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Endure This Now: Literalist Art, Performance Art, and the Enigma¹

Eleanor Ivory Weber

Introduction

In 1967 the American art historian Michael Fried published an essay that would become very famous called “Art and Objecthood”.² It was an iconic and rather scathing critique of the visual art movement that came to be known as Minimalism. Fried had another name for the Minimalists, he called them “literalists”. This is a term we seek to revive from history and put to work today. Taking up the case of large-scale contemporary performance art to parallel Minimalist art under the umbrella of literalism, our aim is to observe dynamics in art’s discourse which may have analogues in broader society and politics, particularly as they pertain to communication and subjectivity.

What we seek to analyse is the logic at work in the discourse of Minimalism, via the statements of its early proponents themselves. What we do not offer is analyses or histories of the artworks in question as artworks. That would be for another text. Rather we ask: how does the logic inherent to the Minimalist discourse, which Fried critiqued nearly sixty years ago, reappear today? This text, therefore, claims no authority pertaining to the artworks in question’s importance or lack thereof, their interpretation, their significance in museum or curatorial studies, or their impact on the market. Instead it tries to perform a kind of discourse analysis by a close reading of “Art and Objecthood”, and contemporary claims by Minimalist artists themselves. And to parallel this with contemporary examples.

This does not mean we are invested in claiming in historicist fashion that the discourse advanced by the literalists about themselves is the only one to be taken seriously. Needless to say, artworks do not necessarily produce the effects or material consequences that the discourse around them alleges. Furthermore, the political consequences we suggest their discourse implies should not be read as shorthand for the political views of the individual artists in question, which is a separate issue on which we have no comment. Nonetheless, what is said about what an artwork is doing by artists and institutions provides ground for understanding the operation of a cultural discourse, namely literalism.

A final note by way of introduction. Fried’s refusal to engage in the political economy of artworks is notable, yet we will suggest his polemic about literalism lends itself to a critique of political economy that he would disavow. We will finally discuss some examples of contemporary performance artists whose work, we claim, carries on the literalist tradition to differing degrees. To extend Fried’s critique of literalism, we are informed by more recent critical theoretical interventions in philosophy and visual culture by renowned Lacanian theorists.³ Finally, this research also wants to bring the word ‘literalist’ back into circulation, both as a superior denomination for what their movement stood for – wholeness, immediate experience and rejection of mediation – and to bring contemporary resonance to the term

Literalists defining literalism⁴

Literalist art aspires to occupy a position in relation to modernist painting and modernist sculpture, against which it claims a ‘disinterested’ view, while it ultimately seeks an equal footing with them. The literalists are critical of painting for two main reasons: 1) painting’s relational character: the fact that painting is not independent, it contains elements, and these elements interrelate, produce space; and 2) painting’s inescapable problem of pictorial illusion: what is depicted is not real experience but mere illusion.⁵ As the Lacanians would say, literalists are not dupes.

We may ask: When do artforms indeed create new positions and when do they simply aspire to occupy the place of existing ones, to win the discursive battle? What does this warlike structure imply for the ‘new’ artform? Are not all forms reliant on prior ones, in order to come into being? Does this not suggest prior relations inhere in the new position? “Much of the motivation in the new work is to get clear of these forms”, writes Donald Judd in his 1964 text “Specific Objects”.⁶ Indeed, Judd took a (historicist) stance on this question, offering his teleological view as follows:

New work always involves objections to the old, but these objections are really relevant only to the new. They are part of it. If the earlier work is first-rate it is complete. New inconsistencies and limitations aren’t retroactive; they concern only work that is being developed. Obviously, three-dimensional work will not cleanly succeed painting and sculpture. [...] The new work exceeds painting in plain power, but power isn’t the only consideration, though the difference between it and expression can’t be too great either. There are other ways than power and form in which one kind of art can be more or less than another.⁷

For literalists, the move from one-dimensional to three-dimensional work is itself a resolution to the problem of pictorial illusion. Their idea is that three-dimensionality reduces illusion because it confronts the viewer. Indeed, Judd disdains that “space in and around marks and colours”.⁸ He writes that with the riddance of illusionism, “[t]he several limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be. Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”⁹ Let us note, then, about Minimalist art, on its own terms:

the idea that limits can be eliminated the idea that the thought of the artist determines the power of the artwork the idea that “actual space” is more powerful than “paint on a flat surface” the idea that there is something “intrinsic” to space, in and of itself

In addition to their desire to establish the absolute redundancy of pictorial painting, such artists want to establish the non-identity of their ‘new’ work and sculpture. At least nominally, their works are not sculpture. The literalist artists wish to distance themselves from these earlier forms because they are “made part by part, by addition, composed”,¹⁰ where “specific elements […] separate from the whole, thus setting up relationships within the work.”¹¹ Instead, literalist artists “assert the values of wholeness, singleness and indivisibility—of a work’s being, as nearly as possible, ‘one thing’”.¹² Fried quotes artist Robert Morris saying he wishes “to avoid divisiveness”; the artworks are “known shape[s]”. Morris’ “unitary forms” are supposed to resist any view that sees them as anything other than a “single shape”. Perhaps we could say they wish to resist interpretation.¹³

Judd, for his part, believes anything that is not “absolutely plain”¹⁴ risks becoming partial. Rather, this work “is simply order”.¹⁵ Here we should understand “plain” in two senses of the word: firstly as ‘without ornament’ and secondly as ‘evident’, ‘obvious’ and ‘clear’. Fried quotes Judd at length, trying to convey his bullish overall idea that an artwork must be whole, not in parts: “when you start relating parts, in the first place, you’re assuming you have a vague whole—the rectangle of the canvas—and definite parts, which is all screwed up, because you should have a definite whole and maybe no parts, or very few”.¹⁶ For Judd, the new three-dimensional work, and the kinds of painting that deal with the rectangle itself, not with the parts making up a picture, quite simply ‘overpower’ earlier works.

We note that the rhetoric of unity, simplicity and wholeness, derives from the artist positively determining the power of the artwork. Wholeness and, by extension, purity and simplicity are claimed as the new artistic values per se. Judd: “The one thing overpowers the earlier painting.”¹⁷ Although one may speculate that it’s here a synonym for ‘meaning’ or ‘value’, we read that, at bottom, Judd’s concern is power. His theory of power – and that of literalism writ large – is one that derives from unity, oneness, the whole.

There is explicitly no conflict and no contradiction. This is because the notion of composition has been removed, or elided. The preposition com- or con-, i.e. with, has one use in their lexicon: confrontation. In this they implore us to think wholeness without contradiction, wanting self-evidence and self-identity. Judd writes: “It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate.”¹⁸

Connection, community, Communism, communion presuppose a partiality that literalist artists refuse. Partiality should resound in two ways: both in the sense of being inclined or biased towards, and in the sense of being limited or not complete. Partiality evokes relation. In her most recent book, cultural theorist Anna Kornbluh outlines the stakes of propagating “[a] literalism of content”¹⁹ across the fields of writing, video and theory: “Immediacy’s surfacing of extreme affect poses as liberatory—authentic, righteous, spontaneous, unrepressed—but its delegitimation of mediation and auto-authority of presence, the impatience for intensity and the convicted certainties, vandalize relation.”²⁰

This idea of relation, rather than simply being any relation, should be understood strictly as meaning the form of a subjective question (with all the social determinants this arouses), a difference, which implies some minus, some negative, something that would be beyond or beneath the artwork’s comprehension of itself (as pure power). As we will argue later on, this literalist position of a whole whose parts will only ever be the sum of the whole is paradigmatic for our contemporary moment. And this is not to ignore or deny the masculinist position that Judd and Morris take up in their discourse, but to show how this logic perpetuates, even in works which may name themselves feminist.

Incompleteness (theatricality bridge)

The well-known analysis of Michael Fried is that literalist (Minimalist) artworks are “theatrical”. Let’s simply note here that theatre, for Fried, is at war with art, and theatre is that which has an audience and exists for one (think: entertainment). So, to be sure, not all theatre is theatre in Fried’s sense. Some theatre might be art. For our purposes, suggestively, what Fried is pointing to is the problem of ‘knowing your audience’; that is, of the audience being discursively predetermined. And, although Fried doesn’t say it, we would add, this is the problem of commodified experience. Fried uses the concept of theatricality to describe works that include the viewer and the given space or situation of its display within the remit of the artwork. Inclusion here would mean then that any experience or observation of the work would be considered as the situation of the work; as part of the work. There is no sense (or power) this work might produce that has not been retroactively pre-ordained by it. Also, in the absolute, Minimalists reject sense.

We might ask ourselves how it can be that literalists seek at once to include any experience of the work in its very being, and at the same time want their works to be ‘whole’, ‘single’ and certainly not compositional? Logically, we want to suggest these two claims are contradictory and in fact the former (the claim that any experience, response, interpretation of the work is self-same to the work) describes more accurately the work’s inconclusiveness. We do not mean to suggest that the viewer/public ‘conclude’ the work but rather that a work cannot include everything.

How can a work be inconclusive and whole at the same time? By claiming the situation – the light, the space, the body of the viewer (today we would include the smartphone) –, literalists, rather than undermining the desired wholeness of their art, in fact simply overdetermine any experience of it. To repeat: the literalist whole refuses parts even as it claims them retrospectively as having always been there. The logic is analogous to surveillance capitalism or a panopticon. It implies that any negativity or resistance to the ideology is predictable; any reply, analysis or critical thought will appear necessarily as a mere effect of the work itself. How can it matter that the viewer is there if she is just an effect of power?²¹

Let us pause on this bridge-concept ‘theatricality’, leading us to performance art as a contemporary form of literalism. The word ‘theatrical’ spontaneously evokes works like Marc Camille Chamowicz’ Celebration? Realife (1972) or more recently Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ ‘golden curtain’ (Untitled (Golden), 1995), and perhaps director Baz Luhrmann’s entire oeuvre. However, the camp aesthetics of these artists seems far from the controlled singularism of the literalists. In what way, for Michael Fried, are literalists engaged in theatricality? Literalist works exert not only the aggressiveness Donald Judd proudly affirmed but also the complicity of the viewer. Their works are exercises in blunt particularity, insisting on the it-ness of themselves, rejecting the non-complete meaning that composition implies in favour of a sort of self-contained skepticism.

