Still and All: a response to Spaulding’s chiasmus
If we take Terry Eagleton’s effort in The Ideology of
the Aesthetic and the work of
Jacques Ranciere seriously, we see that art became a project of
aestheticization in the modern capitalist era with the rise of the bourgeoisie
and their project of sensing a world of feeling that supported their reasoning
about life and its object of “making sense.” This puts aesthetics in a
historical context. If we take the given of aesthetics as the appreciation of
arts and other sublimities, and we push it back into its history, we may see
the possibility for art to be post-aesthetic as it once was pre-aesthetic. This
would allow us to measure the thoughts in Spaulding’s dazzling chiasmus-ization
as merely part of that history.
The first place where he makes a simply aesthetic
judgment is here:
“This is perhaps as
good as modernism gets. It is interesting, though, that for Mondrian as much
as, say, Francis Picabia, or Karl Ioganson for that matter, the modernist mode
carried in its heart an extremism that could become hypertrophic in its best
and worst phases alike. The drive towards self-overcoming that Mondrian limited
to pictorial abstraction was not fundamentally different from the one that led
Ioganson from the studio to the factory to the eventual desertion of art, or
that led Klucis from Malevich to Stalin. In any given instance of modernism at
its highest intensity it was the possibility of the mark itself that was at
stake: whether line or colour or shape could be adequate to history and still
be recognisable as art, and whether the artist’s subjectivity could be adequate
to the making of such marks.” Spaulding
is marking these works of art as markers of a history that he has perceived;
his use of a photograph of Constructivist artists in Lenin’s car provides a
marker of an intersection of their artistic “drive” with their political
stances. The current tendency to read art this way works inside that same
drive: “at its highest intensity it was
the possibility of the mark itself that was at stake: whether [it] could be adequate to history and still be
recognisable as art [criticism],
and whether the [critic]’s
subjectivity could be adequate to the making of such marks.”
Spaulding goes on to intelligently say that “Modernism mediated that limit and made it into form.
Art courted reification when it failed to confront the limit of its
reproduction as an institution – whenever, in other words, it started to look
too much like art – yet it risked still more disastrous reification when it
exceeded that limit, as the late work of Klucis demonstrates. Either
possibility was built into modernism’s basic procedures.” They were
procedures of a late aestheticism, always already at the service of bourgeois
capital and rejectable on the one side if too arty and on the other if too
adamant in trying to be historically dialectical.
Clyfford Still, now packaged rather bourgeois-istically
in that nice new Denver museum, worked from one side of this divide to the
other over his career. Spaulding’s reference to “programmatism” might even be
seen to fit that museum well. Its display of Still’s works begins with youthful
efforts that move naturally into a room of “programmatic” works and then out into the 60s and 70s to
its end, a last room of postmodernity. Spaulding writes “‘programmatism’: briefly, the cycle of class
struggle – conspicuously coterminous with artistic modernism – that finds its
programme in the affirmation of the proletariat as an autonomous pole within
the capitalist class relation. Programmatism refers to struggles that affirm
the identity of the proletarian subject and hence that frame politics in terms
of the growth of class power, as opposed to the immediate abolition of the
proletariat as a class of capital. It begins with the workers’ movement in the
mid-19th century and ends, if we follow the concept’s originators, in exactly
the moment in question, the 1960s and 70s, when new forms of revolt and
capitalist restructuring eliminated the basis for a programmatic class
politics. Workers themselves then tended to reject mediation by traditional
parties and trade unions, while capital decomposed the class through a new
global division of labour and intensified real subsumption of the labour
process (by which I here designate the imposition of specifically capitalist
rationalities through technique and organisation). What does it mean to say
that modernism ‘belongs’ in some deep but still-to-be-determined sense to the
epoch of programmatism?”
