devotion (the boy snow mountains)

A Buddhist legend tells of The Boy Snow Mountains who was a previous incarnation of Shakyamuni Buddha & how he was challenged by the god Shakra. Shakra, manifesting himself as a demon, recited only half a verse of an ancient Buddhist teaching for the boy. The boy was hungry for more wisdom & pleaded with the demon to reveal the other half of the teaching. The demon agreed, but only if the little boy offered his flesh & blood as payment. To the demon’s surprise, the child did not hesitate to the extreme terms & said yes he was willing to give his flesh & blood for the other half of the teaching. Upon hearing this, the demon changed back into Shakra to then praise the boy highly for his willingness to give it all to be enlightened by the Mystic Law.

As we’ve read in the first part of Nichiren Daishonin’s Letter from Sado in the (Nov./Dec. 2009) Living Buddhism: “…nothing is more precious than life itself, one who dedicates one’s life to Buddhist practice is certain to attain Buddhahood.” This devotion is repeated each time we chant Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō 南無妙法蓮華経. Nam (or namu) is a devotional term, a devotion to the truth, from the Sanskrit: namas (devotion). Nam is the only Sanskrit word in the mantra, Myōhō Renge Kyō is ancient Chinese. In the Gosho The Gift of Rice, Nichiren writes that the word Nam “…means to devote one’s life. Ultimately it means to offer our lives to the Buddha.” Giving of one’s life should not be taken too literally, or as a careless sacrifice. Rather it can be read as one should devote oneself to the practice with one’s whole life, otherwise known as “earnest resolve.” On this Daisaku Ikeda writes: “It is the Daishonin’s emphatic declaration that ordinary people of this age can, without having to sacrifice their lives in the manner of The Boy Snow Mountains, attain the same benefit that accrues to such selfless dedication though their ‘earnest resolve.’”

When we chant Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō we are devoting our selves to the mystic law of cause & effect (the ultimate truth). This is a devotional act. First it is personal, we have made a place for it in our lives, a place to offer our dedication to the law. From this & by extension, if the dedication is real & authentic, we are impelled to share this with others to help them find the truth in their lives with the practice. This is known as shakubuku, a dispelling of erroneous views & a leading to the truth. Shakubuku is an act of devotion.

Devotion is a fairly straight forward concept & it also contains a great profundity. Devotion is focus, a quest for truth, dispelling illusions & also moving towards the goal of kosen rufu. Devotion requires a sustained effort & a whole effort. It is important that in the myth of The Boy Snow Mountains, the demon proffers only half of the teaching. Half the teaching is just that, only half—it is not enough, it is not sufficient. The only way to get to the whole truth, The Boy Snow Mountains has to offer his life. The boy, we are told, was on the path of a Bodhisattva, so his seeking spirit was not satisfied with only a fragment of wisdom. This is instructive on how we might take only half the teaching & walk away, or to understand that the wisdom is within the practice of devotion. One can’t be enlightened with only half the effort, with only half the teaching. Devotion is a commitment within our lives. It is with our lives that we are to seek enlightenment—wholeheartedly, fully & without ceasing.

President Ikeda writes: “For a philosophy to open up possibilities for a 21^st century society, it is vital that it distinguish between shallow & profound views of life & death.” To understand the profundity of life, one must devote one’s life to seeking, understanding, learning, changing, growing & opening-up. This is no small task & it cannot be attained with half measures. With this wisdom, let’s take the other half of the teaching & with our devoted lives start to get the full experience of Buddhahood & enlightenment as a whole, with the courage & strength of the Lion King & of The Boy Snow Mountains.

Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō 南無妙法蓮華経 

–Aurelio Madrid

thantic modernism—notes on pumhösl & baudrillard

documenta 12 | Florian Pumhösl / Modernologie (Dreieckiges Atilier) | Modernology (Triangular Atelier) | 2007 | Fridericianum

 

“We are laboring under the illusion of the end, under the posthumous illusion of the end.”  –Jean Baudrillard

 The Austrian artist Florian Pumhösl recreates Modernism’s formal language.  The so-called death of Modernism is a courageous (if not over-determined) leitmotif.  The artist with his quoted historical artifacts transforms the gallery/museum as a reliquary of the Modern.  The late philosopher Jean Baudrillard has already addressed the end of history. At the present time, art seeks to move away from the defunct ideologies of an exhausted Modernist hegemony, purity, progress & predictable aesthetic fulfillment.  However, the relics of Modernism continue, persist & resist, just a bit older. 

The question that confuses is: how do we properly mourn Modernism?  Pumhösl appropriates the architecture & art of the high Modern.  His cold concrete forms, the installations, his under-glass painting, the antique Japanese garment patterns, the appropriations & the Constructivist “quotations,” remind one of the possible future–the way it used to be, the way we saw it then.  Post-Modernist, post-conceptual, post-minimal or post-colonial might work here, but none are a perfect fit.  Everything is always “after” the past.  Baudrillard wrote on the endless proliferation, this “necro-spective” of the past, of Modernism (gone, yet obsessively refurbished).      

Pumhösl’s cynicism is not overt–it’s lithic & ashen.  His gestures are a vivid simulacra, a simulacrum that reaches into a Modernist rhetoric, with its constraint, its sterility.  When observing his artistry, we too reach back to a frail remembrance, one that was insufficient, anxious, & anemic.  We might find a reliable grid & pattern to palliate (momentarily), but will that sustain our aesthetic needs today?  On the anxiety of art objects Baudrillard says: “Instead of first existing, works of art now go straight into the museum.  Instead of being born & dying, they are born as virtual fossils.”  Pumhösl fathers these elegant fossils, ossified, resistant & un-emotive. 

It’s Pumhösl’s job to keep an eye on this presumably deceased past.  How do we treat this memory, (these memories) our collective regret? This new art is a memorial to an idealized time gone by, now perhaps, with an unrecognized hum of nostalgia.  This is the art of looking back, an art of exquisite exhaustion.  After reading Baudrillard & thinking of Pumhösl, we learn what has been, we learn to understand that a contemporary art of the NOW, is simply a thing of the past–gone to be revitalized later.  The future is looking to what was.  Again Baudrillard writes: “When everything can be seen, nothing can be seen anymore.  What is there beyond the end?”

Aurelio Madrid

Modernologies

(Image found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/architektur/634605977/  

by .ack-online.de)

paul mccarthy’s art is offensive

paul mccarthy - tokyo santa - 1996

“For a long time my window gave onto a cabaret painted half  green and half bright red–a sweet torture for my eyes.” 

 –Charles Baudelaire (Salon of 1846)

 Paul McCarthy’s art is not for everyone.  Viewer beware–caveat spectator!  We’ve known this for a while now.  He’s been as distasteful back in the 70’s as he is now.  Who needs to remember his prurient ketchup, the sleazy masks, the unfortunate dolls & the horrible sexual affronts?  We’ll avoid detailing all the other petulant paraphernalia, gooey performances, cheesy props & whatever-else, for the sake of saving the appetite. 