Literalist works seek to render indistinct the work of art, on the one hand, and the experience of viewing it, on the other. This produces a kind of authority by and of indifference, whereby the viewer’s presence is tacitly commanded, and so is predetermined, yet it is also dismissed, inconsequential. Literalism’s ideal viewer becomes aware of herself through being confronted by the presence and power of the work, yet she is not in relation to it. Though this certainly appears in contradiction to the undeniable commercial and museological success of Minimalism, it’s as if the viewer (as a subject) is irrelevant. The viewer then does not have thoughts, desires, known and unknown, because there is no difference between work and viewer (the latter is an effect of the work). And so the expression of desirous interpretations would only suggest a weakness in the work’s power. The viewer does not and indeed cannot see something other than that which has been claimed to be there by the artist and is thus in fact there, whatever it is. A tautology is of course without contradiction.

Fried tells us in “Art and Objecthood” that literalist artwork is in fact based on a hidden or disavowed naturalism, an anthropomorphism. This is expressed by their belief in the clear, uninterrupted experience, a sort of unmediated givenness that escapes the trappings of painting and sculpture. In fact, “the materials do not represent, signify or allude to anything; they are what they are and nothing more.”²² This ‘nothing more’ also means ‘nothing less’ and invites an ironic problem whereby a subjective (individual) desire for the natural being of things gives way inevitably to the problem of language (social): they are what they are (what the artist says they are), which is the natural order of things. Take artist Tony Smith’s experience of the newly installed New Jersey Turnpike road, what we could describe as a ‘primal scene’ of Literalist self-awakening:

There was, [Smith] seems to have felt, no way to ‘frame’ his experience on the road, that is, no way to make sense of it in terms of art, to make art of it, at least as art then was. Rather, ‘you just have to experience it’—as it happens, as it merely is. (The experience alone is what matters.) There is no suggestion that this is problematic in any way. The experience is clearly regarded by Smith as wholly accessible to everyone, not just in principle but in fact, and the question of whether or not one has really had it does not arise.²³

Whereas Robert Morris wishes to remove relationships from within the work and sees control as “necessary if the variables of object, light, space, body, are to function”,²⁴ Fried gives the counter-example of British sculptor Anthony Caro, for whom: “The individual elements bestow significance on one another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition: it is in this sense, a sense inextricably involved with the concept of meaning, that everything in Caro’s art that is worth looking at is in its syntax.” Here Fried presents Caro as the anti-literalist par excellence. Philosopher Joan Copjec wrote a comparable statement in her essay “The Orthopsychic Subject”:

Because it alone is capable of lending things sense, the signifier alone makes vision possible. There is and can be no brute vision, no vision totally independent of language. Painting, drawing, all forms of picture making, then, are fundamentally graphic arts. And because signifiers are material, that is, because they are opaque rather than translucent, refer to other signifiers rather than directly to a signified, the field of vision is neither clear nor easily traversable. It is instead ambiguous and treacherous, full of traps.²⁵

For Copjec, language is structurally incomplete. What literalist logic upholds, if you push it to the end, is nothing less than the insistence that a common language (structurally incomplete) is not only impossible but undesirable. So when we hear ‘relation’, we must understand that it says something is missing, and will remain so, otherwise why would we need to relate/speak?

We might boldly evoke the literalist approach as somewhat totalitarian. What is evident in their discourse, though indirectly stated, is that the artist is master. The ideal viewer accords herself to the literalist’s vision of the work, or risks finding meaning where there is none. Resistance however is in itself meaningful, and literalists therefore seek to include it as contained in the work’s scope, its confrontational power. Again, the literalists want to evacuate relation. Meaning necessitates a relation, which necessitates a common language, which necessitates difference, a gap, lack. Literalists don’t care about meaning, they care about power.

Literalism today

Taking off from these points, we may observe certain tendencies of 1960-70s three-dimensional art (re)appear in 2010-20s performance art. The literalist insistence on the large scale of a work being one of the criteria for success finds its match in contemporary performance art’s need for maximalist spatial intervention. A few initial ideas about such works, to indicate the direction of our thinking.

As Fried argues in “Art and Objecthood”, one of the aims of literalist art is to get rid of art and to get to experience, just experience; no more partiality of things and images, no more relation, no interpretation, no more pictures; experience alone is what matters. In some contemporary performance art the latent naturalism of Minimalism, as described above, comes back and finds its place in the overdetermination of the body. We might imagine that the body is more real than any of the signs we put on it. It is presented as something inherently powerful, even and perhaps especially in its weakness; the body is a fount of wholeness in its particularity. In this logic, as for the literalists, interpretation is not necessary, the body knows (remember Morris’ “known shape”). And the viewer will simply and inevitably be confronted with the body due to its singular power; the body is in and of itself. In refusing composition, as both a process and an outcome, literalist works finally refuse the risk of looking in favour of the privacy of experience.²⁶

The usual comportment during such performances is total awareness. The performers are in control of the work, and perhaps more noteworthy, so are the viewers to the extent that they know how to behave as viewers (even without the obvious structuring that, for example, the theatre would provide). The viewers know what they will see. The quality of performance is not virtuosic, not histrionic, but plausible and professional. It is supposed to be live, and it is supposed to be exciting but nothing unpredictable or shocking happens, because it cannot. This is not just due to choreography or planning or institutional conditions. It is also a structural logic of literalist works. The whole subordinates the parts, there is no composition that would allow a relation, namely a gap, that would produce real, unpredictable consequences for the work or the viewer’s experience of it.

It becomes possible to imagine that such performances are not live, they are endless. And the market is happy to encourage this for such performance is not ephemeral but perennial. Literalist art has – we might imagine – fought its war for the last fifty years to rid itself even of its three-dimensionality, and today finds itself in the corporeality of performers, who are often – at least in dress and class – indistinct from viewers. This indifference furthermore concerns the modes of spectatorship and the integration of the architecture of the space.

Costumes are rare in contemporary performance art. Music if used is usually diegetic, what we hear is the same music the performers hear, sing, dance, rehearse to, there is rarely juxtaposition; the music in this sense does not give any conflicting thoughts to the work. The performers are presented as they are, usually with minimal makeup, in running shoes, sportswear and streetwear. There are no elements that would compel us to imagine something beyond what is before us (except perhaps becoming better than we are currently); that’s why it should seem natural that the performers are there, just as it is natural we the viewers are there, right? But why are we here? Is any of this a given?²⁷

Here are three examples from Western Europe.

1) In the program notes to Kate McIntosh’s work To Speak Light Pours Out (2020) we read, ‘If we listen to music together in the same space, after a while our hearts will beat in sync, but our breathing will remain polyrhythmic.’ Conceived as a deconstructed theatre piece based on the idea of listening, the work has the audience sit on the stage with the performers. The ‘our hearts’, ‘our breathing’ of the quote rhetorically makes the audience and performers one. McIntosh employs texts authored by several poets and has them read out loud by herself and other female performers who also play percussion instruments, dressed casually. The cited texts are projected above the audience’s head as surtitles on four huge screens arranged in a cube over the stage, so we can read along with the performers. The neo-gospel message (with neo-colonial echoes) intones repeatedly that the old world is over and the new world is being born.

McIntosh herself speaks of those not ready for the new world as follows: “They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.” The command is to let go, flow into the river where social change will presumably take place: “We have to push off from the shore into the middle of the river / See who is there with us and celebrate.” The insistence on the new recalls Judd’s own position, and the insistence on flow Kornbluh’s critique: “Flow as essential value for this aesthetic swells from flow as essential value for the twenty-first-century economy.”²⁸

At intervals throughout the piece, McIntosh, strolling casually around the space like it’s a living room, addresses the audience as a whole to ask how we are feeling, if we are doing OK. Still, attention throughout is on the performers’ own experience; the audience watches them laughing and directing each other, demonstrating what to do next, maintaining eye-contact amongst themselves, shuffling papers like they don’t know which text to read next. The group of professional dancers and musicians plays like they don’t know what they are doing. It is choreographed improvisation; improvisation without the risk of failure. The pretense is that we are simply sharing space, almost as if it’s a coincidence that we, the public, are there at all; as if we just stumbled into a rumpus room and decided to stay, here where “life is allowed to unfold”. Yet the attempts to rhetorically ignore the fourth wall fall short; of course no one answers to say how they are, and any true answer would be irrelevant.²⁹

2) In Alexis Blake’s work the performer must come so close to being simply the experience in itself that the term performer starts to become, at least rhetorically, comparable to a “Specific Object” (Judd’s term). Blake says of her work rock to jolt [ ] stagger to ash (2021):

It’s asking a lot of the performers to go deep inside themselves. What I always say is what you put in is what you get out, and for me it’s about bringing a subjectivity within the work, because when you do that it becomes real, it becomes palpable, it becomes authentic. And when you watch that, and experience it, you feel that, you feel and connect to something that is deeper inside oneself.³⁰

In other words: what the performer experiences is said to determine the experience of the viewer.

In an earlier work, Crack Nerve Boogy Swerve (2019–ongoing), which also exists as an installation without the performers, we experience an endless resonance of broken window glass. Judd and Morris would agree with us that this installation is no work of three-dimensional art, for the broken glass panes placed in cement blocks already suggest a representational if not pictorial logic that they would reject. However, the broken panes of glass, which persist with or without the performers, insist that the performance happened, is happening and will happen, and in this absence of limit shares a logic with literalist art.