This question leads Spaulding’s aesthetic investigation
further into the language of Marx and post-Marxism, where we can begin to see
that the concepts fit our history of aesthetics neatly. Too neatly. It is as if
Ranciere’s thesis on the aesthetics of politics were turned again moebiously
inside-out. To see the artwork as a commodity and the artist’s work as labour
and yet to treat aesthetics as a timeless value is to miss somewhat of Marx’s
(and Zizek’s) efforts. Ranciere places Marx’s efforts at the edge of the modern
regime of aesthetics and gives credit to the Romanticisms of German Idealism
for making Marx possible. Ranciere also provides a challenge to Spaulding’s
thinking when he admits that the regime of representational art subsists
alongside the aesthetic regime of the modern period. This is how programmatism
has a place, but Ranciere does a better job of assessing the work-value of art
in our times. Where Spaulding says, “Under
capitalism, art is and is not like any other commodity. It is and is not like
any other congelation of abstract labour time. It occupies something like a
permanent gap in the structure of value’s reproduction, and hence is in
contradiction with the value-form even as it is nothing other than this
relation to it. During the epoch of programmatism, it was the specific form of
this contradiction that accounted for art’s positivity, as a practice that was
able to sustain itself, indeed to thrive on its predicament, at least for a
time.” Ranciere says art brings work into visibility “on the basis of
a twofold promotion of work: the economic promotion of work as the name for the
fundamental human activity, but also the struggles of the proletariat to bring
labour out of the night surrounding it, out of its exclusion from shared
visibility and speech (The Politics of Aesthetics 42). He also demystifies the sense of “utopia” in
arts, programmatic or not, by showing how the utopic thinking of fiction and
politics was actually just heterotopic (36-37). Spaulding goes into the myth of
utopia a little too far when he makes it the value-form of art that favors workers’ goals:
“Modernist art was also negative because it stood for everything beyond the law
of value. In certain of those extreme moments that defined its very being, it
was nothing less than the concrete figure of utopia. As such, however, it
perhaps remained a specific and conflicted instance of the value-form’s own
properly utopian content, which is to say its prefiguration of a socialist mode
of production that would be even more thoroughly mediated by labour than is
capitalism, though under the conscious direction of its human bearers. Hence if
class consciousness in its Lukácsian formulation is the self-consciousness of
labour, recognising its own alienated essence in the commodity-form, modernist
art could be described as something like the moment of value’s
self-reflexivity, when it pauses in its circulation and dithers. Modernist art
is value thinking its own sublation.” Ranciere has already thought this
through a little more clearly: “The workers for their part did not set practice
in contrast with utopia; they conferred upon the latter the characteristic of
being ‘unreal,’ of being a montage of words and images appropriate for
reconfiguring the territory of the visible, the thinkable, and the possible”
(37).
Ranciere’s statement shows the inverse truth where
Spaulding defines the Modern as determined by artists: “Art could play this role only by continually
defying its relapse into identity with the value-form. This required an immense
labour of the negative.” Spaulding’s fairly convincing but abstract
argument depends upon a positive utopia as the focus of programmatism.“Again and again, though, it was discovered that the
preservation of art as the figure of utopia necessitated the destruction of art
as a signifying practice, because signification itself was perceived as already
captured. Artworks had to be opaque to the extent that utopia had to remain
unrepresentable, lest it succumb to the fallen world.” This positive
unrepresentability is about as naïve as Ranciere has shown negative
unrepresentability to be in The Future of the Image.
Spaulding’s most interesting idea comes where he sees
opaque artworks as arbitrary like money is:
“Words in liberty and arbitrary signs began to look like money, value’s most
general equivalent.”
Spaulding’s examples, though, show a naiveté about both
money and signification: “In all of these
cases [Picasso 1912ish, Duchamp, &/or Picabia later], it was modernism’s
gambit to submit art to its opposites, value and non-signifying matter, as
perhaps the last way it could still be made.”
They also show a willingness to subsume art-making under
economic terminology: “Yet it is reproduction
that is tacitly asserted as the content of the everyday, because whatever
emancipatory potential one could attribute to the collapse of art into ‘life’
cannot be drawn from alienated production alone, and hence must posit at the
very least its infection by social reproduction: that is, subordination of
production to actual needs rather than accumulation. For all of its frequent
productivist (and masculinist) pretensions, then, it is more useful to describe
the avant-garde as, among other things, a means of precipitating an altered
relation between the two spheres – ultimately, their anticipated identity. We
can thus say that the aim of the so-called historical avant-garde, albeit one
that was perhaps not completely articulable until its recovery after World War
II (that is, after an immense crisis of the capitalist everyday), was to
reconcile production and reproduction under the sign of sublated value.”