His work is often spoken of  in relation to Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject: the revolting other that threatens to intrude on the boundaries of the self.  The self is threatened by the offending abject-object, often not to be admired, nor given an audience.  This is contradicted by McCarthy’s aggressive subversion.   Without our fear of filth, our porous fragile bodies are vulnerable.  This doesn’t mean that we’ll be rescued from our malaise, our idle fear of the profane.  It is within us, where abjection never leaves.  The residual abject is always present, reviled we push back, pushing it away.  McCarthy tries to be & mock that boundary, that precipice, that polemic. He begs us to face our disgust & revulsion.  He has to know that few will understand his insistence, his churlish advances.  “I hate all that mess” says nothing to his value. 

Okay so he’s hated, or reviled.  Moving from there we’re left wondering why he’s liked.  He obviously has not run out of ways to annoy.  McCarthy apparently wants you to hate or at least to consider his ridiculous gestures.  Then what?  The Dadaists wanted this too.  The ribald methods of Tzara, Schwitters, Duchamp &c. all anticipate McCarthy’s performances, his corrosive humor, & his insistent cynicism.  We’ve had artists behaving badly in the name of art (anti or otherwise) before.  

Also McCarthy’s Pop themes give little relief all the same.  His Santa Claus acts out an excessive psycho-drama we’d be happy to forget.  Food as a symbol of any corporeal effluent is rarely pleasing.  Art often works with a currency of symbols & signs.  Fast food always approaches on the vulgar as it is.  McCarthy shoves all this along till it’s no longer food, food as an eruptive side-affect.  Along with the inane packaging, he forces us to see what’s been rejected inside, now spilled & thrown outside.

Disgust hasn’t been absent from the consideration of art over the years, nor has is been absent from our lives.  Who has the audacity to be the fool who reveals our interior hell, the repressed hell of popular culture, just slightly hidden underneath?  Comedy can offend; McCarthy’s offense is that he makes art.  His art effect results in how a taboo is judged.  Why shouldn’t we regard the abject?  What’s instructive about this horror-pleasure?  The squeamish who revolt, won’t stop the distaste. 

McCarthy’s value is that he’s not a liar—the fool unveils a virulent truth.  This petulant darkness is fundamental within us, unavoidable yet often disguised.  Since we are threatened by waste or putrescence, we’ll often imagine an ideal purity.  The septic stupidity keeps the purists away, while it opens & introduces the possible initiate to understanding.  McCarthy’s art suggests that the ugly has a place, & that it isn’t needful of a perfunctory make-over.  How conservative are we really, when we can’t face our own demons?  How narrow are we, when we ask art to be only pleasing, easy & sweet? 

Paul McCarthy’s art is offensive—that’s why we look.

–Aurelio Madrid

IlllllllllllllI (& aurelio)

(…this post leaps into Grant’s answer on a general question concerning aesthetics & ethics—followed by our inconclusive discussion on art & philosophy.  Grant kindly involved himself with my questions.  Perhaps we’ll assume the voluble philosophical/art mantle, another time soon.)

IlllllllllllllI: I am interested in aesthetics, but I’m not sure I grasp any connection to the ethical. I think the early Nietzschean conclusion about the Dionysian terror of reality being best borne in an Aesthetic way of being is something valuable to contemplate though that’s a pretty localized historical phenomena that doesn’t seem relevant anymore. I mean, slavery is kind of necessary for that way of thinking to work and I don’t think anybody would advance a pro-slavery claim anymore.
To me Kantian aesthetics speak more to the value of the Sublime or in more contemporary thought the un-beautiful, the challenging, etc. Maybe this has an ethical turn in that it requires of its viewers conscious effort, like some forced Heideggerean authentic reaction but I don’t think most people experience it this way. In my immediate experience, the avant garde or experimental or radically conceptual work or whatever one would like to call it, ends in alienation or capitulation to the trend for most people who encounter it. Which is frankly a terrible and elitist ethic but I think we’d be hard pressed to validate low-culture in the same way. There exists something in that division that retains deep and terrifying origins that I’m not prepared to pretend doesn’t exist but am willing always to be disputed over.
That said, the method of aesthetic creation that seems most valid today is beyond any philosophers general conception as I’ve read or heard them. I guess one would expect such a thing if art since the last great philosophical wave in the 70’s and 80’s has changed as much as it appears. Deleuze, whom I think had a very contemporary conception, still divided it into this other category of percepts and affects and insisted that it be divorced from concepts (which is to ignore the best of 20th century aesthetics) and science, a tremendously fertile production method and necessary element in almost all contemporary product. To me, aesthetics instead is about the production of environments, something like Heidegger’s conception I think but in an immediate and fictive sense. The work is about crafting a universe in which the work exists and has relational effects with a viewer and with other pieces, that remnant of postmodern ideology that may be most legitimate, but a location that is more fluid than the temporally absent Greek Civilization or the culturally momentous cock-fight. We instead are indoctrinated into a new location, a becoming-point in space, and aesthetics is the study of how to create that becoming-point, either according to an artists conception or a structural pace depending on one’s view of the self. I think this can have ethical dimensions but epiphenomenally perhaps, where the form taken causes certain ethical behaviors and effects yet in unintended ways to distance itself from any socialist realism or Marxist aesthetic.
I’m so tentative on these things that whatever I have in my mind will have collapsed in a few minutes so I’m very interested to hear what you’re working with, especially regarding ethics. At this moment I can’t see how aesthetics and art can rise above nihilistic capitalism, but perhaps there is something much more there that I am blind to.

Aurelio:  When speaking of the avant-garde in art, can you present any examples of how one has to capitulate to a trend?  Perhaps you’re suggesting that we are subjected to an assault on our good taste as with Jonathan Meese (“The dictatorship of art is the holy grail”) or even Thomas Hirshhorn (“energy yes—quality no”) where the viewers are subjected to “bad-taste” in an exaggerated way, a psychotic & (playfully?) sadistic way.  Certainly with these two artists a good number of people are taken aback enough to question (their own & others) taste standards.  Another artist we’ve noticed is Santiago Sierra who—for example—paid workers to sit inside cardboard boxes (in a gallery) for minimum wage, or where he hired workers in India to make blocks of human-waste. With Sierra we start to see a clear nexus of aesthetics & ethics. 

IlllllllllllllI: The avant-garde is so problematic, isn’t it, because it contains the capitalist’s constant expansion of production model in thought but unlike capitalism the well of natural resources is endless. This is instructive too, but in our immediate circumstance, I think the central problem with avant-gardism as a method is that the early 20th century attachments from which avant-gardism seemed the best inversion were of a very specific variety. Contemporary attempts to repeat the structure of these methods occur and proliferate but after those giants are dead. Avant-garde? If one stands on the side of the exploited workers and exposes/flagellates the recursive decadence of art, this is an instinct that contemporary people have. Avant-Garde would be something evil, something beyond the bounds of taste. The Futurists were so avant-garde they started fascism, bolshevism. That’s truly a slap in the face of public taste, no?

To be very clear, I am not impugning anyone by suggesting that the Fascists and Bolsheviks were doing it more completely, I am not so absurd. I am only suggesting that the use of the avant-garde mechanism, attempting to seek out the edges of bourgeois life and destroying them via aesthetic production, is perhaps impossible today. There are no more bourgeois lives, or no more attempted bourgeois lives, not among artists or art-lovers. (Here is another side problem of the avant-garde; by consistently alienating, one produces an avant-garde audience who appreciates the shock but is no longer attacked by it while those who were initially assaulted are back to their soft realist hearth.) But even among this audience, the targets of taste or economics are far too large to be dealt with on the tip of the subject. We all know it is wrong to exploit workers and children, yet today all of us continue. We might attempt to limit our damage, but what is an ethics that says we will exploit only so many, kill only so many?