The discourse around Blake’s ongoing artwork asks what it means to preserve performative artworks, while it avoids the arena of the economy that undergirds the question of preservation.³¹ The notes to her exhibition affirm the idea of “allowing the body itself to become the archive” in opposition to the archive’s proclaimed tendency to hold “information and experience captive”.³² In the context of Blake’s work, we should understand ‘archive’ (another word for history; another word for temporal ‘mediation’) as that which captures and compresses experience:

Fluid and ever-changing, the original performance was never intended as a fixed point in time, but rather as a scaffold designed to stage further venues of development, wherever they may lead […] affording us the opportunity to bear witness to a grand totality.³³

3) Less verbose than some of her colleagues, artist Anne Imhof outsources her discursive production. Her performance works, such as Natures Mortes (2021), dissolve the difference between the artwork itself and the experience of viewing the artwork. In an article on Imhof’s work, critic Benjamin Piekut writes that

Imhof stages arenas, fields of play, and the player is you. In her performance installations, the most overtly confrontation gestures [sic] […] are synecdoches of a larger contest, the game of living. […] The ensuing […] participation must begin from this moment of indistinction.³⁴

Here, as per the literalists, the “player” is the viewer, the work “confronts” her, and the viewer’s experience “must” derive from the indistinction proposed by Imhof. The literalist echo is that the work is dependent on the experience of it, and yet any experience, necessarily inconclusive, will retroactively be included as if it were part of the whole.

We might think of the importance of social media in the dissemination of Imhof’s work, whereby the filming, story-ing and streaming of the work by those present while it’s happening is a crucial factor in the work itself; being there to experience it is what matters and we know this beforehand. The reduction of distance between audience and performers is physical, too, as the latter meander their way unpredictably through the crowds, sometimes without us knowing who is and is not performing. Audience members may adorn fashion styles similar to that of Imhof and her performers: black, baggy, punk-esque but most of all artful and well-made, a bit like the clothes worn by the ranks of emerging artists at the time. The fact one thinks about the audience’s clothing style when reflecting on this work demonstrates the way they have been included. What we are witness to in this performance are the bodily enjoyments of performers: pouring substances down her throat and naked chest, licking a guitar neck, tattooing his own leg, non-stop vaping. These actions seek our presence as witnesses, while they have no discursive consequences: the enjoyment of the performer is empirical, and our experience of watching it play out is simply that enjoyment’s condition.³⁵

In “Art and Objecthood” Fried writes: “the sense which, at bottom, theater addresses is a sense of temporality, of time both passing and to come, simultaneously approaching and receding, as if apprehended in an infinite perspective”.³⁶ As distant as they might seem in materiality and in time, these three artists share the literalist’s interest in large-scale works that create an “extended situation” and include (and maybe overwhelm) the viewer. They share the literalist impulse to overdetermine the experience of the viewer and reject partiality, syntax, internal limit, which is necessary to the production of meaning. As Copjec writes: “only a limit guarantees that the production of meaning will continuously be subject to revision, never ending.”³⁷ And so we must work to bear in mind the distinction between, on the one hand, the endless, inclusive whole of literalists and, on the other, the necessarily limited, incomplete whole of artists, which bets not that the viewers are the effects of a work but that viewing a work has consequences for it.³⁸

The enigma

In Read My Desire Joan Copjec outlines the fallacious reasoning that defines “the whole such that one of its essential features is its superiority to its parts”.³⁹ This doesn’t mean, for Copjec, there is no whole. Whereas a literalist whole unfolds “on the same plane”, manifest and present, available in and of itself, the whole we describe

will never reveal itself in an analytical moment; no diagram will ever be able to display it fully, once and for all. At the same time this acknowledgment does not compel us to imagine a society that never quite forms […] a society about which we can say nothing and do so in an endless succession of statements that forever fail to come around to the same relevant point.⁴⁰

Indeed, the whole and the parts can be thought without reducing ourselves and our work to one or the other. This requires the courage to speak, to symbolise – in art and its discourse – without knowing in advance what the other thinks, without overdetermining what she might say. Without this faith in our own enigmatic core what we conjure into the world is totalising; it asks no questions. “The fact that it is materially impossible to say the whole truth – that truth always backs away from language, that words always fall short of their goal – founds the subject.”⁴¹ Or in Kornbluh’s words: “neither the subject who experiences nor the object available to experience are self-identical.”⁴² In literalist art, the subject as necessarily lacking is pushed out of view by the verbatim insistence on totality without relation, that is to say without limit.

In this light, we could also consider how the viewer herself inscribes something in the object when she looks at it, and that this vision is already desire, that is a result of lack. This lack necessitates the work of meaning, the process of signification and, as we have already implied, this is the courage of communion, not the paranoia of confrontation. For philosopher Mladen Dolar, “(t)he image has to be deciphered; there is a blur implied in its viewing and by extension ultimately in all vision.”⁴³ This distortion is precisely what literalists renounce, the fact that a picture, an image, three-dimensional work, the visual field as such involves an enigma.

Philosopher Alenka Zupančič, for her part, relates the enigma to the very structure of the difference between an utterance and a statement. An utterance or an enunciation pronounces a self-reflexive and self-contained situation; a statement on the other hand cannot be guaranteed in advance. For Zupančič, “(t)he moment the subject gives their answer to the riddle, the words of their response are neither true nor false; they are an anticipation of the truth that becomes truth only as consequence of these words.”⁴⁴ The discourse of literalist art threatens art’s true power – to convey something beyond the artist’s intention, in other words: a question – by making it a reiteration of “known shapes”, a performative display of the existing conditions.

Michael Fried concludes the famous essay that has occupied us here with an enigmatic line that indicates the stakes of his fight against literalism: “We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace.” What we might interpret here as the meaning of “presentness” is not to be understood as that described so thoroughly by Kornbluh as immediacy, that is, the present of commodities. Rather we take it to mean the present that in a recent essay Copjec delineates as “the location of the subject and consciousness”.⁴⁵ And if we are to interpret “grace”, we would suggest that it is another name for the structure of a minus that connects the subject to the other, that in Lacanian terms makes the subject’s desire that of the Other.⁴⁶ Grace goes beyond equations that summarise parts into a whole. It is immeasurable, excessive, unpredictable, non-normative; it will not guarantee that this object is good – or good for you.⁴⁷

Notes

¹ This paper is a revised version of a talk given on 23 March 2023 at the Conditions of Spectatorship symposium at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound (RITCS) in Brussels, Belgium. It was presented in a shorter form at the Lacan Today conference at Ghent University, under the title ‘The live does not exist but there is liveness: literalist art, performance art and the enigma’ on 21 September 2024.
² Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood”, Artforum, vol. 5, no. 10, Summer 1967.
³ Mladen Dolar, “Anamorphosis”, S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique (Vol. 8, 2015); Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (New York: Verso, 1994); Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2023); and Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex? (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017).
⁴ We will mostly stick with the term ‘literalist’ throughout to designate the tradition the Minimalists inaugurated, though the terms may be used interchangeably as they refer to the same discursive position.
⁵ Fried, ibid.
⁶ Donald Judd, “Specific Objects”, Arts Yearbook, 1965: https://juddfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Specific_Objects_1964.pdf
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ Ibid. Our emphasis.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ Fried (quoting Judd and Morris), ibid.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ Susan Sontag’s essay of the same period, “Against Interpretation” (1964), offers a comparable literalist disdain for meaning (figuration) in favour of being: “Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”
¹⁴ Fried quoting Judd, ibid.
¹⁵ Ibid. (Judd is making reference to Frank Stella.)
¹⁶ This was said by Judd in an interview with Bruce Glaser, edited by Lucy R. Lippard and published as “Questions to Stella and Judd”, Art News, Vol. LXV, No. 5, September 1966. Fried’s first note in “Art and Objecthood” goes as follows: “The remarks attributed in the present essay to Judd and Morris have been taken from this interview, from Judd’s essay ‘Specific Objects’, Arts Yearbook, No. 8, 1965, or from Robert Morris’s essays, ‘Notes on Sculpture’ and ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,’ published in Artforum, Vol. IV, No. 6, February 1966, and Vol. V, No. 2, October 1966 respectively. (I have also taken one remark by Morris from the catalog to the exhibition ‘Eight Sculptors: the Ambiguous Image,’ held at the Walker Art Center, October–December 1966.) I should add that in laying out what seems to me the position Judd and Morris hold in common I have ignored various differences between them, and have used certain remarks in contexts for which they may not have been intended. Moreover, I have not always indicated which of them actually said or wrote a particular phrase; the alternative would have been to litter the text with footnotes.’
¹⁷ Judd, ibid.
¹⁸ Ibid. Our emphasis.
¹⁹ Anna Kornbluh, ‘Video’, in Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2023), p. 114.
²⁰ Kornbluh, “Imaginary”, in Immediacy, p. 62.
²¹ Joan Copjec, “Introduction”, in Read My Desire, p. 6: “[I]t is this notion of immanence, this conception of a cause that is immanent within the field of its effects, with which this book quarrels and repeatedly condemns as historicist.” And by extension, later, in “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason”, ibid., p. 205: “The completeness of the system of signifiers is both demanded and precluded by the same rule of language [the statement that discourse is ongoing].”
²² Fried, ibid.
²³ Smith quoted by Fried, ibid.
²⁴ Morris quoted by Fried, ibid.
²⁵ Copjec, ibid., p. 34.
²⁶ It’s worth noting the elaboration of the problem of the body as ‘given’ by Anna Kornbluh in Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2023). She writes on page 81: “Enclosure is inscribed as literature in the gestures of privatization and prosaicism this chapter catalogs. Literature now encloses and reifies the substance of real bodies and real identities, excluding the less phenomenal, more speculative processes of fictionality and figuration.” And later, on page 165: “Immediatist theories posit a smooth continuum of body–experience–knowledge; bolster reflexive, passionate attachments as more legitimate than reason; refuse ‘symptomatic reading’ in order to immanentize content. ‘It is what it is,’ immediacy theory incants.”
²⁷ See Kornbluh. For example in “Antitheory”, ibid., p. 154.
²⁸ Kornbluh, “Circulation”, ibid., p. 25.
²⁹ Observations based on Kate McIntosh, To Speak Light Pours Out, Kaaitheater, Brussels, Belgium, 2 April 2022: https://kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/21-22/speak-light-pours-out
³⁰ Alexis Blake, “Alexis Blake over de Prix de Rome 2021”, Mondriaan Fonds, 13 December 2021: https://youtu.be/Vsd6Tlazqyk?si=XyExleiYzxo22-u1&t=115 (accessed 31 July 2024).
³¹ There are counter-examples of performance artists refusing any physical trace of their work, such as Tino Sehgal.
³² Josue Aliendre Carvani, “Alexis Blake: Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve (the archive)”, Wiels Visitor’s Guide, Brussels 2024.
³³ Ibid.
³⁴ Benjamin Piekut, “Anne Imhof in Three Acts, an Improvisation: Hunter, Writer, Lover”, Flash Art #334, Spring 2021.
³⁵ Observations based on Anne Imhof’s Natures Mortes, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2021, and Anne Imhof Instagram stories: https://www.instagram.com/Anne_Imhof/
³⁶ Fried, ibid.
³⁷ Copjec, “Cutting Up”, ibid., p. 60.
³⁸ Here I am thinking of Alenka Zupančič’s What Is Sex? (MIT 2017), where she writes her ‘rule’ for the Real: “something has consequences if it cannot be anything (that is, if it is impossible in one of its own segments)”, p. 81
³⁹ Copjec, “Cutting Up”, ibid., p. 60.
⁴⁰ Copjec, “Introduction”, ibid., pp. 8-9.
⁴¹ Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject”, ibid., p. 35.
⁴² Kornbluh, ibid., p. 154.
⁴³ Dolar, ibid., p. 126.
⁴⁴ Alenka Zupančič, Let Them Rot (London: Divided Publishing, 2023), p. 68.
⁴⁵ Joan Copjec, “Battle Fatigue: Kiarostami and Capitalism”, Lacan Contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, and Politics, ed. Nadia Bou Ali and Rohit Goel (New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 153.
⁴⁶ See Jacques Lacan, From an Other to the other: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI (ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Bruce Fink), p. 103.
⁴⁷ For more on the Lacanian conception of grace, see Jean-Daniel Causse, “Lacan, le christianisme et la doctrine de la grâce”, Figures de la psychanalyse, no. 34, 2, 2017, pp. 83-93. He writes (our translation) on p. 91: “it is precisely because grace is a thought that is not organised in the service of the good of the other, or of oneself, nor by the idea of a salvation that would aim to reabsorb what makes a subject limp rather than walk, but on the contrary by what confers on the act a transgressive or subversive value in relation to the whole normative apparatus, the whole system of individual and collective regulation.”