The workers in “the real” and not in heterotopia might embrace Picasso’s chunks of the real, the bicycle seat bull head like Duchamp’s urinal or Picabia’s newsprint, as an upside down everyday world they knew very well. I can see them laughing sardonically like the voice in Mark Knopfler’s “I want my MTV” at how money is made of these insignificant signifying things. Spaulding wants to mystify their cleverness with an unconscious side and to translate it to a realm where everything has been figured out in those other terms that he applies: “I say this knowing that the imperatives I am describing were only intermittently conscious to practitioners and critics of modernism, and rarely made up a programme. Neither did these stages of negation follow one from another in crude temporal sequence. Rather, the structure outlined here is a recurrent narrative form proper to the contradiction of the aesthetic as an aspect of the moving contradiction of capital during a certain phase of its development. The concept of programmatism clarifies the periodisation of modernism because it more precisely determines the relation between class struggle and the reproduction of value.” Class struggle needs no such affirmation; it is. Art can join it in assuming the kind of multiple consciousness forced on the working class, or ignore it and struggle with the materials (and “immaterials”) of art-making.
If we respect the aesthetic worker at the same level as
other workers, the “double play” in those three Modernists has more than
value-form or signification; it has both, but in an inverse way from that
theorized by Spaulding: “The value-form is a
broken image of utopia. The forms of negation sketched above would make no
sense unless art was felt to be, somehow, the repository of a quality lacking
in capitalist modernity, a quality that could only be made available to
society, however, by one style or another of art’s destruction. It is not the
case that in every single instance this quality was in fact the liberation of
labour – in other words socialism, or the reconciliation of humans with their
own production and with nature. However, the fact that labour in the form of
value is the most basic mediation specific to capitalist society means that
there was in this era a structural propensity for liberation in general to be
posed as the liberation of labour, so long as labour itself could still appear
as the proletarian subject’s own truth, rather than as wholly subsumed to the
reproduction of capital. If the affirmation of the proletariat affirms value as
the worker’s own objectified essence, which it expects to be reappropriated
under socialism rather than merely destroyed and stripped for its use,
modernist art as the value-form’s utopian moment necessarily bears a relation
to the dynamics of class struggle: not as something external (context or
subject matter) but as the very ground of the artistic mark’s possible
mediation with a social totality.” This plays right into the bourgeois
sublation of the artist as the one who defines work from apart or above.
Aestheticizing the act of the artist is the bourgeois
move par excellence.
“Class struggle in the shape of programmatism is internal to modernist
practice, and inescapably so. Of course this does not explain everything about
modernism.” Certainly.
“The conversion from revolution in the aesthetic to
political revolution evidently remains for us the one possible way of imagining
art’s end and hence its realisation.” If the “us” is the bourgeoisie or the
aristocracy, this may be true; however, the worker either sees the artist as
bourgeois or as fellow worker, and that is the possibility denied by theorizing
programmatism back into Modernism.
Clyfford Still’s career is still the best way to see a lot
of this at a glance. His paintings can easily be aestheticized into either
programmes of raising awareness of the feel of the life of regular folks or
later the feeling of playing with abstract elements of painting, OR they can be
read as work with arbitrary capital value applied to them later and separately
despite the artist’s best efforts. Still’s career allows this latter
possibility because of the way he stepped aside from the capital machinery.
Despite Katherine Kuh’s lamentations over Still’s stipulations about his mass
of works, we now have the museum in Denver where their mass has momentum.
There is an attempt by Spaulding to bring the current
situation of Capital into the picture…:
“Capitalist development no longer homogenises the class
worldwide but stratifies and disperses it. Capital throws off labour and
creates vast surplus populations with no clear basis for unity at the point of
production. Decoupling the reproduction of capital from reproduction of the
proletariat becomes at once the result of the capitalist valorisation process,
as the moving contradiction between necessary and surplus labour, as well as
the break to be produced by the activity of proletarians: class war now is war
over the results of a crisis in the class relation, not control over the
workplace or the state. The value-form has ceased to project itself into
modernist futurity as the anticipated basic mediation of a socialist
transitional period, but instead faces the alternative of its reproduction, in
capitalism, or its abolition.
[13 To forestall a misunderstanding: this is not to say that destruction
of the value-form is the content of revolutionary practice or its sine qua non.
Rather, destruction of the value-form is implied in whatever practice would
destroy the capitalist mode of production. Such a practice would presumably be
motivated by much more immediate factors.]”
… that is engaging but also a way of cheating in theory
by blurring bits of history together.