Aurelio: What about Deleuze?  Didn’t write on aesthetics? Was he arguing for a aesthetic-relativism?

IlllllllllllllI: This point, about the failure to further radicalize the critique (again, perhaps with some very good historical context in which to remain conservative lest artists again choose their Mussolini), is taken up in Deleuze. His descriptions of aesthetics weren’t relativistic or otherwise, he was more of a diagnostician and underminer, a subterranean. In the first guise, he draws Art as a condensation of composed methods of seeing and feeling, constructing subject-independent mechanisms then attached to the material. Foucault’s description of Las Meninas is an analysis of this practice put into its highest movement. This is not about a hermeneutics, but dealing with the very surface of paintings, what Heidegger calls the nearness of the nearest: what exists in this painting that has caused it to be and be here? In Deleuze’s second costume, the Subterranean, these experience-producing mechanisms should be put into practice toward our desires, the independent strains that occur in bodies and against the corralling of those desires into the corrupted coherence of the subject. This is perhaps where the avant-garde can still reside, but frankly how that might occur is as yet obscured.

Aurelio: You also speak of an aesthetic environment & its relational effect on the viewer as compared to Heidegger, can you expand on this?  Can we see Heidegger’s use of the terms “world & earth” to mean culture & the purely physical dimension (& where a work of art is the fusion of the two)?  

IlllllllllllllI: This is difficult and I hope to avoid becoming jargonistic. First, it would be a mistake to limit Heidegger’s ‘Earth’ to only the physical dimension. It would be more accurate to think of it as all the existing forms which condition and constrain what occurs there. For instance, a certain climate and geography will cause the world of Coats and shelters and food that occurs there, but the relation between two words which causes one to think of a pun is another Earth-World occasion. Behaviors occurring as a result of believing in phantoms and gods is another. And while World is a sphere that occurs as a result of that physical dimension, it is also an action of human being where our intrusion into history causes both the existence of World and the construction of relations.  As it relates to art-encounters, between Heidegger and Deleuze, the piece of art can occur within the Earth and World as a mechanism of the subjects who are produced by the Earthen history. I think art in these formulas is a point of very difficult sublation, where the relation between world and earth is constantly overcoming itself yet with sometimes little or no effect on us. Here relativism is unhelpful because this clash is actually existing in a terrifying and important intensity, and it is of a certain variety of ethics, honesty or integrity, perhaps even that despotic authenticity, that one would chase this.

Aurelio: Nicolas Bourriaud wrote on relational aesthetics which proposes more interactive art, as with Rirkrit Tiravanija or Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster where the viewer is more an active participant or convivial to the art work.  Are you familiar with Bourriaud’s ideas?

IlllllllllllllI: I am familiar with the premise, but I think Bourriaud puts it slightly askew with the Creole. It sounds akin to Appiah’s cosmopolitanism, but I’m not sure about the nuances of how those two machines might occur together. The interest in participatory art has always intrigued me, but more because I do not understand it. It would be quite a thing to make non-participatory art. It seems, in the residue of the postmodern, that we are distrustful of historical participation, that we identify the fascist fuhrer principle in the artist-subject-viewer relationship and we want to refuse to be dominated or to dominate by proposing that perhaps we all make art/love/culture together. While Bourriaud is quite right that multi-culturalism can be a prison (however only once it has achieved its necessary purpose of placing another kick in the teeth of morality), one must be careful not to respond with a flattening, where the artist and the art and the aesthete are unified in one triumphal chain. There are differences and while these differences occasion domination and violence but they are also the textures of Earth that themselves cause Worlds, the perversions that create new methods of seeing and breaking apart ourselves as selves, as subjects.

Aurelio: I’m reminded of the Marinetti quote “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene…” which is dripping with radicalism & is slightly ridiculous.  Thank you for reminding me of the Futurist’s proto-fascism—this is a good lesson on extreme aesthetics (vs. ethics).  We’ve seen additional outrageous ends of radicalism in the arts elsewhere—for example, with the Vienna Actionists.  Here is someone like Hermann Nitsch who embraced a new intensity/revulsion with the use of animals &c. and on the other polarity (same milieu) emerges Franz West who broke away with his “Adaptives” (“Paßtücke”) & his chairs.  With West we can now move full circle to “relational aesthetics.”  He simply had the idea to offer the museum/gallery visitor a chair to sit on & relax.  Surely there is an ethical connection there too—after all West offers you (physical) comfort.  As you suggest Appiah might be useful in this kind of relationship with the artist & viewer, let go of the differences & have a seat (to what end?—who knows).

…but, back to Deleuze, with whom I’m intrigued to learn more.  Didn’t he have something to say on Kant’s aesthetics?  Deleuze wrote on Bacon are you familiar with this text?  Didn’t he (Deleuze) also have a concept in the “unaesthetic?”

The Foucault essay on Velazquez’s Las Meninas is gorgeous & it also speaks to the famous painting’s origins—its complex interiority.  He explores in depth the relationship of the artist, viewer, subject & patronage.  Now I’m reminded to return to his writing on Magritte’s “This is not a pipe.” 

You’ll have to forgive me when I move around non-chronologically to ask you about Hume.  “Of the Standard of Taste,” is a worthwhile read & I was particularly interested when he defended a kind of expertise that is necessary to give well informed judgments of taste, where we’d trust the opinion of a connoisseur rather than the casual observer.  I am curious to know what you have to say on Hume’s aesthetics (?).  He didn’t seem to be as stringent as Kant.  I feel more at ease to read about how Hume uses Don Quixote to illustrate a delicacy of taste.

 IlllllllllllllI: …..

michelangelo pistoletto

venus of the rags 1967, 74 (michelangelo pistoletto) photographed by zeno de cock

 

 ”To be a true ecologist [artist] today, one must re-establish the aesthetics of beauty within the realm of human trash and material waste.” –Slavoj Žižek (…maybe Žižek wouldn’t mind the minor alteration.)

Michelangelo Pistoletto pushed together a pile of rags & a statue of Venus in 1967 & 74.  The above photograph is by the Belgian photographer Zeno de Cock from an exhibit in his hometown of Antwerp.  Zeno’s photo captures the immediacy of the profound assemblage.  

Venus of the Rags is redolent of the radical sixties & it is also an icon of Italian Arte Povera.  Arte Povera was young & getting started when Pistoletto created the Venus.  The sculpture speaks to a few key ideas of the style.  Arte Povera is seen as anti-modernist, in that it (ostensibly) rejected the idealistic (high-modern) minimalism of the time.  Conversely, it shared the reductive (minimalist) language that attempted to distill art to its essentials, its elemental basics & the bare minimum (albeit without the assumed sterility of some American minimalism).  Arte Povera (loosely: poor art) was not necessarily an aesthetic of impoverishment, rather it was getting back to essentials—reaching to nature, the mundane, the everyday, even to classical antiquity (thus anticipating post-modernism) & also back to classic art materials (wood, marble & gold among others).