^—“Avatar.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, n. d., Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/avatar. Accessed 6 Nov. 2024.
^—Bermudez, José Luis; Marcel, Anthony, and Eilan, Naomi. The Body and The Self. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998.
^—Bridle, James. Ways of Being. Penguin, 2022.
^—de la Bellacasa, Maria Puig. Matters of Care - Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
^—Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
^—Fu, Kexue; Chen, Yixin; Cao, Jiaxun; Tong, Xin and LC, RAY. 2023. “I Am a Mirror Dweller: Probing the Unique Strategies Users Take to Communicate in the Context of Mirrors in Social Virtual Reality”. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, p. 1 - 19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581464.
^—Gallup, Gordon G. “Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition.” Science, vol. 167, no. 3914, 1970, pp. 86–87. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1728199. Accessed 6 Nov. 2024.
^—Lee, Kwan Min. “Presence, Explicated.” Communication Theory, vol. 14, Issue 1, 1 February 2004, p. 27–50, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2004.tb00302.x
^—Meltzoff, Andrew N. and Moore, M. Keith. “Infant’s Understanding of People and Things: From Body Imitation to Folk Psychology.” The Body and The Self, edited by José Luis Bermúdez, Anthony Marcel, and Naomi Eilan, The MIT Press, 1998, p. 43-69.
^—Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. Thames & Hudson, 2023.
^—Tsing, L. A. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2021.
^—Vandeweerd, Guus. The Avatar and the Self. Phenomenology of my Digital Double. 2023. PXL-MAD School of Arts Hasselt. Master’s Thesis.
^—Waldenfels, Bernhard. Phenomenology of the Alien. Basic Concepts. Northwestern University Press, 2011.
^—Wakkary, Ron. Things We Could Design For More Than Human-Centered Worlds. The MIT Press, 2021.
^—Weinstein, David. 2022. “What is Extended Reality?” Nvidia, https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/what-is-extended-reality/. Accessed 6 Nov. 2024.
^—Wright, Kate. “Becoming-With.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 5, May 2014, p. 277-281, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615514

^—Greg Scheirlinckx is a composer, sound designer and computer artist. He creates music and sound for film, installation and performance.
^—Anneleen Swillen is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at PXL-MAD School of Arts and Hasselt University, Belgium. Her work explores jewellery within a post-digital culture through research in the arts, education, curation, and writing.
^—Guus Vandeweerd earned his master’s degree in graphic design at PXL-MAD School of Arts in 2023, where he focused on digital identity and avatars. He is pursuing a master’s in research in design at BAU College of Arts & Design Barcelona while continuing his research on digital identity through collaborative projects at PXL-MAD and Corda Campus.
^—Senneke Van de Wygaert is (not) a jewellery artist.
^—Ine Vanoeveren obtained her doctoral degree in Contemporary Music Performance in 2016 at the University of California, San Diego. She specialises in XR performances, using the latest live entertainment technologies. She is Lead Technology & Innovation of Europe’s pioneering digital event venue, Corda Arena.
^—Esther Verstreken graduated in 2024 with a master’s in Image Thinking at PXL-MAD School of Arts. For two years, she has been deeply engaged in research that brings art and tactility as close together as possible - a project she continues to refine and expand.

¹ For more info, see https://artificialintelligems.com/
² Extended reality (XR) comprises immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). VR fully immerses users in a virtual environment through headsets. AR superimposes digital images onto the real world, whereas MR integrates both real and digital elements, enabling interaction with both (Weinstein 2022).
³ The concept of the more-than-human refers to a holistic perspective that encompasses non-humans and other-than-humans, such as things, objects, other animals, living beings, organisms, physical and geological forces, spiritual entities, and humans (de la Bellacasa 1).
⁴ The term “post-digital” can be misleading. Instead of indicating a period following the digital era, it stresses the interwovenness of physical and digital. Curator Christiane Paul states that post-digital art “finds its artistic expression in works that are both deeply informed by and shaped by digital technologies, while also crossing boundaries between media in their final form. Post-digital art can take various forms, including sculpture, photography, and painting” (Paul 7). In our research, we explore the post-digital as a perspective, a form of expression, and a domain.
⁵ Nvidia’s StyleGAN
⁶ The entire database of photos submitted for this project, as well as a selection of Ornamutations, can be accessed via https://artificialintelligems.com/ornamutations-since-2021/ (slide down the text window by clicking “X” at the top right corner to discover the image collection).
⁷ The word “avatar” can signify multiple concepts, such as “an electronic image (as in a video game) that represents and may be manipulated by a computer user”, “the incarnation of a Hindu deity (such as Vishnu)”, or “an embodiment (of a concept or philosophy) often in a person” (“Avatar”). In this text, “avatar” pertains specifically to a digital representation of a person in the online realm, free from any limitations on the quantity or variety of those representations.
⁸ Vanoeveren makes this decision based on her feeling of connection with an avatar. Through experimenting with different Ornavatars, she tests whether they inspire or impact her musical compositions. So far, she has performed with two different Ornavatars.
⁹ While questioning how to embody the Ornamutations, Vandeweerd, Verstreken, Van de Wygaert, and Swillen engaged in some thought experiments, in which they attributed tactile properties to the Ornamutations. Amongst others, they imagined how an Ornamutation might smell, sound, feel, and move. As part of their experiment to connect with virtual more-than-human others, they fed their ideas to LLM ChatGPT 3.5, asking to turn their responses into a poem.
¹⁰ Donna Haraway argues “to be one is always to become with many” (4) and “[i]f we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism then we know that becoming is always becoming with, in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake.” (244) Anna Tsing extends this view as she states that “we engage in processes of thinking-with, making-with, and becoming-with our other-than-human colleagues” (22).
¹¹ It’s important to note that digital technologies, such as AI, have a significant ecological footprint. Although digital technologies often appear to operate invisibly, they are not without material roots or impact. While this discussion is crucial, exploring it in depth goes beyond the scope of this essay.

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clustered | unclustered

Painting-as-Prop

Ryan Cullen

“The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”
— Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

“A painting hangs off the wall, like a gun, or a hat.” This observation, a quotation that a professor of sculpture at The Cooper Union named Niki Logis has been fraudulently attributing to Martin Heidegger since the 1990s, will be our point of departure. That a painting is an object is a fact so obvious it is often forgotten. Paintings are of course objects – they hang on walls; they are professionally handled, wrapped in protective wrappings, put in boxes, and transported; they are bought and sold; they can be damaged, insulted, or destroyed. These are traits which have remained mostly true throughout history. Yet a second perspective on painting has historically dominated the understanding of the medium: that a painting is an image. There was a time when drawings and paintings were uniquely synonymous with images, as, in a manner of speaking, there was not yet any alternative form they could take. Yet the advent of the printing press, photography, and mechanical reproduction more generally soon made clear that paintings are function as much as image as object. This sentiment is apparent when we see human individuals collide with artworks on exhibition. Contrary to Ad Reinhardt’s famous aphorism that “sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” most of us have witnessed more people leaning against paintings in thoughtless exhaustion than we have seen sculptures bumped into in breathless reverie. In an attempt to avoid much of the (at least) 2400-year-old discourse on the differentiation of the image from its object, this essay will limit its scope to a particular class of object: the prop.

The word “prop” predictably comes from the word “property,” specifically “stage property;” and it is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “any portable article, as an article of costume or furniture, used in acting a play: a stage requisite, appurtenance, or accessory.” This text will position the prop as a conceptual model that articulates a novel mode of spectatorship. Beginning from the prop’s natural domain of the theater, we will trace a brief history of “the theatrical” in visual art and elaborate a theory of a dissociative spectatorship that evades the historical pedantic binaries of active / passive, performer / viewer, and subjecthood / objecthood. Of particular concern with the theatrical prop is its readymade expression of a complex maneuver in mimetic representation, that of auto-mimesis, the object that performs itself.