It allows him to get close to the truth that he is
denying, though:
“None of this is external to art but instead constitutes
something like its ontology, since although the value-form no longer has a role
to play in the affirmative apparatus of programmatism it does emphatically
still determine the place of art in capitalist society. There is no
‘aesthetics’ proper to the kind of revolutionary action that could occur in the
present moment, but only certain conditions of possibility that we can
reconstruct in theory. The release of art from the programmatist dispensation
with regard to value means that there is now a certain leeway or even an
aleatory moment in the relation between art and concrete instances of struggle.
This is the extremely qualified sense in which one can accept the sub-Hegelian
notion that we are living during or after the end of art: it is not true that
anything goes, but rather whatever goes has to be determined one case at a
time. Art may never have had much to do with the absolute, but in the past two
centuries it has had a privileged relation to value, which is the basic
mediation of a capitalist social totality. When labour, that is to say the
substance of value, ceases to be affirmed in class struggle, art takes on a new
indeterminacy with respect to that totality. Art becomes open to the
inscription of new subjects and to the appropriation of its marks by new
collectivities, not necessarily, but as things ebb and flow.” This is where
Spalding gets to his most important and clearest thoughts but also sets labour
(sic) aside too quickly. “There is no
‘aesthetics’ proper to the kind of revolutionary action that could occur in the
present moment, but only certain conditions of possibility that we can
reconstruct” is the point, but his adding that this reconstruction
happens in theory and his implication that it happens only in theory is a
denial of his own “None of this is
external to art.” Art has labor in it.
The aesthetic regime recognized and explicated by Jacques
Ranciere may leave us trapped in the dilemma described by Spaulding, but it is
certainly not the last word—even for our times. We will have already surpassed
it once the theorization of a post-aesthetic art appears. And it has already
been appearing even as we critique the aesthetic regime. This Zizekian
retro-view is used by Ranciere too, as he explains how the aesthetic had
already begun to arise during the regime of representative art (v. The
Future of the Image pp. 79-82, 89,
& 104). The hinges for having already begun a post-aesthetic regime are all
around us, but I enjoy looking at them in the career of Clyfford Still.
Spaulding says, “The
undoing of the modernist form of the relation between art, value, and futurity
by the extension of real subsumption means that art cannot now be presumed to
hold in reserve any qualities of essential use to a coming social order,
because that sort of future – a future in which a coming mode of production
could be planned and realised by a programme – no longer exists.” Still
provides a practical specific example that reaches beyond such a big general
statement about art. Spaulding statement is small in comparison to the actual
practice of Clyfford Still. The critic makes claims like, “It hardly needs to be said that what I am
describing here is another way to narrate the phenomenon previously known as
“postmodernism,” and “we ought to understand what made its [Modernism’s]
ambitions plausible in the first place, and what ruined them.” But
the work of many artists shows how narrow these statement and concerns are.
Still’s career is fairly well represented in the new
museum in Denver, despite its near grandiosity, and its catalogue can be used
to see how the artist made his way through the kind of Modernism that Spaulding
sees as “ruined” and on through a Postmodernism that escapes the limitations
Spaulding says were set for it by one kind of project. Still’s project, though
his art looks like “the phenomenon previously known as ‘postmodernism,’” is
different and partly because of the way his earlier works colors it. We can
read it, period by period, as that catalogue does, and use the
Hegelian/Zizekian reverse view to see how the early periods were part of the
later periods as we look back through them. We also can see how the later
periods are still carrying the project of the earlier ones, not in negation of
them but in a fulfillment of aspects of them that Spaulding’s framing of
Modernism can’t even see.
He completes his article by asserting very complexly and
somewhat self-guardedly that the
“argument, to repeat, is that the end of programmatism also means the end of
modernism, and that both ends can be described in terms of the changed temporal
horizon of the class relation and in particular the proletariat’s attitude
towards the value-form (on a fundamental structural rather than a conscious
level). To restate the point in somewhat different words, we can say that
modernist art must negate itself because its continued existence is seen as at
once prefiguring and preventing conscious direction of the value-form under
socialism, whereas art after the eclipse of programmatism no longer relates to
a real horizon of the value-form’s socialisation but only to that of its abolition.
Art no longer embodies the value-form’s utopian moment because restructuring of
the class relation has annihilated the particular kinds of struggle by which
its realisation could have been imagined.” Phew.