Pistoletto posed a dialectic with the discarded rags & a concrete cast replica of (Bertel Thorvaldsen’s) Venus (with the apple).  Thorvaldsen’s Venus is holding an (unseen) apple & is from the legend “the Judgment of Paris.” The legend is not addressed by Pistoletto, however the goddess of love & beauty (Venus) was awarded the golden apple by Paris (remember too, Paris gave into her irresistible bribe of a beautiful woman).  The significance resides in the symbol of Venus as beauty (ideal beauty).  The rags are from Pistoletto’s studio & were used to clean his signature stainless-steel mirrors.  We know that Pistoletto made several versions of the sculpture, including a live performance & he also made a gold (gilt) version. 

This is an artwork of contrasts & reflection.  We have high art coupled with an upsurge of refuse.  Beauty’s facing rejected trash.  Simple nudity is amidst an overload of used-garments.  Refinement married to disgust.  If we take the sculpture as a metaphor, it is an easy stand-in for our own confrontation with our now omnipresent waste.  Venus of the Rags is a emblem to throw-away culture.  It is as if she’s urging us to consider the aesthetic of decay & how that can inform a new & timely (re)consideration.  Why should we care about our waste?  What is important about the dialectic: beauty vs. trash?

We’ll also recall Pistoletto’s mirrors.  While Venus isn’t looking into a mirror, she is looking at a polarity with which she’s part of. Other sculptures show where Pistoletto has taken classical statuary & positioned it with a real mirror suggesting that the statue were made for this purpose—made for reflection & contemplation. 

Venus of the Rags is dialogue of the present with the ancient, resulting in a new perspective (dare I say a globalizing view) that includes the banal & everyday with the beautiful.  Germano Celant (who coined the term Arte Povera) writes on Pistoletto’s Venus (specifically addressing the rags).  The rags represent: “…the confusion & multivalence of marginalized people, the totalities of random & disparate communities of social rejects…that is the rags of society.”     

Now we’re at another confrontation: the world’s wealthy contrasted with the poor.  Again the artwork assumes a broader relevance.  How do we regard the poor?—or the rich for that matter?  We know these enormous questions need our attention & we know that art can help us see clearly (not only in a strict visual sense), more fundamentally, & then perhaps ethically.  Art positions our problems to be observed, before we can understand them.

It is a great teacher/master who can create a didactic sculpture that is fresh & engaging (40-something years later).  Pistoletto’s “poor art” perennially inspires growth & interaction.  We know that Michelangelo Pistoletto continues to make art & he’s opened a foundation: Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, where he proposes “a new role for the artist: that of placing art in direct interaction with all the areas of human activity which form society.” 

 

Aurelio Madrid

jörg hillebrand

jörg & prince

Jörg & Aurelio

Aurelio: I’ve drawn you & your stepson: Prince, from one of your photographs.  I want to know if you can give me any background on the image.

 Jörg Hillebrand : …every time I have the opportunity to visit my stepson in Ghana, we stage one welcoming shot, like this one, on the very first night we meet, mostly in a hotel, after he picked me up from the airport and before we continue to travel to our hometown, which is Kumasi, Ghana, the capital of the Ashanti kingdom.

 Sadly, and it nearly broke both our hearts then, Prince was deported from Germany in 2005. I don’t know, whether one day I can take him back. Several efforts failed…

Truth is stranger than fiction, I guess that’s the underlying message here, but we try to turn and twist it our way.

 Aurelio: …wish I understood more of your situation with your step-son.  The tension of the story is somewhat evident in the photo.  I wish you the best & hope you both can triumph in spite of it all!

I also had no idea that another artist had painted this image too!  What a surprise.  It is curious that we both selected this image.  With great respect, if I had known that the Ghanaian gentleman had painted it, I would have gone with a different image.  Now that I know however, I can appreciate that for a strange reason we both did it.  What an odd coincidence?  

I liked the image because it looks like a movie still.  The scene could have a complicated plot behind it.  It does not appear to be the reunion shot that it actually is.  Maybe it is because you’re on the cell phone (sunglasses on & shirt off) & Prince is counting money (in his boxer-shorts).  It is interesting that you say it was staged (in a previous message), I’m wondering how much of what is in the photo was planned.  It looks like a fictional narrative & the facts may be harder than i understand from afar, just looking in.    

 …about your photography, I can’t help saying that I like it very much.  I love it.  The subjects are diverse: the Ghanaian people, industry, the city of Madrid &c. 

Madrid has always felt like a long-lost relative I’ve never met & I’ve seen only in pictures.  I inhabit Madrid in my thoughts.  I’m not usually attracted to the touristy shots of the city & when I found your pictures I was instantly a fan.  The Madrid photos show that you have a strong sense of line, pattern & you like a low saturation (of color) &c. Your eye for architecture is also unique.  The way you photograph architecture feels non-hierarchical, i.e. the mundane buildings are treated with equal respect as the nicer more refined structures.  You seem to be interested in the way the landscape interacts with the buildings.  I am thinking of the shots where the neglected weedy landscape is emphasized in conjunction with the city & environs.  There is a palpable mood of desolation & abandonment.  What was your thinking when you’ve photographed Madrid?  Is any of what I just mentioned intentional?  Do you (or did you) live in the city?  The mundane & banal profoundly feature in most of these beautiful photos.  Madrid looks so dry & kind of melencholy.

Palomeras Bajas

…Looking at your industrial photos also makes me wonder why they are so extraordinary, perhaps because it is such an unfamiliar sight, not-before seen. 

alcoa automotive

The photos you have done in Ghana are in a contrast to the European selections.  The African photos are filled with people & not as much attention is given to the landscape &/or architecture.  Here is a remarkable exception:

kumasi [ghana]

(…received the following replies from Jörg (after I posted this), he attached the replies to my Kant-cigarette text-image.)

 Jörg: POINT ONE: Mr. Kant from Germany and Hello to you from Mr. Hillebrand again, and sorry again for not answering your so well put ideas, suggestions and questions…I stopped reading 8 years ago, when I met Prince’s mother here in Germany, don’t ask me why, TV rules since then in the worst sense. Being a German brutalized by Akan/ Ashanti culture has so many aspects to give in, matrimony, weaknesses, hard to tell, the ways of storytelling African life end up in NOLLYWWOD, Nigerian movies within the tradition of storytelling and heritage by wandering theatres from village to village in the olden days getting to VCR in the 70ies….maybe that’s oral/ visual…but definitely not written, back to Mr. Kant and what we Germans are famous for.

POINT TWO: Pagan reality is tempting: I wish I could kill someone for a good reason.

POINT THREE: “It does not appear to be the reunion shot that it actually is….” That´s exactly how this shot was intended…homo,drugs, mafia,diapers and whatsoever…it´s a simple family matter. Here is #2:

 

 Accra, New Haven

 I think I smoked them all by now and meet you in Madrid; sorry Mr. Kant won’t be around there and then…it’s all smoke, which gives you another picture.