The Theater

In 1940, a Czech theatrical theorist named Jiři Veltruský cast a wide net in saying that “all that is on the stage is a sign.”¹ Veltruský was part of a circle of semioticians in Prague that developed a theory of semiotization of objects,

a process which is clearest, perhaps, in the case of the elements of the [theatrical] set. A table employed in dramatic representation will not usually differ in any material or structural fashion from the item of furniture that the members of the audience eat at, and yet it is in some sense transformed: it acquires, as it were, a set of quotation marks.²

The prop as a semiotized object is a useful description of an object that is transformed into itself, but a more relational interpretation of the prop is necessary in extricating how an object actually becomes a prop. The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott thought that “there is no such thing as a prop, wherever a prop exists an actor-object interaction exists. Irrespective of its signifying function, a prop is something an object becomes, rather than something an object is.”³ Winnicott’s perspective further refines the mandate of the stage as the impetus of semiotization. The prop is an object which comes into being through its context or interaction with an actor. One such appropriate context is usually that of the theatrical stage. For instance, a suitcase in a stage production is just a suitcase until it becomes a prop-suitcase on stage; a suitcase which is a representation of itself; a performing-object. Another architectural context which semiotizes its objects and subjects is that of the visual art exhibition. Importantly, this comparison should not confuse the art exhibition for a stage, nor the inverse, but only suggest that the two have a lot in common. What is important is how bodies and objects interact within these spaces.

Apart from its power to semiotize objects, theatricality infamously semiotizes humans into two categories: the performer and the spectator.⁴ This dynamic is frequently formulated in political terms of potency– most commonly: the active performer and the passive spectator. Still, I argue that the tendency to apply these pseudo-sexual terms to the scopic relation sets up a false dichotomy between producer of spectacle and consumer of spectacle that no longer adequately describes the contemporary conditions of spectatorship. I would like to propose a framework of dissociation that makes space for a further fragmentation and refinement of the dialectical concepts of active / passive and subject / object. Superficially, this might recall Bertolt Brecht’s theory of the Verfremsdungeffekt – often translated as the alienation or distancing effect –, which sought to distance, estrange, or otherwise “divide its audience” from the performance by destroying stylistic conventions of illusion and realism.

According to Brecht, through theatrical mediation the audience is made aware of the social conditions that produce it and is motivated to enact change.⁵ The modernist impulse was to create a distance between the spectator and the performance by revealing the constructed nature of the theater, which in turn would reveal to the audience the similarly constructed nature of social reality. The Aristotelian catharsis of classical drama, where emotions were aroused in the audience through an empathy fabricated within the theater’s represented reality, was to be deterritorialized to the broader social sphere.⁶ Antonin Artaud’s similarly pedagogical but much more maniacal impulse to liberate the spectator called for “a theater which wakes us up: nerves and heart.”⁷ His own deranged prescription for the slumbering masses was “to attack the spectator’s sensibility on all sides.”⁸ However inspiring, for us Artaud serves only to demonstrate another instance of the artist who too easily assumes his spectators are sleeping, or at the very least constitute “a public [which] does not understand.”⁹ In their respective critiques of the theatrical relation between spectator and spectacle, both Brecht and Artaud adopted a language of impotency that presupposed the viewers’ passive consumption of a spectacle’s active performance.

Taking the passive spectator and the active spectacle as predetermined and stable wholes assumes an irreducibility of subjecthood and objecthood that does not survive confrontation with psychoanalytic theory.¹⁰ Moreover, this erroneous irreducibility necessarily disregards other vital agents in the spectatorial relation, like that of the theatrical prop-object or stage setting. The particularity of the prop, remember, is its ability to be the thing which performs itself. This process is of a specific order of semiotization where an object represents itself at the same time that it is itself; however, in the act of performing itself, the prop-object becomes something other than itself: a disidentified object. This auto-mimetic dynamic is exemplified by Borges’ map at the scale of its territory.¹¹ Moving forward, it should be clarified that this conception of the auto-mimetic prop-object presupposes that all pre-modernist theatrical theory – that is theatre before Brecht – was essentially Aristotelian. As such, in this form the prop-object challenges the theatre’s traditional dualistic ontology.

Contemporary Belgian artist Laurent Dupont’s insistence on painting cardboard boxes to look like cardboard boxes is a useful reification of the auto-mimetic function. Dupont makes sculptures that comprise cardboard boxes which have had their surfaces meticulously repainted over in acrylic paint. With the exception of the sculptures’ painted surface having a negligibly more plastic quality than the actual cardboard beneath it, the result is a painted cardboard box which looks identical to the cardboard box it both represents and is. The sculptures actualize the map-territory dynamic characterizing our notion of the prop. In a sense, the boxes are paintings of themselves. Yet, as the sculpture is the cardboard box we see, the synthetic simulation of its authentic surface makes the sculpture other than what we see – by representing itself, it is transformed into something that is no longer authentically itself. Here one might think of the Capgras Syndrome, in which patients hold the delusion that their friends, families, and/or acquaintances have been replaced by identical imposters – imposters who are at once themselves and not themselves. The literal auto-mimetic quality achieved in the painted cardboard boxes is neither requisite nor exhaustive in the construction of the prop dynamic. The prop as such should rather be understood as a schematic illustration of a process of dissociation. As will be returned to later in this text, the dissociative object which both is and is not itself offers a conceptual framework through which we can consider contemporary art as opposed to a prescription for how it can be produced.

Melanie Klein’s ideas of partial-object relations are relevant for continuing this line of thinking about the prop. Klein believed that “the ego is incapable of splitting the object…without a corresponding splitting taking place within the ego.”¹² We must briefly return to the domain of the theater proper in order to fully grasp the consequences of a partitioned objecthood. The theatrical prop, I argued, exists as a dissociated object with a quality of derealization occuring in the semiotizing procedure. The shift from being to performing negates the object’s authentic identity. The writings of Klein, as well as some revisions made by Jacques Lacan in the 1960s, show us that in the scopic field, any divided object implies a divided subject. This framework of dissociation results in a complex question of identifying the true subject of the theater. As a conceptual model, dissociation serves as a type of critical relay switch that refreshes and amplifies the differentiations between performer and spectator. The theatrical relation can be thought of as a metalanguage comprising four terms: the viewing-subject (audience); the performing-object (stage play/spectacle); the performing-subject (actor on stage); the performed-object (the prop). This protracted complex is necessary insofar as the aim is to propose that the dynamic between artwork and viewer might be more comparable to the relation between the stage actress and her prop than it is to the spectator and the spectacle. The desired effect of the dissociative operation transforms the viewer from a passive spectator who consumes images into a dissociated subject who performs their role in the consumption of images.

Fear and Loathing

More often than not, what the theater wants to show us is something concrete: a discussion, a fight, a relationship or its dissolution, a rise to power, a betrayal, a downfall, etc; and it is these mimetic representations which frequently signify some other more abstract, less concretely representational idea or emotion. Visual art, at its most a/effective, does not often have this luxury. Where the theater has space and time as its mediating forms, in visual art ideas and affect are transmitted by static images and objects.¹³ Its signification has, as it were, another degree of mediation – of separation – from its viewer. One finds this reasoning succinctly described by Cady Noland in her explanation of her use of real objects “as a way to avoid an art where paintings and sculptures are stand-ins for objects which are stand-ins for other people.”¹⁴

It is visual art’s mediation through objects and images that differentiates it from the theater. Theatricality, according to Umberto Eco, is ostensive by nature – it shows us what it intends to convey.¹⁵ By contrast static visual art, such as a painting or a sculpture, more often relies on exemplification as its rhetorical mode; it tells us something by showing us something which stands as an example.¹⁶ In simpler terms, the theater shows whereas the gallery tells. The distinctions underlying ostension vs. exemplification can be formulated in any number of ways, such as drama vs. epos; mimesis vs. diegesis; or showing vs. telling, but it remains a critique of modes of didactic mediation as opposed to one of content. Insofar as theatrical metalanguage allows for a synthesized spectatorship where the spectator can actively perform the passive act of viewing, the present mode of discourse in contemporary visual art remains caught in the classical psychoanalytic dialectic of the gaze. This classical view is incongruous with the complexity of the conditions of contemporary spectatorship.

One does not need to look very far back to find the consequential origins of how the ostensive mode of the theater came to be purged from visual art discourse. Decades before the “artists” and curators associated with the relational aesthetics of the 1990s began their open salvo upon what they mistook for a barrier separating “art” from “life,” we find a history of distaste for the theatrical in modern visual art. It was likely Michael Fried and his bizarre fetish for “present-ness” – expressed most lucidly in his influential essay Art and Objecthood – which first theorized this post-modern distaste for “theatricality” in art history.¹⁷ Fried’s proclamation in 1967 that “theater is now the negation of art” set the stage for more than 50 years of a visual art that was only ever permitted to tell things to its viewers.¹⁸ Nonetheless, Fried seemed mostly troubled with the necessity that he exert his forlorn body in order to wholly perceive the modern art of that era – comically enough, unadorned, often monochromatic, medium-sized boxes placed on the floor or the wall. His paranoia of being “extorted into situations” with artworks, brought him to reject art which could not be understood immediately.¹⁹ What I would like to propose is that the true subject of Fried’s critique was not theater as such, but rather ostensive mediation – said more succinctly: Fried’s critique was centered on a rejection of the scopic metalanguage instigated by Melanie Klein’s proposition of partial objects and split subjects. When historicized appropriately, this proposal can be viewed as an aesthetic foil to Guy Debord’s prophetic theory of Spectacle. In 1967 Fried wanted immediate access to the things in front of him – a condition that today is inescapable. Art and Objecthood’s presentness is a rallying call for artworks that are readily capable of being consumed as images. Any forms of mediation – that is, anything that could subvert the classical passive-spectator / active-spectacle dualism – were branded as theatrical and thus “hostile to the arts.”²⁰

The diatribe set up an asymmetrical contrast between “presentness” – the immediacy of an image’s consumption by the viewer – and “theatricality”– objects which need the viewer herself to mediate the act of consumption. However, there is no inherent opposition between the two terms. His scorn was directed not so much at the “theatrical” minimalist artworks he used as examples, but at the manner in which their “non-art” qualities forced him to consider them.²¹

The argument was fundamentally reactionary, articulating a desire to return to the autonomous modernist abstraction whose efficacy could be judged one-dimensionally, that is, by its elementary pictorial and anti-situational nature, as part of the false spectator/spectacle binary. Fried mourned a lost past where images and the reality they represented were distinct from each other. The qualification that so-called “theatrical” forms which cannot be apprehended as wholly “present” are “at war with art as such” set a standard for visual art which foreclosed on the development of any critical language outside that of direct readability.²² This resulted in an art historical conflation between the emerging discourses around more mutable psychoanalytic and political subjectivities and the classical dichotomous dynamic of the gaze.²³

Fried’s misinterpreted gaze-anxiety should be read as a desperate plea for whole subjects and whole objects. The dissociative mode of viewing exemplified by the prop offers a novel understanding of the gaze that accounts for the postmodern transformation that shifted the line of sight’s origin from the viewing subject’s physical eye to a dislocated perspective where the subject sees herself as she performs the principal act of viewing. A transition from the passive viewing spectator into a projecting spectator; a subject who sees herself seeing.

