VIVISECTION


"The same formidable question that has been haunting the world for two centuries is about to be posed again everywhere: How can the poor be made to work once their illusions have been shattered, and once force has been defeated?"
(Guy Debord, from the preface to the 3rd French edition of 'The Society of the Spectacle')

I arrived at, and was somehow was relieved by, the conclusion that within a frame defined by the ambitious title, ´The New Art´, you´re hardly expected to say anything but regrettable things. On the one hand, it is so much outdated to confront the question of novelty. On the other, it is so much supposed to be about the content (who the hell dreams of new forms?), while content somehow has never been the stronger part of visual art. In addition, a kind of malice is easily detectable in HTV´s proposal, as if with their new issue they wanted to contribute to the alleged decline of art. At least by pushing their artist-contributors in the darkest state of disunity with their practice. But, at the end of the day, everyone who from time to time feels guilty for being an intruder in Art, everyone operating on the final deconstruction of it, cannot but agree.

For its size - both quantitatively and qualitatively, as compared to that extensive richness displayed by late capitalist creativity industry and, in dialectic relationship with it, by the creativity of pop resistance - art in general should deserve and require lesser attention. If it is about efficiency, then it would do itself good by taking sides with one (or both!) of the above mentioned magnetic fields and by burning its own bridges. Well, apart from maybe being overly realistic - although this is quite what is happening - this might also sound slightly masochistic; but let us just call it the ´melancholy of realism´.

While kind of working in art, a question often emerges: 'What is this in which I am participating?' My option is to answer with the repeated gesture of getting rid of every certainty, every reliable direction suggested by continuously changing streams of thought. This will make you proceed quite slowly and will make you 'weakly thin' mentally. Out of the assumed duty of being as much present in the present tense as humanly possible you easily develop a case of cultural bulimia. Nevertheless, I don't think it is good to ignore this question, and it is here where the motto by Debord makes sense to me, though my conclusions are a bit different.

Let us try to see what can be considered as relatively ´new´ in culture, in a broader sense. And just what it is that can motivate such an excited self-destruction in art.

'No Logo' by Naomi Klein starts with the realization that for the author's generation the overwhelming discourse on civil rights and emancipatory politics of the eighties and nineties (gender studies, multiculturalism, civil rights movements and the likes) formed an intellectual cloud. Under this cloud the multinational corporations could make their route to the absolute domination over the world practically unchallenged, even unnoticed at the beginning. We can clearly perceive the turning point around the millennium when economic foundations of the system have again been put in the focus, just like it had happened following Marx' work. Since then talking about new art has increasingly meant talking about capitalism, at least within the kind of art I have an eye and an ear for.

As art became aware of, and since that time has been unable to fully liberate itself from, Marx' conclusions, it has started - with the historical avant-garde - its long term project of liquidating its bodily essence. Visual art's militancy was louder and more radical than in other domains of artistic creation. The price to be paid was the loss of its language, primarily its visuality. The prize to win was to become accustomed to the exposure to crises, to the extent that what ought to be vulnerability now seems to be its new medium. Art today stands in an empty field where winds blow. I cannot but respect today's art for this radicalism; there is something heroic in this consistency of following a political/ideological conviction. It might be a consequence of the fact that Marx has shown the 'real stuff´ that culture in general is dependent on material foundations, economics, politics, class power and its strategies; it belongs to the 'edifice' as opposed to the 'foundation'.

On the level of theory, art could still lurk within the edifice of leftist aesthetics offered by Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, Balazs and others. But this attempt failed with the S.I. and Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle' (1967), in which he extended Marx' conclusions on Marx himself as well as on all sorts of intellectual and artistic activity or commitment that are not proceeding simultaneously with the construction of 'situations'. Debord denounced art for although it appeared to be challenging it, it in fact simply enriched the matrix of the increasingly co-optive system.

Then the world's, and Debord's own, fight against these conclusions started. In a small volume called 'Comments on the Society of the Spectacle' (1984), he introduces the term of 'integrated spectacle'. This was the evolved form of the new world order. But we can suspect that this integrated spectacle is nothing less than the spectacle that 'knows that you know that it knows'. That is, the spectacle that in the meanwhile integrated Debord himself.

In my first socialisation, under Hungary's soft-communist regime, I perceived culture's detachment from other aspects of social/political life as absolute. Due to those special circumstances created by the 'double-language' system of those regimes - the first one was the official language that virtually no-one perceived as real, the second was the one of that large scale hidden consensus, dissident towards communist ideology, which developed its content and conclusions largely out of the negation of the first one - reality itself was in a way simply independent from its perception. The second discourse in turn was where contemporary art could reign in its most independent, flourishing, quasi-philosophical appearance, out of the energies gained from censorship on the one hand, and from the hidden consensus on the other. Was it good art? Not at all. But it was art that was in the focus of attention and had an impact. At the end of the communist regime when capitalism came to rule, art's philosophical character, its inherited detachment distance from reality had lost its bases. Dissident approaches towards capitalism were encoded within the official discourse of the previous regime. Thus they couldn't make room in the 'real' one. And so, after a short and extremely disgusting transition, we had to socialise again. We had to discover what ´political´ and ´social´ means at all. Later on we had to realise just how much our expertise in not relating to reality could be put to good use under the changed circumstances.

At that point it was a lucky and fertile coincidence that I got in contact with situationist ideas, albeit in that childish and naïve form in which they were rediscovered and reinterpreted around the end of the nineties. I perceived this rediscovery and reinterpretation in the art world as somewhat of a parallel to what was happening in politics, with the rise of the anti globalisation movement. Unfortunately I went in to deep: I just finished translating ´The Society of the Spectacle´ in Hungarian. Now I am busy finding the way out of the dangerous tendency I found in myself after having confronted the apocalyptic Debordian method. It is a real ´vertigo of dialectics´, which at the end of the day is nothing else than a binary slide on which you are only supposed to improve the path of your fall.

A lot of effort has gone into opening a new field for reality-based activity in the cultural domain. Hierarchical expressions suggesting totalitarian tendencies have been replaced by names that extend the possibility of participation while trusting the ´weak power´ (de Certeau) to bring it on. Spectacle today is called ´visual culture´, proletariat is ´multitude´, revolution is ´tactics of everyday life´, dialectical relationship is 'multiple engagement'. Art is still called art, just as capitalism is still called capitalism. It might be this formal integrity that gives me the idea that talking about new art indeed means talking about capitalism.

In this talking there is something of the sensory manipulations of a child that sees things for the first time, or, rather, of the tendencies of an overly intelligent teenager that fills newly learned expressions and concepts with her/his newly born anger and loneliness. At the same time, artists rarely speak about how sad they happen to be, about how much they need to be taken by the hand and walked through the forest (sorry). Objectively, current discourses in art use very little of the available individual power, they lack the emphasis of the affirming subject. Since for the allegedly new art the main enemy has been personified, with good reason, by the omnipotent individual artist. Along with this omnipotent artist comes a kind of reductionism to formulas and to objectivity and rationality. There is a real danger that this can end up in vague empathy, sympathy, common places that stand for social sensitivity and in an overly institutionalised framework which extends itself over even the most intimate domains of the individual. All of this unless the position from which to talk becomes more stable. Stability in this sense can be gained by conceiving the inherited weakness of art as a strength.

[Miklos Erhardt]