 That one is on my soul.

 a dwarf, as a giant, on assignment in a small medivial German city. Aufbau Ost

 Please tell me which part of the world you live in?…Jörg

 C. de Estocolmo diptico, San Blas, Madrid, Spain

 …within the same group…still illiterate, nice, send me some books though…I recommend, street is slippery, condoms on the street, don’t read while walking, I had a couple of beers before, large format, be aware…

…your Kant still worries me…he taught me though in a bad translation,” what is not relevant to everyone is of no matter to the individual” and vice versa…and that matters a lot…

(I tried to give you an answer a long time ago, but it got deleted, while I tried to sent it to you, which frustrated very much me then. I appreciated your questions there and answered them to the best of my knowledge, but it got lost in our e-world….I am sorry, you may even add to this to your blog, shit happens and you need to know, that I love your methods.)

kant addenda

Joachim Koester The Kant Walk #2, 2003-2004, framed color photograph, 81cm x 69cm

This addenda is to follow-up to my previous post “on Kant’s aesthetics.”  The Curator dropped by with  comments on my notes:

The Curator: “Aurelio, it seems that you’ve made a bit of a mistake in your interpretation here, and while I don’t want to be confrontational, I think I ought to explain why I disagree with you.

I think the basic problem rests in your understanding of the word “subjective.” In common parlance today, we use that word to describe things that are not universalizable, which applies most frequently to the common view of aesthetic judgment. But this is not what Kant means by the word. For Kant, beauty is “subjective” in that it does not exist in the object itself; it is a feature of our judgment about objects. This doesn’t translate to “there is no accounting for taste,” though.

In fact, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant goes to great lengths to account for taste and to prove the “intersubjective validity” of aesthetic judgments. Just because beauty is not in the object doesn’t mean it isn’t valid for me to judge a thing as beautiful, and it doesn’t mean that all aesthetic “judgments” are equally valid.

The full exposition of this is in sections 30-40 of the Critique of Judgment. The argument is commonly called the “Deduction of Taste.” Without going into much detail, the basic thrust of it is that we all have the same cognitive faculties of judgment, so when we make aesthetic judgments we are relying on a sense that everyone has. Kant calls this “common sense” (also different from the way we usually use that phrase). Since everyone has that sense, valid aesthetic judgments are valid for everyone or universalizable as long as we don’t try to say that beauty exists in things themselves.

I agree that this is not really a satisfactory account of taste, but at any rate, I think it’s clear enough that Kant says there IS accounting for taste, and that the beautiful is in fact NOT “subjective” in the way that we usually mean it.

Of course, Kant agrees with you that it’s pointless to try to argue about beauty and expect the argument to get anywhere using concepts, so perhaps your basic point is unchanged by all this.”

 Aurelio: …I was not making the claim that because a judgment of beauty is subjective (i.e. of the subject, that which is felt by the subject) that there is no accounting for taste. I meant that there is no accounting for taste (concerning the beautiful) because as Kant illustrates it cannot be proven by concepts. Kant does, as you say “account” for taste in great detail, but he does say that a judgment of beauty cannot be proven, is subjective, & that it claims universality. Am I really that far off?  Perhaps I should’ve left the cliché out.   

I am thankful The Curator brought me to this nuanced clarification & I apologize for any discomfort over my omission.   I blame the oversight on the delicate intricacies of Kant’s theories that are a spectacular array of precision & are always potentially trenchant for the casual reader (me).

I found a paper online (which I recommend reading for a greater understanding of sensus communis) by Antoon Van den Braembussche that I’ll use to demonstrate that I was “mistaken” to not mention Kant’s sensus communis as it relates to the subjective-universality.  Van den Braembussche writes: “So, according to Kant, our judgment of taste is subjective and nevertheless involves at the same time a claim to being valid for everyone. Our judgment of taste is subjective and at the same time universal. This subjective universality, as it cannot be based on an objective principle, is rooted in ‘a subjective principle, which determines only by feeling rather than concepts, though nonetheless with universal validity, what is liked or disliked.’ And this principle is called by Kant sensus communis.

            This argument of Kant is the locus classicus of the idea of sensus communis. For Kant it is an a priori principle of every judgment of taste; it explains why we assume that our aesthetic judgments will be shared by others, why they are transcendentally necessary.”

Without going into excessive & horrifying (Kantian) detail, the subjective is still: of the subject, or as the subject feels.  The difference is that when one makes a judgment of taste, her appeal to universality (that everyone should believe her judgment of taste to be valid) is an aspect of common sense—sensus communis.  The sensus communis is still a feature of the subjective as we know it & it does not alter my previous view on subjectivity.  While we make a judgment that an object is beautiful, contained within the judgment is the notion that it beautiful for everyone else.  Sensus communis could be understood (very roughly) as a “common-feeling.”  This common feeling is how we “justify” our claim that something that is beautiful must be the same judgment for all (according to Kant).  Sensus communis is presupposed within the aesthetic judgement, it “goes without saying” & it is a priori.  Sensus communis is a feature of Kant’s aesthetic subjectivity.  Basically, that we can feel beauty subjectively yet the underlying sensus communis almost tricks us into thinking it should be the same for all.  This enhances subjectivity more than it corrects it. 

We are not of the same rational mind when concerning judgments of taste, but since Kant made this clear & it is generally accepted that we can all agree that we’ll sometimes disagree on matters of taste (aesthetics)!  

Van den Braembusshe writes in his post-script that: “…sensus communis is something which cannot be put into words or clear concepts. In retrospect, writing or even speaking about sensus communis […] is always questionable: it is above all an experience, which is beyond (or beneath) any discursive or rational argument. And yet, philosophy cannot avoid writing or speaking about it, because it concerns the deeper layers of any human and even transcultural challenge to communicate in a sense, which is not dictated by explicit reasoning or doctrinal commitments. The latter have indeed the tendency to divide people all over the world.”

The Curator: I appreciate your taking my comment so seriously. I particularly liked the link you gave in your response to my original comment:  http://www.uri.edu/personal/szunjic/philos/deduct.htm

This is a nice, detailed laying-out of the whole Deduction of Taste. I would refer you particularly to the Antimony of Taste, sections 56 and 57 (about two thirds of the way down the page). This explains the section of the Critique in which Kant shows that taste is not based on concepts but that judgments of taste can nevertheless be intersubjectively valid.

This argument, perhaps unfortunately, relies heavily on Kant’s preceding critiques, where he claims to show that there must be something beyond what we perceive to “ground” what we perceive. Although we can’t have rational, determinate-conceptual knowledge of that something beyond (the “suprasensible”) we know it is there because it logically has to be there (according to Kant). Its existence allows us to know things and to say that there is truth and falsehood, a “matter of fact” about the things we experience.

In his solution to the Antimony of Taste, Kant uses this same argument. We know there are judgments of taste, so Kant asks what makes these judgments possible. His answer is the suprasensible. Judgments of taste are, as Van den Braembussche has it, “rooted” in the suprasensible. Since they’re rooted in something, there is a fact of the matter about them. Hence, they cannot be relative.

There is an important point here about the difference between being proven by rational concepts and referring to concepts, as well as an important distinction between determinate and indeterminate concepts. I won’t try to rehash this, because I think the link I referenced above does a better job than I could. Suffice it to say that a complete relativism of taste does not follow from the claim that we cannot prove the beauty of a thing using concepts.