Fried located anxiety, tension, and disquiet in minimalist sculpture. Which is to say that in psychoanalytic terms, he thought he found the Other inside human-sized geometric shapes. While the unease Fried felt when viewing a Tony Smith sculpture is a feeling he doubtlessly experienced as sheer terror – it was not the well-established sensation the subject experiences in realizing that the object gazes back. Instead it was an instance of dissociation. Fried was not extorted into a situation with a Tony Smith sculpture which returned his gaze – in truth his experience was a dissociative vision of seeing himself seeing the Tony Smith sculpture. In this way he was no longer a unified or pure viewer, as now he performed his role as viewer. When we contextualize Fried’s vehement antitheatricalism in the text’s absence of politics, we find this most basic phenomenology of “presentness” to be little more than a thoughtless affirmation of the same tautology of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, published the very same year. Debord laid out the spectacle’s totalitarian “social relations between people that are mediated by images,” which are consumed as immediately as they are produced.²⁴ While Fried’s point of departure for “presentness” is ostensibly relevant only to the field of visual art, Debord’s theory of the spectacle insists upon its molecular totality that imposes itself everywhere. In this way Fried’s “critique of culture” could and should have been contextualized as part of a broader “unified critique dominating the whole of culture that no longer separates itself from the social totality.”²⁵

Given that the direct financial support of certain artists, styles, and genres of modern art by the CIA, laundered through various fronts and foundations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Hoblitzelle Foundation, Association Française d’Action Artistique, among a multitude of others, is by now well-established, curious is the fact that the aesthetic theories which served to validate this legacy of cultural imperialism have hitherto gone unchallenged.²⁶

In several ways the aesthetic domination of this misconstrued position of theatricality is stronger now than it ever has been, especially when considering the advent of Instagram and online viewing platforms as new sites for the immediate consumption of art. The interesting differentiation between Fried’s and Debord’s conceptions of “present-ness” or “spectacle” is that where Debord found no possibility of evading the spectacle save its total negation, Fried intuited (even if he rejected) that theatricality might in fact offer some prospect, however slight, to regard images (paintings, sculptures, life, etc.) as objects and thus inhibit their complete consumption by passive spectators.

In principle the prospect of a dissociative theatricality is still a didactic approach hinged on the problematic desire to emancipate spectators who have never once signaled a sentiment of entrapment. Yet distinct from the dialectic ping-pong of the classical gaze, dissociative theatricality divides and complicates, doubly implicating the spectator first as viewing-subject and then as performing-object. The viewer views the work as they view themselves viewing the work. As proposed by Elan Keir, the hallmark of theatricality is its production of quotation marks around its bodies, actions, and objects. It is these quotation marks which offer the newly created identity of performing-spectator, neither as a “third position” nor an attempt at subversion, but rather as a dynamic of radical dissociation.

I want to argue that now is the time to be radically dissociating. Especially when judged with the view of the contemporary youth’s growing penchant for horse tranquilizer – evidenced by a 582% increase in estimated recreational ketamine use by people under 40 in the US and EU between the years 2012–2022; whether as a form of recreation or as a mode of being and perceiving in the world, dissociation seems to be undeniably of our time.²⁷

Relations

It is often said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Unfortunately, it is rarely the pavers who understand such a thing. In order to trace the consequences of a foreclosed theatricality from Fried’s prohibition on partial objects we must take account of those artistic trends that took theatricality to be such a literal concept that an artwork’s existence could only be affirmed through its material “use,” “activation,” or “experience” by a viewer. In other words, we must recount the great fraud of Relational Aesthetics. Regardless of the conservative inanity of Fried’s antiquated sentiments, a visual art that had largely disposed of “theatricality” as a discursive framework was famously good for business, and so there should be few questions as to why it went mostly unchallenged for some 30 years. There were of course challengers and dissent to the regime of presentness, all of which were briefly tolerated before they could be refined into fodder for the canon and its market. It was only in the 1990s that a maniacally optimistic Nicolas Bourriaud announced loudly and proudly that “theatricality” was back. After years of relentless shelling, curators such as Maria Lind, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barbara van der Linden, with Bourriaud leading the unit, had breached what they thought was a wall between “art” and “life.” In reality, the only boundary that was breached was more of a rickety chain-link fence barely separating the sacred autonomous zone of art from the field of full-blown Spectacle.

On paper, so-called relational aesthetics claimed to be “an art form where the substrate is formed by inter-subjectivity, and which takes being-together as a central theme, the ‘encounter’ between beholder and picture.”²⁸ Relational art claimed to s(t)imulate social experiences in “civic space,”²⁹ using the artwork itself to mediate interpersonal relations. If, on paper, it sounds a lot like the fourth thesis on the first page of The Society of the Spectacle, that is because it is nearly identical to Debord’s definition of Spectacle referred to earlier as “the social relation between people that is mediated by images.”³⁰ In brief, it had emancipation in its sights. As might be expected, what was advertised on paper corresponded very little to the effects in real life. Of course it is necessary to properly contextualize the movement within the deluded optimism of the time – the emerging service economies of the West, the burgeoning tiger economies of Southeast Asia upon which they relied; and all this accompanied by Fukuyama’s End of History cooing softly from a radio you can turn down, but not off. Yet it is through the lens of effects and results over intentions and rhetoric that one should judge relational aesthetics.

The most immediate problem of relational art is the absolute impossibility of interpretation. In her thoughtful critique of Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, Claire Bishop describes a shift: “rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux. There are many problems with this idea, not least of which is the difficulty of discerning a work whose identity is willfully unstable.”³¹ This “willful instability” is a position which serves as a critical plausible deniability obfuscating aesthetic judgment, taxonomy, even ontology.³² Relational aesthetics and its strategy of willful instability spawned an entirely new rhetorical determination of aesthetic critique. The legacy of these positions is something by now well-understood as a two-part supposition: politics as content and identity as politics.³³ This maneuver took place as part of a larger shift. In relocating objects’ aesthetic taxonomy from prescription by their physical context – – the exhibition space or the theater for example – to dictation by various experts, relational aesthetics succeeded in decoupling the process of semiotization from physicality, building a new rhetorical dependence. No longer was something determined to be art because of its physical context or intrinsic qualities, the semiotizing agent of aesthetic determination was wholly conditioned by language and cultural capital. The effect of relational art was that the status-as-art of any object, image or situation was now dictated to the viewer by institutions, curators, and/or “artists,” which replaced the artworks’ own process of semiotization. This shift may appear to be a detail, but the results of such a dissociating maneuver had effects only similar in scale to the potentially analogous dollar-gold decoupling of the Bretton Woods annulment. This taxonomy can be summarized as such:Whereas relational art is didactic by exemplification – it is what they say it is –, theatricality can be thought of as ostensive-heuristic – it is what it is perceived as, or, it is what it says it is. Of course this axiomatic is not new, nor was it new in the 1990s. What was exceptional however was how this axiomatic was instrumentalized by some relational art in order to offer spectacularized and simulated versions of basic human services, such as soup kitchens or public libraries. Perhaps it is due to its estimation as low-hanging fruit that Bishop did not comment on the genre’s most glaring embarrassment, but nevertheless one should make note of the decadent optics of much of the genre. For example, that a gathering of a wealthy gallery-going public in an affluent part of a city to eat free soup as a means of “mediating social relations” in the same city where there are people who cannot afford soup as a means of mediating hunger is a gesture of the most base fetishism.

A key quality about Bourriaud’s ideology is his almost Stalinist view on the efficacy of art. As he makes clear, art has a purpose, and its purpose is basic services and remedial labor: “through little services rendered, artists fill in the cracks in the social bond.” His lip service to mutual aid or a Leninist concept of dual-power here has no such revolutionary ends in mind, as these social cracks were only ever intended to be filled by art temporarily, over the duration of an exhibition. Following the closing of the show, the hungry or library-deprived must return to their respective cracks. An aesthetics that necessitates an artwork’s actual functional “use” is an extremely simplistic misunderstanding of “theatricality.” When Veltruský said that “All that is on the stage is a sign,” he did not mean that the janitor washing the stage’s floor after a performance becomes a performer nor her mop a prop by their mere presence “on the stage.”³⁴

We can see Bourriaud’s demand for total undivided subjects building temporal “microtopic communities” less as a reasoned resistance to the inherent anti-sociality of the New Global Economy, than as a desperate plea³⁵ for undivided attention, social cohesion, and delusional desires of conviviality in an increasingly antisocial and fragmented society. It is worth mentioning here the similarity to Fried’s rejection of the respective fragmenting of subjecthood and objecthood.

