Bourdieu

“The best-intentioned explanations will ring false so long as they fail to recognize the ways in which the dynamics of struggle within the field articulate with the distributions of different forms of power, whether economic or cultural, political or professional.”

“A ‘Sensation’ Chronicle,” Andrea Fraser

When I first read AF’s article of 2001, I tried to understand what motivated this particular form of interpretation.  AF had become fascinated by Pierre Bourdieu’s work, as she had loved Lacan and immersed himself in his writing and particular lens.  Seeing through this new lens, she often spoke in terms of a shift she had made between the two French men’s interpretive paradigms.  She spoke of herself as a “Bourdieu-ian,” something that sounded odder than “Lacanian.”  There were many Lacanians.  There were, of course, Lacanian psychoanalysts who took the Lacanian lens as a tool to use in moving their patients forward.  There were Lacanians in the academic world, too, for whom the lens was something to use against a text or some other cultural phenomenon.  AF had dated, then lived with an older Lacanian psychoanalyst.

To be a Lacanian in the 1980s/90s was not only to peer through a lens, it was a way of being-in-the-world.  It was a philosophy of life and a fashion statement.  You spoke like a Lacanian and you dated like one.  Lacanian psychoanalysis and the theory that was its motor (or weapon) gave one an irony that seemed rooted in rather poetic truths about the nature of desire, the impossibility of its fulfillment and the illusion of identity.  Thus, it was a theoretically motivated irony that marked the speech and behavior of these theorists and it was, also, a staunch refusal to commit.  Since Lacanian psychoanalysis puts a damper on the possibility of union and of love — with another person, self, or god — to be a Lacanian meant to be sad.  It was a sophisticated sadness, but it was sadness.  It meant the most interesting people tended to be low-key people, intelligent analysts, whose passions were suppressed.

To be a Bourdieu-ian was something else.   When AF left the older Lacanian psychoanalyst and, eventually, shifted her allegiance to Bourdieu, her focus also shifted away from questions of the desire of institutions to questions about status, value, and profit.  This shift was not only limited to AF herself but to the intellectual field, if there is such a thing, as a whole.

Economies of Transgression

I considered making the title of this post “Economy(s) of Transgression” in honor of the “transgressive” practice I was raised on, which stipulates that one should always, if possible, present nouns in the plural when they refer to presumed singularities.  So there were “feminisms” rather than feminism, which was to serve to correct the Sixties-era presumption of political unity, a presumption that resulted in many exclusions based on race or personality or belief.  Unfortunately, the gesture of the label didn’t always successfully correct the exclusion, but merely displaced it onto other hierarchies.  Ironically those pluralizers raised during the Era of Deconstruction excluded on the basis of belief in the utility of pluralization, for one thing.

When I refer to the raising of me or others during this era of theory or deconstruction, I am referring to intellectual formation, since we were raised to eat and speak and walk quite a bit earlier.  My intellectual formation occurred during the 1980s and  1990s. Though I have never yet stopped, I hope, being formed, the basic texts and thoughts had been pretty much put into place by 1999, when I got my PhD.

So I am pluralizing the word economy in keeping with my training, but also to ironize it, to pay it an empty honor.  In fact, I believe it does little but make a gesture that is in keeping with my subject.  Transgression is a gesture towards not the breaking of rules but towards a social position whose marginality lends it a degree of power.  What was I trained to do except make gestures like that, towards a masked power that speaks with righteousness from an imaginary “outside.”

Sensation

Andrea Fraser’s own work on the field of art has probably been the most instructive for me in discerning political, economic and aesthetic stakes in the art world.  A visual artist, AF remains one of the most articulate dissectors of the way the art world works.  Her article of 2001 in Social Text, “A ‘Sensation’ Chronicle,” is a succinct mapping of that world by way of the controversial 1999 exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art called “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection.”  She expresses how much more complicated this controversy is compared to the NEA crisis of 1989, which rested exclusively on questions of art’s autonomy from political control.  New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s attack against the museum in response to the Sensation exhibit, and the various responses to that response, provide AF with material for mapping two additional areas: “the border between art and economic interests and the border between so-called high and low, elite and popular culture.”

What is the transgression economy?

The metaphor of an “economy” is often used to describe a system whose analysis includes looking at motives, payoffs, debts and the value of things. I penned my proposal imagining the economy of transgression as a system of incentives for breaking the law, by which I really meant the symbolic laws governing all manner of things relating to the production and reception of art.  The incentives are the usual, starting with cash but including all forms of status marking such as shows, awards and other recognitions for artists.  My understanding of a “transgression economy” is also intimately related to Marcel Mauss’s idea of the gift, which I’m also using to develop a new play that’s probably going to be called The Gift Economy, with a subtitle (tho I hate subtitles) of A Life in Holidays.  Mauss’s thesis might be considered grim by some people who want to believe in selflessness to the extent that they believe that there exists a world unmotivated by profit and without markets of any kind.  His book, written in 1925, turns this idea on its head, looking at transactions of many kinds as all part of a social system that binds people together into social groups.  One of the most interesting aspects of this idea is that a simple transaction, the giving of an object, is not simple, but a small part of a larger system of exchange.  Another idea I find compelling is that, while gift-giving looks innocent, in other words voluntary, it is, in fact, “rigorously obligatory” and also enforced by various forms of covert and overt “warfare.”

While The Gift Economy is (a work-in-progress) based on my own family’s huge psychic investments in holidays and presents, the essay on transgression is not personal, or at least not personal in the same way.  In “Update on the Transgression Economy,” I’m looking at the way individual acts of transgression are part of a larger  field of contemporary exchange whose effect is greater than merely establishing the reputations of individual artists.  It’s usual to hear the criticism against modern art that it’s only goal is self-promotion through shock value.  While this may, indeed, be a goal or the goal, the type of analysis I want to pursue here looks at self-promotion as well as the distaste that promotion of any kind can generate and sees both as part of the larger field.

And why look at this “field” of art production and reception?  Why see a field and why see it defined in terms of a series of exchanges, economic, psychic and other?   It is a disrespectful way of looking at art, since it veers away from the usual reverence towards creativity, originality and also professionalism.  I embrace this disrespect because it lets me see the way things work.  I would not like to conclude that there is no real value to “shock art,” the artists who make it, or the funders and promoters who promote it.  I hope not to do that.  Instead, I want to make a more empathic mapping of transgression as a modern value (whose roots go back to the 19th century).

For artists, transgression, from the formal transgressions of modernist abstraction to the shock techniques of the avant-garde to postmodern forms of critique, is in a sense obligatory.  While the desire to trash the old and innovate the new seems a natural impulse for art, in fact it is compelled by the economics of the professional worlds that surround it.  Just as the gift must appear to be selflessly given, art must appear to have been selflessly created in the vacuum of genius.

The Transgression Economy

I received a grant from the Warhol Foundation to write an article called Update on the Transgression Economy, which is based on the mixed reception of Untitled, a controversial performance by my former collaborator on The V-Girls, Andrea Fraser. This public sort of rumination is an experiment in making use of the Net to see what kind of writing and thinking it will foster in me.  The idea of one’s audience is usually so abstract and remote.  I’m curious to see what it feels like to write with the knowledge that someone may be actually reading.  I believe my ideas may stay more relevant, my writing more accessible.