And, yes, judgments of taste do have an inherent claim to universality, as you point out, but that claim to universality is also justified, according to Kant. It’s a mistake to think that the claim to universal validity contains an implication that judgment of taste does NOT have such validity.

 Aurelio: To what great fortune do I owe this dialogue we’re having?  I have tried to ask people about Kant’s aesthetics before & have been unable to get a reply.  Now that you’re here, I’d like to thank you for the time.

Okay, so Kant is not arguing for an aesthetic relativism & what he writes confirms this:

 (§ 57) “Solution of the antinomy of Taste: …The judgement of taste must refer to some concept; otherwise it could make absolutely no claim to be necessarily valid for every one. But it is not therefore capable of being proved from a concept; because a concept may be either determinable or in itself undetermined and undeterminable. The concepts of the Understanding are of the former kind; they are determinable through predicates of sensible intuition which can correspond to them. But the transcendental rational concept of the supersensible, which lies at the basis of all sensible intuition, is of the latter kind, and therefore cannot be theoretically determined further.

[…] the judgement of taste is based on a concept (viz. the concept of the general ground of the subjective purposiveness of nature for the Judgement); from which, however, nothing can be known and proved in respect of the Object, because it is in itself undeterminable and useless for knowledge. Yet at the same time and on that very account the judgement has validity for every one (though of course for each only as a singular judgement immediately accompanying his intuition); because its determining ground lies perhaps in the concept of that which may be regarded as the supersensible substrate of humanity.”

From what The Curator has pointed-out & Kant seems to be saying is that there is a kind of “justification” for the claim to universality & that it is not arbitrary, but it does not present itself easily.  It is (oddly enough) a concept, but one that is “the transcendental rational concept of the supersensible, which lies at the basis of all sensible intuition.”

Now that we (may) have found a common ground, (untrammeled) I’ll continue to ask: can we agree to acknowledge a diversity of opinion & or taste?  Are we the unable to accept a difference of taste?  Should we all agree the same thing is beautiful or ugly?  Does my taste have to be the same as yours?  Perhaps these questions are restrained by Kant’s presumed specificity, orthodoxy & parochialism, or invalidated by his antinomy of taste.  Yet I’m of the mind to see Kant as an authority on aesthetical  convolutions & am always willing to bend for my own views, while allowing for the good/bad taste of others.  I’d be happy to read anymore of The Curator’s response & to thank him/her again for the fine Kantian clarifications. 

 Aurelio Madrid

on kant’s aesthetics

Joachim Koester The Kant Walk #6, 2003-2004, framed color photograph, 81cm x 69cm

 …now a few notes on three sections (§) from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment.  Keep in mind that we’ll be speaking of Kant’s ideas in terms of aesthetic judgments concerning art (broadly & generally coloring outside the lines), rather than natural beauty per se.  It is clear that he made distinctions between art & natural beauty & their respective judgments, those refinements will not be examined.

 (§ 1) “The judgment of taste is aesthetical: …The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be none other than subjective.”

Here we have from Kant that an aesthetic judgment of beauty is not only subjective, but that it also cannot be understood cognitively (hence it cannot be defined by concepts as he states later).  The subjective manner by which we apprehend beauty is a revelation.  Beauty itself relaxes the subject from the responsibility to have to justify their aesthetic judgment.  The subject is released, allowing the feeling of beauty to be contained within our experience, within a feeling of pleasure.  Kant’s notion of the subjectivity of the beautiful, relinquishes one from the boundaries of cultural taste & its oppressive taste-dictums.  It is made clear (by Kant) that a judgment of taste is purely subjective (we’ll look at why this is problematic when speaking of his idea of subjective-universality).  Sometimes we’ll revel in the beautiful, saying it is this or that, detailing its every feature, explaining its intricacies.  These explanations of the beautiful are not always what beauty is.  Kant repeats over & over, that beauty cannot be summed up with concepts.  Yes, we can speak of its features, but we can never define it, we can never fully understand it.  Beauty itself cannot be defined.

Nehemas said that “there can be no experts on beauty.”  Although this is presumably true, there are no lack of experts, connoisseurs, critics, taste-purveyors & aesthetes who will claim their authority in matters of beauty.  It should be clear that we will need to consult an expert from time to time & we can also rely on experts to enhance our own appreciation of beauty (but not to define it).  We can simply start with the beautiful & move from there to the critic &/or connoisseur (when looking at art) to help us understand the object more in depth.  At the same time we can see that it is our own subjective desire to enhance understanding & learning about that which we find beautiful.  An expert can give us a historical perspective, or he can speak to the object’s uniqueness, or its ingenuity, or even to why he finds the object beautiful & worthy of attention.  The critic shouldn’t be ignored either.  She too can give us a position that we didn’t see before, or a vantage that is not readily apparent.  Just be aware that they can’t tell you what beauty is, that’s your job, and they’re there to help.          

(§ 17) “Of the Ideal of beauty: There can be no objective rule of taste which shall determine by means of concepts what is beautiful. For every judgment from this source is aesthetical; i.e. the feeling of the subject, and not a concept of the Object, is its determining ground. To seek for a principle of taste which shall furnish, by means of definite concepts, a universal criterion of the beautiful is fruitless trouble; because what is sought is impossible and self-contradictory…”

 Kant must be saying & reaffirming that we cannot pin-point beauty with a theorem, an equation, nor a concept.  When we claim a particular object is beautiful, we can’t explain exactly why.  As much as we may think there are laws governing taste & the appreciation for the beautiful, Kant reveals this to be false & without presumed or real authority.  Once we see the choice (of what we see as beautiful) as our own & truly without presupposed concepts—we’ll start to (& should) loosen the tyranny on what others find beautiful & worthy of aesthetic judgment.  If we don’t understand this we’ll continue to claim aesthetic authority over others (deemed as having poor-taste or some other presumed taste deficit) & vice-versa we’ll allow the aesthetic taste of others to infiltrate our own whether they know better or not.  Again, this is not to say that one cannot speak with expertise on a given object, your own taste will determine who you listen to & who you’ll disregard.     

(§ 22) “The necessity of the universal agreement that is thought in a judgment of taste is a subjective necessity, which is represented as objective under the presupposition of a common sense: In all judgments by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion; without however grounding our judgment on concepts but only on our feeling, which we therefore place at its basis not as a private, but as a communal feeling. Now this common sense cannot be grounded on experience; for it aims at justifying judgments which contain an ought.  It does not say that every one will agree with my judgment, but that he ought…”

This will be referred to as Kant’s aesthetic theory of subjective universality.  How this is understood is debatable.  We’ll take it to mean that when a sombody finds a particular object beautiful, she places this feeling (of beauty) into a supposition of universal agreement.  Basically if you find something beautiful, within that aesthetic judgment is a desire to universalize that judgment, i.e. everyone “should/ought to” agree with your sense of the beautiful.  How often do we feel that taste is foisted upon us by others?  Have you ever tried to convince someone that you find something beautiful, when they just can’t see it?  This is a common problem of aesthetics.  The assumption usually is that: What I find beautiful, everyone must find beautiful. 