Even if we consider all this optimistic rhetoric of conviviality in good faith and we believe that relational art had Situationist aims as “a logical development of Brechtian theatre,” as Bishop rightly observes, “one important difference remains: they would involve the audience function disappearing altogether.”³⁶ Of course, far from offering any new “heterogeneous modes of sociability,” the reality is that relational art was not only dependent upon, but actively reproduced and intensified the class divisions which make contemporary art spaces overwhelmingly socially homogeneous.³⁷ This dependence can be extruded further, to an understanding of Relational Aesthetics’ contradictory dependence upon the classical divisions between spectator and spectacle. Bishop’s categorization of the annihilation of the audience function denotes a symmetrical disappearance of the spectacle itself, something that relational art theoretically dreamed of. However, I argue, an “art” which claimed to have neither an audience nor a performer, is engaged less in a discourse of spectatorship than one of simulation. And it is in fact this essential distinction between representation and simulation that is at issue. Representation has actors and qualities at play, regardless how fragmented: there is a class of objects, there is a class of subjects, there is a mode. Simulation, in contrast to representation, has no such actors, no such qualities – there are participants and there is the totality of imitation. Simulation has only the language of its original through which to speak. Relational aesthetics replaced the formal architecture of semiotization – the stage and the exhibition as sites that had had the ability to place signifying “quotations” around bodies and objects – with language and cultural capital as agents of aesthetic determination; and it replaced the content of an aesthetic representation with the form of a simulated experience. In shifting aesthetics from a work of art’s intrinsic status-as-art to one that was constructed rhetorically, relational art disposed of any negative dialectical thinking in art. Inherent antagonisms and complexities of aesthetic representation have neither traction nor relevance in a discourse on simulation and imitation.

At issue is the legacy of relational art’s whole-someness. What immediately comes across as a deluded optimistic affirmation aimed at a mythos of conviviality, should rather be understood for what it is, another attempt to heal the original sin of postmodernism: to fuse fragmentation; to repair the exponential and equal disintegration of previously dichotomic terms: subject, object, spectacle, spectator, content, form, passive, active, public, private, master, slave, individual, collective, and so on. Although cheap, the qualification of the whole-someness of relational aesthetics is meant to comment on its imperative to make whole again, to heal, whether in content (as described earlier in Bourriaud’s mandate for art to “fill the cracks in the social bond”) or in form (as in the great scopic melting pot of simulated experiences). Psychotic whole-someness is the essential legacy of relational aesthetics: psychotic because it comprises an aesthetic theory decoupled from any form or physical reality; and wholesome because it mandated itself the imperative to make whole the dubiously irreconcilable relation between simulation and authentic experience.

Bishop concludes her critique of relational art by taking particular issue with the affirmative nature of Bourriaud’s “microtopic” relational art, which ignores any ideas of “relational antagonism that would be predicated not on social harmony, but on exposing that which is repressed in sustaining the semblance of this harmony.”³⁸ Relational aesthetics’ denial of antagonism’s crucial societal and political presence is not only aggressively retrograde, it is also a militant affirmation of a deleterious hegemonic ideology which would, in a matter of 30 years, prove apocalyptic.

To which could only be added: For an aesthetics which proclaimed itself to be above all else political, ethical and convivial, relational art has served as little more than an unsavory celebration of the West’s transition to a service economy. Not unlike Michael Fried’s refusal to account for the political context of his aesthetic theory, Bourriaud too fails to substantively address the actual conditions of the political economic developments that he claimed were symbolized by relational art’s apparent immateriality. As is obvious in hindsight, the emergence of totalized globalization and the West’s economic transition to tertiary industry has proved disastrous not only for the planet’s ecological stability, but also for the hundreds of millions of exploited sweatshop workers in Asia and the sub-continent who became destined to manufacture products for the West’s endless thirst for cheap disposable commodities. Not to mention the immensity of social atomization and scapegoating subsequently generated in those Western economies when the very same workers whose jobs were outsourced to far away places found their factories shuttered and a job market they were unprepared for.

Because he makes explicit reference to the experience and service economies it does not suffice to claim that Bourriaud could not have been aware of the economic conditions and political context of Empire. Among a plethora of others, writers such as Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Fredric Jameson, Naomi Klein, and Tiqqun, observed the same political, economic, and cultural contexts of the late 1990s; yet not one of them managed to naively glorify these developments. The error, again, is political; Bourriaud’s mistake is analogous to Fried’s. Just as how Fried and Debord observed the same shift in spectatorial dynamics and each took an opposing ideological position on it. In 1998 Bourriaud saw the same developments as Tiqqun and dismissed critique for a position of affirmation. We don’t need to try to construct yet another critique of spectacle’s Empire, attempting to subvert it or evade it, but at the very least we should never again allow ourselves to be duped into affirming, let alone celebrating its indelible dominance.

Put into order as a list of chronological shifts, we see that the postmodern metalanguage of the theater began with Brecht’s quest to rouse the spectator through the use of distancing and estrangement (Verfremdungseffekt); to show her the reality of the shadowy cave in which she lived. Brecht’s focus on content as the catalyst for alienation distinguished him from Artaud, who believed theatrical form itself, if realized cruelly enough, could awaken the passive spectator to action by way of eliminating the modernist categories of spectacle and spectator altogether. In the 1960s Debord’s political metaphysics of Spectacle marked a new paradigm, a synthesis of historical and modern philosophies and political ideas applied to the novel field of communications and media theory. This new standard solidified the inherent politics of the McLuhanite conclusion of form-as-content. The disintegration of form and content was misinterpreted by Michael Fried as a purely aesthetic phenomenon exemplified by minimalist sculpture. His fatal mistake of presuming whole and undivided concepts was finally repeated in relational aesthetics, where Bourriaud assumed that the literal simulation of social relations could replace the increasingly fragmented conditions of both spectatorship and society. For the most part, relational art, “socially engaged” and “research-based” practices comprise a facade of dialectical “truth” which has been structurally irrelevant for over 60 years. And so our discourse speaks in a language that our art does not. The continued naive compulsion toward unity, toward synthesizing opposing dialectical terms has served not so much to emancipate, as to bind the spectator to a condition of impotence for which we have no language. Furthermore, because the actual conditions of spectatorship at present consist of a complex irreconcilable network of mixed terms, fragmented positions, and antagonistic ideologies, every effort to resolve antiquated dichotomies only serves to reaffirm the stranglehold of pluralistic depravity. This negativist position is one perhaps best summarized by Benjamin Buchloh, in a review of the most recent Skulptur Projekte in Münster:

If one hoped that even the slightest effects of enlightenment, of resistance against the ruling proto-totalitarian powers, could still be induced by any sculptural intervention within the residual forms of public space, it would be precisely the result of fragmentation, not fusion: those decisive artistic capacities that fracture the relations between individual and collective even further, that begin to differentiate subject and object into utterly irreconcilable oppositions, that polarize experience and representation — opening increasingly unbridgeable chasms between linguistic, sculptural, and architectural operations and the existing sociopolitical and ideological totalities within which these forms of artistic production can barely occur.”³⁹

Painting

How else might we conclude such an asymmetrical mess as the one I have hitherto constructed than to return, not only to the prop, but to painting? In the work of Laurent Dupont, we can find a schematic blueprint that articulates, literally, the theatrical mechanics of the prop. It is useful then, to find an example of an art which applies this schematic practically. The idea of plausible deniability, referred to earlier in the context of the willful instability of relational aesthetics, is important insofar as its capability to both affirm and negate in a single gesture is structurally analogous to the ontology of the theatrical prop. In its cultural connotation it is a method for governments and politicians to evade responsibility for an action or position by being able to plausibly deny knowledge or participation in its consummation. Accordingly we could define aesthetic plausible deniability as the condition of an artwork’s ability to plausibly deny its own aesthetic proposition. This is how the dissociative relation can be instrumentalized as a negative dialectical tool, one which proffers both a thesis and anti-thesis that soon evaporates into a muddy fog foreclosing on synthesis or conclusion. In principle plausible deniability is an instrument of irony. It describes the ability to make a single proposition which can plausibly be used as its own refutation. According to Freud, irony says “the opposite of what one intends to convey… it brings the person who uses it the advantage of enabling him readily to evade the difficulties of direct expression.”⁴⁰ It is through this advantage that we should consider an artist who exemplifies the dissociative procedure.

Throughout his career, German painter Michael Krebber has constructed an oeuvre and reputation which places him in somewhat of an aesthetic pillory – having built a mythos around an attitude of cynical dandyism at the same time as a genuinely compelling formalist painting practice. We could understand Krebber as having constructed this position through a series of complex plausible deniabilities. His artworks often take on an almost prop-like status. For example, we can take one of his Herbes de Provence paintings from 2018, a formalist abstract work comprising a mostly blank canvas thinly adorned with minimal beige-pink marks, awkwardly executed with a small paint roller. This work is, in one sense, a formally moving work of sincere vulnerability, expressing the artist’s inherent reticent ambivalence and struggles with the conditions of impotence in contemporary painting; at the same time the work is a performance of these qualities, and so a gesture of cynicism, a painting that performs itself by an artist who is performing a painter. This delicately constructed irony is typical of Krebber’s work. In a review of a 2010 exhibition in Berlin, art historian Michael Sanchez elaborates: “what Krebber has achieved is to allow shame to exist alongside a performative self-awareness.”⁴¹ The coexistence of these two contradictory positions is a dynamic of auto-humiliation – a phenomenon if not responsible for, than as popular as dissociation.

An exhibition of Krebber’s paintings in the first order presents an ambivalent vulnerability, an impotent failure to commit to the genre of abstract painting; the same work is capable of engendering an emotive cringe of sincerity through the exhibition of vulnerability. Alternatively it is not a given that such vulnerability is sincere, the public self-flagellation of presenting these works is just as likely to be a performance, a joke critiquing the art market’s fraudulent preoccupation with authenticity. In the second order this tenuous position of (in)sincerity imperils the gallery where he stages the exhibition – they become actors who humiliate themselves through a desperate attempt to get a joke where there is none; or they become ridiculous for not understanding the joke. He humiliates the collector who is in on the joke only insofar as the joke is almost certainly on her; he embarasses the viewing public as they become self-conscious as to whether they are being made fun of; and they manage to embarrass any critic who might take such a joke seriously. The operation can just as easily go in the other direction. The paintings as compelling indices of failure and doubt can be perceived as so compelling as to cause Michael Sanchez to “write down in [his] notebook, probably less than half joking with [him]self, ‘When I think of this show, I am tempted to cry.’”⁴² In this way, wilful instability becomes an instrument of dissociative action of the prop. Plausible deniability invites the viewer to engage with an artwork first as the wretched passive spectator duped into appreciating the edifice as authentic, and then secondly, as the self-aware active performer who understands the edifice and what lies behind it. Krebber manages to implicate all parties by giving the spectator what she wants: humiliation.

The dissociative operation prioritizes spectatorship; in a manner of speaking it is meant to induce a state of passivity so extreme that the viewer sees themselves seeing. In other words the aim is self-imposed self-consciousness. The vital distinction between self-consciousness proper and self-imposed self-consciousness describes the difference between shame as a verb enacted upon a subject, and auto-humiliation. The dissociative viewer is she who controls her own shame, she shows herself what she does not want to see. The biggest misunderstanding we could have today is that spectators – wherever they are, whoever they may be – want to feel good. It should be clear by now that the spectator wants to feel bad with a variable caveat; just like all of us today in the western world, the spectator wants to feel bad in the right way. If waking up and engaging in society does not offer enough empirical evidence of the sentiment that people would rather suffer than not, there was a scientific study conducted in 2014 which found 67% of participants freely administering electrical shocks to themselves when asked to sit in an empty room with their thoughts for 15 minutes.⁴³

The continued presumption of the passive/active dynamic in spectatorship relies upon a pedagogical perception of art’s ability to reveal a reality or truth hidden behind a spectacular edifice. At its core the active/passive dichotomy is the prerogative of the artist; the impulse of the artist to teach something to her viewers. Indeed Jacques Rancière’s aptly titled The Emancipated Spectator builds a compelling analysis of this foundational perspective of the spectator’s “inability to know and desire to ignore” a hidden reality of the world behind the illusory spectacle.⁴⁴ Although the book develops a rigorous critique of art’s political efficacy, he fails to apply the same dialectical rigor to his own position. Could it not be the case that from our position today, the artist’s insistence to reveal something to her audience might serve as precisely this inability to know and desire to ignore a far more painful reality? A reality which is not so much, as Rancière suggests, “[a transformation of] the desire to ignore what makes us guilty into the desire to ignore the fact that there is nothing we need to feel guilty about,” but rather the desire, if not the imperative of the artist to ignore a more specific order of guilt: the artist’s guilt of incessantly plotting ever more verbose ways to emancipate a spectator that continues to express neither a wish to be liberated, nor any sentiment of enslavement. This is the artist’s essential inability to understand that it is their own compulsion to control the spectator; the artist’s desire to ignore the fact that the spectator already knows that “the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror,” to quote Fredric Jameson.⁴⁵ From the present moment, should it not be obvious that the viewer understands their guilt, and they like it, they love it, they want more of it. The spectator, like us all, relishes in their denunciation; the spectator desires mortification. The fundamental and unasked question is why the artist and theoritician continue to desire a spectator that is not a spectator – the fundamental and unasked question is why the artist needs to control how the Other sees; how the viewer interprets. For a rhetoric neurotically preoccupied with emancipation, why does the artist dream of control? The control of their viewer, control of their interpretation, control of their thoughts, control of their actions, control of their political destinies. From the sinking ship of our 21st century it appears evident that Rancière’s “inability to know and desire to ignore” is better suited to describe the incapacity of artists to learn – whether from exoteric evidence, or empirical mistakes – what the viewer wants. In any case, this essential question of the viewer’s desire is the wrong one. The political impotence of the artist aptly accommodates a homologous metaphor for the left’s larger inability to learn and desire to ignore the innumerable failures and resulting contingencies of its 20th-century struggles – a great historical irony considering their pedagogical preoccupations.

Notes

¹ Veltruský, Jiři. “Man and Object in the Theater.” In A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, ed. Paul L. Garvin, 83–91. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1964.
² Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. Methuen, 1980, p. 6.
³ Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props. University of Michigan Press, 2003, p. 12.
⁴ It should go without saying that there are additional categories of people in these spaces for example: the stage crew, the gallerist, the curator, the director, the usher etc. However, these infrastructural roles are not semiotized based on their context – the stage manager, gallerist, or usher do not cease to be so upon leaving a semiotizing space.
⁵ Brecht, Bertolt. “Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting.” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willett, Hill and Wang, 1964, p. 91-99.
⁶ Ibid. p. 130-136.
⁷ Artaud, Antonin. “Theatre and Cruelty.” The Theatre and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, 1958, p. 84.
⁸ Ibid. p. 86
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ See Lacan, Jacques. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. (Originally published 1969-1970). Klein, Melanie. “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms.” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 27, 1946, pp. 99-110.
¹¹ Borges, Jorge Luis. “On Exactitude in Science.” Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, Penguin Books, 1998, p. 325. (Originally published 1946)
¹² Klein, Melanie. “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms.” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 27, 1946, p. 105.
¹³ Artaud, Antonin. “The Theatre of Cruelty.” The Theater and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, 1958, p. 89.
¹⁴ Noland, Cady. Clip on Method. Anastas, Snowden, 2021.
¹⁵ Eco, Umberto. Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press, 1984. p.224.
¹⁶ Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Hackett Publishing Company, 1976, p. 53.
¹⁷ Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, University of Chicago Press, 1998, Originally published in 1967. pp. 148-172.
¹⁸ Ibid. p.153
¹⁹ Ibid. p.155
²⁰ Ibid. p.160
²¹ Ibid pp. 148-172.
²² Ibid p.163
²³ See Morris, Robert. “Notes on Sculpture.” Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem, edited by Robert Morris, MIT Press, 1993, pp. 21-31. (Originally published 1966); Smithson, Robert. Collected Writings. Edited by Peter L. Frampton and Robert Smithson, University of California Press, 1996.
²⁴ Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Zone Books, 1994, p. 4. (Originally published 1967)
²⁵ Ibid p.111
²⁶ For a comprehensive accounting of the CIA’s activities in the visual arts during the cold war see: Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper. Granta Publications, London. 1999
²⁷ Results collated from annual reports by: National Surveys on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH): Summary of national findings. SAMHS. Rockville, Maryland. 2003–2023. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). Lisbon. 2003–2023.
²⁸ Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics, Presses du réel, Paris, 2002. p.14.
²⁹ “Civic space” here of course referring to a museum or biennial to which one must pay an entrance fee.
³⁰ Debord. ibid. page 1
³¹ Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October, no. 110, 2004, p. 52.
³² This concept of plausible deniability and willful instability will be returned to in the last part of this text.
³³ See Madsen, Kristian Vistrup. “Conversations with Friends.” Kunstkritikk. Sep 8, 2023. https://kunstkritikk.com/conversations-with-friends; Fisher, Mark. “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” The Weird and the Eerie, Repeater Books, 2018, pp. 87-98.
³⁴ Veltruský, Jiři. ibid.
³⁵ Here I am reminded of Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” anti-drug crusades.
³⁶ Bishop, Claire. Participation: Essays on the Intersection of Art and Audience. MIT Press, 2006, p. 13.
³⁷ Bourriaud, Nicolas. Participation: Essays on the Intersection of Art and Audience. MIT Press, 2006, p. 164.
³⁸ Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October, no. 110, 2004, p. 79.
³⁹ Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” Artforum, vol. 56, no. 1, September 2017, pp. 96-101.
⁴⁰ Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Penguin Classics, 2000, p. 274. (Originally published 1905)
⁴¹ Sanchez, Michael. “Dose of Feeling.” Texte zur Kunst, no. 79, September 2010, pp. 91-96.
⁴² Ibid
⁴³ Wilson, Timothy D. et al. “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind”. Science, vol. 345, 2014 p.75-77
⁴⁴ Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Verso, 2009, p. 26.
⁴⁵ Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991, p. 27.

Clusters

Collisions

Conversations

40 — December 2024

Conditions of Spectatorship (1/2)

Arne De Winde, Goda Palekaitė & Margaux Schwarz (eds.)

a

Endure This Now: Literalist Art, Performance Art, and the Enigma¹

Eleanor Ivory Weber

Introduction

Literalists defining literalism⁴

Incompleteness (theatricality bridge)

Literalism today

The enigma

Notes

b

Excerpt from Skull Island Part III

Graham Kelly

c

Mirrored Dwellers: Reflections on Plural Perspectives through XR Performance

Anneleen Swillen / Guus Vandeweerd

Phygital Compositions

Fluid reflections

A more-than-human perspective

Bibliography

Bios

Notes

d

Painting-as-Prop

Ryan Cullen

The Theater

Fear and Loathing

Relations

Painting

Notes

COLLATERAL – Online Journal for Cross-Cultural Close Reading

Clusters

Collisions

Conversations

40 — December 2024

Conditions of Spectatorship (1/2)

Arne De Winde, Goda Palekaitė & Margaux Schwarz (eds.)

a

Endure This Now: Literalist Art, Performance Art, and the Enigma1

Eleanor Ivory Weber

Introduction

Literalists defining literalism4

Incompleteness (theatricality bridge)

Literalism today

The enigma

Notes

b

Excerpt from Skull Island Part III

Graham Kelly

c

Mirrored Dwellers: Reflections on Plural Perspectives through XR Performance

Anneleen Swillen / Guus Vandeweerd

Phygital Compositions

Fluid reflections

A more-than-human perspective

Bibliography

Bios

Notes

d

Painting-as-Prop

Ryan Cullen

The Theater

Fear and Loathing

Relations

Painting

Notes

COLLATERAL – Online Journal for Cross-Cultural Close Reading

Endure This Now: Literalist Art, Performance Art, and the Enigma¹

Literalists defining literalism⁴