The acknowledgment of this notion presents a great insight.  Kant is suggesting that with our aesthetic judgment of beauty, we appeal to the taste of others to also find the same thing beautiful.  As it is laid-out, the conflict arises: not everyone agrees on what is beautiful & what is not.  Now we can see each other as different with differing tastes & not always in agreement.  Here we can come to terms with our own differences with respect to others.  Once I respect that your taste is just as irrational as my own, then we’ll be moving toward understanding & we’ll allow each other to find beauty wherever we can, whatever it is… Understand that everyone’s concept of beauty has at it base a universalizing quality & you’ll be less inclined to bicker & squabble over an argument with no clear winners.  There is no accounting for taste. 

 Thank you Kant,

Aurelio Madrid

el sueño de la razón produce monstruos

Francisco Goya, 1797

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters), Plate 43 of The Caprichos

Etching, aquatint (drypoint & burin), 8 7/16” x 5 7/8”

Yinka Shonibare

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Australia), 2008

C-print mounted on aluminum, 72” x 49 ½”, 81 ½” x 58” x 2 ½” (framed), Edition of 5

 

Who has dreamt that someday we’ll see the truth & let go of old ideologies that cause suffering in this world?  Who has dreamt that an old & ancient bias cannot go away, unless we face the monsters that dwell inside each of us–all of us?

In the Enlightenment people began to question ecclesiastical authority.  Intellectuals were compelled to critique royal hierarchies.  People also sought to bring rationality & reason to our understanding of the world, the heavens & mankind.  The dream was a world where all are equal. 

In the waning years of the Enlightenment (the 1790’s) Francisco Goya (1746-1828) published a series of aquatinted etchings: Los Caprichios.  The prints were a wide-ranging vision of man’s vice, man’s foibles & man’s weakness.  Goya’s moralistic vision is salty, dirtier & closer to humanity than his English peers Hogarth or Rowlandson.  He is said to be the first modernist.  Goya depicted man’s real demons, which are: man’s hidden truths.

Within the Caprichios are a few prints known as the Sueño’s (sleep & dreams).  The thematic device of dreams & dreaming allowed Goya a certain critical freedom & less official scrutiny.  The most famous of the (Sueño) Caprichos is: El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, ca.1797).  This print (in several versions) should’ve been a frontispiece for the Caprichios.  The print was not so much satirical, as it was an allegory of reason &/or truth.

About 211 years later (2008) the British born Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare (1962- ) quoted, re-used, appropriated, re-staged & was inspired by Goya’s well-known print.

Shonibare kept most of Goya’s image the same.  The owls in Goya’s original (that symbolized foolishness, not wisdom), the bats (that symbolized stupidity) & the lynx (that signified a clear vision of the truth) are all delightfully brought to life in Shonibare’s re-make.  The sleeping man does change ethnicity in Shonibare’s five C-prints.  The man in Goya’s print is the artist himself.  Shonibare clad his man in Goya’s costume, except that the outfit is made from Shonibare’s favorite fabric: Dutch wax cotton.  This fabric is used in most of Shonibare’s artistic output.  The fabric is a multicultural metaphor.  The artist is quick to reveal that the fabric’s connection to Africa is intentional, but it also has more of a global (& colonial) past.  The fabric is sold in London by the Dutch & it is based on Indonesian designs, and then exported to West Africa & elsewhere.

In the original where Goya had written that the sleep of reason produces monsters, Shonibare instead asks in French (underscoring the multicultural motif) “Does the sleep of reason produce monsters in America (& Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia)?”  Each of the 5 C-prints represent a continent (South America must be considered one with [North] America).

Shonibare’s tableaux-vivants refresh Goya’s allegory by enlarging & re-contextualizing the question of reason (or the absence thereof).   He seeks to re-inhabit history with questions of how it is viewed & how it can be re-framed or re-argued.  The Enlightenment sought to critique the prevailing canon.  Shonibare wants us to question our own age & its complicated sense of reason with a more global multi-cultural vision.  Goya would’ve been proud.

–Aurelio Madrid

what is contemporary art?

 

Thomas Demand
“Shed” 2006
C-Print/ Diasec
177 x 200cm

“…it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying.” –Theodor Adorno

What is contemporary art?  When we engage this gigantic question, we’re thrust into an enormous labyrinth of possible conclusions.  How to define or even describe the Hydra-headed beast with the elusive name: Contemporary Art?

The strategy will be to (hopefully) define some basic (but very slippery) terms. Other terms, concepts & genres will inevitably appear along the way & we’ll tackle those as needed.  Meanwhile (simultaneously) small examples (with hyperlinks of art & artists) will be given from the broad range of the pluralistic & contradictory term: CA (contemporary art).  The examples are not definitive, or exhaustive.  This is intended to be a casual introduction, not a formal dissertation. 

Often, CA leads to more & more questions.  This implies a certain inquisitiveness to find the answers (or it leads to more questions).  However, one need not always interrogate, since CA can be enjoyed by merely looking, enjoying & then appreciating.  Also, we’ll be discussing (only) visual art & not music, architechture, the performing-arts &/or literature.

Let’s start with part of the question 1st.  What is art?  Art is usually defined as a man-made object (&/or idea) of aesthetic concern/beauty.  Concern & beauty are spilt to demonstrate that art does not have to be beautiful, but it usually has an aesthetic “concern.”  This concern can be many things at once (including beauty).  An aesthetic concern might be how to make an all white painting, think Robert Ryman & his explorations of a singular motif (a white painting). Another aesthetic concern may be how far to push the limits of taste, or more specifically polite taste.  An artist who recently passed-away, Dash Snow, constantly pushed the borderline of acceptable taste & conventions with his revolting glittered newspapers & other artistic-spasms.   And yet another aesthetic concern (from any number of possibilities) could be, the great Marcel Duchamp’s (now) mythical questioning of art itself with his “Fountain.”  The question itself (What is art?) seems to be important when looking at Duchamp & of course all of CA.  One might see it as a kind of game, indeed a game we are still obsessively playing.[i]

Can art be a set of instructions for a painting by Sol Lewitt?  Can art be getting shot in the arm, as with Chris Burden’s “Shoot?” Art can be an idea & an action.[ii]  Can art be a Prada shoe-store in the middle of the desert, as with Elmgreen & Dragset?[iii]  We see that the questions lead many directions, everywhere & all at once.  The questioning of the definition of art itself is one that is continuously asked & redefined.  I presume the question will not let go anytime soon & it is a characteristic trend of CA now.

Thinking of Duchamp, another term stubbornly attaches itself & will not let go—the avant-garde.  The avant-garde & its relationship to CA, is a fundamental artistic tradition too.  Understand that the avant-garde tradition is well-worn & these days a “little” ironic at the same time.[iv] The avant-garde might be (most of the artists already mentioned &) an artist like Olaf Breuning who delights in offending good taste & common conventions like: what is good art & what is ugly or bad art?  Remember Christoph Büchel’s interiors that drag the viewer inside the mind of the homeless, the neurotic & so on.  Think also of Wim Delvoye’s digestive machines: Cloaca, that replicate the digestive process.  These examples should give a general sense of the avant-garde as a trend in CA.

A term that I want to attach now is hermeticism.[v]Although the term is not used widely, the concept (or trend) is rampant & omnipresent in the general practice (dare we say praxis) of CA.  Hanne Darboven’s art[vi] is a good example of hermeticism.  Her counting & examinations of time are vivid reminders that her actual intent was elusive & not easily understood.  The multi-faceted installations of Cosima von Bonin can be hermetic, with her personal references, cultural hints & often opaque meanings, done in a visual language that’s not always transparent.  Matthew Barney is also emblematic of the hermetic, in particular his “Cremaster Cycle.” The prevalence of coded signs & hidden meanings may signify that art can (as part of its general aesthetic) have a sense of mystery, a sense of the unknown, and the enigmatic.[vii]  Hermeticism in CA is endless & overloaded, just don’t take it personally, its part of the game!  

This nuanced entrenchment of the unknown can also be part of CA’s beauty.  Keep in mind that a sense of beauty in art is impossible to pin down.  CA can also demonstrate how the concept of beauty can be many things, to many people.  Think of Thomas Demand’s photographs as distillations of reality, with his paper versions of historically accurate scenes.  That’s beautiful to some, yet confounding to others.  The beautiful is not absent from CA’s discourse, but as the meaning of art is consistently questioned, so is the meaning of beauty. 

Now that we’ve touched on numerous trends & ideas, let’s not forget a few more trends & ideas.  One is Pop-art, or more appropriately its legacy.  Some might refer to the trend as Post-pop art (although this term is typically not used).  Basically this is art “after” Andy Warhol,  Roy Lichtenstein &c.  Here I find someone like Shepard Fairey to be a perfect example of this trend now, down to his use of popular imagery as source material.[viii]  Jeff Koons embraces & evokes consumer (pop) culture with his finely tuned, over-polished & highly desirable objects, while at the same time embracing the whimsical & mundane.  Koons’ working method also reflects Warhol’s factory & thereby mimics a mass-produced, made-to-sell product.  With this trend we also have questions of authenticity, originality, piracy, the copy &c.[ix]  The post-pop trend also questions well-worn (art-world) hierarchies, such as high-brow vs. low brow.  Recall Cady Noland’s engulfing cans of Budweiser, walkers & her depictions of Charles Manson groupies.   

So the Pop legacy is everywhere in CA. Yet another theme emerges that shouldn’t be overlooked: specialization.  As Koons was a good example of the (post) pop-tradition, he also carries over as a good example of specialization.  This trend of specialization is also linked to the sciences, as with Olafur Eliasson’s experiments with light, weather, water, sound &c.  Also think of Mark Dion’s courting of the (natural) sciences to expose a deeper meaning from the work of science, while critiquing it, all at once.  Damian Hirst too, consistently exemplifies specialization.  Just think of his famous vitrines & pseudo-pharmacies.  All of that work requires an array of experts & specialists to get to the final product.  No doubt, the CA object is subject to the forces of technology & innovation, exploring the boundaries of science, art & commerce.[x] 

The repurposing of everyday objects is also an important CA trend.[xi]  Who could forget Tom Friedman’s cereal boxes or his colored-paper traumas?  Tara Donovan’s epic statements with 1,000’s of plastic cups or drinking straws, surely speak to this ever-morphing trend.       

CA is pluralistic, divided & contradictory.  This multivalent quality is also a trend.  The photo-realism & abstraction of Gerhard Richter makes this clear.  On one hand you have the fantastic manipulation of the painted surface with his abstractions.  At the same time we also can appreciate the subtlety of his gentle life-like candle or flower photo-realism.  Speaking of slightly schiziod (with a dollop of irony) we should look at Martin Kippenberger.  Kippenberger aligned himself with a kind of quantity-over-quality aesthetic, while at the same time dazzling us with his multiplicity.  His art is like a DIY-CA group show, composed on a heroic scale.  It is probably worth it to bring in Joseph Beuys[xii] as an example of trying to be all things, to all people: teacher, artist, mystic, everyman &c.  His art appears to be hermetic, divided, avant-garde & questioning.  Beuys might be the paterfamilias of CA.  He helped lay the groundwork for what was to follow.  He can’t be forgotten.

It should be clear by now that we’ll never come close to explaining the complicated terrain of CA in all its fascinating fits, miasmas & emulations.  We see that CA is about questioning, taste-issues, the avant garde, beauty, irony, contradiction, plurality, the everyday, originality & so on!  Art is a reflection of our society & whether we look at ourselves through its lens, or our own—we are still mystified & perplexed.  Perplexity can cause us to question.  After reading this, pick up an art magazine, flip through it, look at the ads & read an article.[xiii]  Or if you’re around an art gallery, or museum showing CA, drop in & look around, see what you like, learn a little more about it.  Look up an artist online, keep going, and indulge your curiosity.  Contemporary art isn’t slowing down, painting is not dead, and the end of art is not upon us.  Why would anyone stop making it?  Why would anyone stop looking?

–Aurelio Madrid  

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[i] I see Duchamp as a forefather to CA, however his art not usually considered to be CA-proper.   His influence on CA cannot be underestimated.

[ii] Chris Burden probably wouldn’t call himself a conceptualist, but we’ll use him here as a proxy, a stand in for the conceptualists (where the idea was everything).  Sol Lewitt’s instructions are probably a better example.

[iii] A few of the examples (artists) were also considered minimalists, (Ryman, Lewitt, & Burden: also known as a performance artist).   Duchamp: also is a modernist might be known as a Dadaist (& even a surrealist to some).  Elmgreen & Dragset may also be said to work in a minimalist vein, & are still more broadly known as CA (contemporary artists).  Classifications that were once fashionable are usually no longer used.  Typically critics no longer use the ‘isms, better yet, no new ‘isms are used, only the “old” ones: modernism, post-modernism, minimalism, conceptualism, Pop-art &c.  The old terms are used, but usually only as something that has past.  Rarely do you read about any new “movements” in art, they seem to be a thing of the past.  You will however, hear about trends (or genres) such as video, performance, craft, goth, graffiti-art, globalization digital art &c.  To be clear, classifications now usually tend toward the most general art terms: painting, sculpture, video art, performance, installation &c.

[iv] The avant-garde was usually an affront to tradition in the 1^st place.  Funny that it is now a tradition. 

[v] Not to be confused with mystical hermeticism, but my use of the term does share aspects of it: esoterica & the like.  Also look at Secret Society.

[vi] Hanne Darboven (1941-2009) sadly passed away this year.  Here is an obit. from Artforum.  She is known as a conceptualist.

[vii] Theodor Adorno speaks at length on the notion of the enigma in art.  David Ferris helps to understand Adorno’s concept in this paper.  Adorno’s use of the term Modernism can also apply to CA.

[viii] Fairey’s practice is also related to appropriation art which in turn also has a strong link to Pop art.

[ix] Look at Predicting the Present.

[x] Hirst’s diamond skull “For the Love of God,” is famous for pushing the boundries of commerce & art-practice.

[xi] Now we’re back to Duchamp & his readymade ideas, now everywhere.

[xii] …of course Joseph Bueys was considered by some to be a fluxist, but he can also be a conceptualist & performance artist.

[xiii] Art in America, Artforum, Frieze, Art Review, Flash Art, Modern Painters, &c.