As you turn the pages of Clyfford Still: The Artist’s
Museum, you can take a path
something like walking through the building and something like moving through
the life of this iconic and iconoclastic painter. It begins with a selfie in
the style of Rembrandt (1924) and moves through the quasi-programmatic late 20s
work from the fields and factories of Alberta. Still’s work of the 1930s, from
Washington State in Pullman, is important to addressing the issue of value-form
and class shaped by Spaulding as the basis of his argument. The book’s notes, apparently
written by David Anfam, focus our attention on the “expressionistic” quality of
these paintings. The artist, he says, “seems committed to revealing the
physical, emotional, and even psychological effects of hard work.” Anfam
opposes this to “the many upbeat images of labor made by diverse American
artists during the Great Depression.” This thinking is central to the framing
(so to speak) of Still’s paintings by the museum. From it, we can unfold more
than a move toward abstraction and find the thread that can be woven back
though these paintings from the abstract future.
These paintings, from the late 30s, and those that come
from the early 40s in Oakland show a social value for abstraction. The book
separates them from what it calls the “first abstractions” done mostly in
Richmond, VA, in ‘43-‘45. Still had his first big one-artist show at SFMOMA in
’43, so that dividing line makes sense in lots of ways. Still, with Still, such
a division also is a hinge. And the war is there blurring those years together.
It is easy enough to see the figures of the suffering farm families melting
into abstraction, but a little work with this period can reveal another
continuity and how social value is at its focal point.
Anfam’s language actually puts some light on this
continuity that negates Spaulding’s “chiasmus.” Spaulding writes that “if
this chiasmus is anything it is at least in part a map of ideological closure,
that is to say, of modernism’s myths. The workers’ movement was not in any real
way dependent on the artistic avant-garde, nor, of course, were the two
formations necessarily aligned. If it was long the case, however, that the
negation of art was a real force in the making of art, as I have shown in the
example of Mondrian, I am sure that this is because the futurity of revolution
along programmatist lines was intuitively known as art’s own occluded content.”
The example of Still, and its difference from such as Mondrian, can
shift us away from terms like occlusion and even revolution but still back to
art’s labor for laboring people of all kinds. Clyfford Still was known as an
angry person Katherine Kuh, in My Affair with Modern Art, calles him “Art’s Angry Man” and Anfam refers to
his “rage.” Anfam’s wording about the 30s paintings gives Still credit for a
combination of expression and commitment that rises out of and above this rage.
He asserts that this commitment is toward those who do “hard work.” In his
larger article on Still’s career, Anfam even calls him “Resolutely antifascist”
and quotes him on how “subversion offers possibilities” that are not in blatant
revolution as he says, “Totalitarian societies have to keep watch for the wild
weeds” (96). This approach skirts the programmatisms looked at by Spaulding and
the stoicisms of Modernists.
Neither rage nor stoicism presents a full response to
fascism. Still presents a reality that can provoke both emotion and perspective
distance in the viewer; he does not load the canvas with his emotion or that of
his “subjects.” He has clearly worked hard to invite your emotion and thinking
to join in aesthesis. If you look
at the 30s paintings from Pullman, you can see that it is their distortion that
works this evocation. It is the distortion of lives that we respod to in these
works. Theirs is not a positive programme nor heroic revolution but a
resistance, a “subversion.” This is the work that art works do, by bending us
from what we’re used to, and the direction of this bending can be left or right
or nowhere (as in Mondrian).
The elongated verticality in the Pullman paintings is a
rhetorical move. It speaks of this distortion without expecting an answer. And
that rhetoric continues as we look at later works by Still where the figurative
has disappeared. This progression might be read to suggest that the figurative
is the “basis” from which the “abstractions” are abstracted (as the word
suggests). However, Zizek has shown us that, in Hegel and elsewhere in the
spirit of our thinking, things work the other way around. The abstract shows,
once it happens, that it was always already there in the figurative; the
abstract is the “basis.” It is in how we see, physically, along with the sense
of “fusion” of the abstract elements in whole responses.
“Form/Feeling/Perception/Concept/Consciousness” is the order of the almost
instantaneous heapings-up of mind (skandhas) studied for centuries by Buddhist
scientists. Feeling-fusion comes early. Neuroscientists confirm this in
face-recognition processing.
Still emphasized this when he told Kuh that he “never
wanted color to be color, …texture to be texture, or images to become shapes,”
but he “wanted them all to fuse into a living spirit.” She uses that quote in
her 1979 Affair book (199) and
earlier in her “Foreword” to the Buffalo catalogue in 1966 (10). However early
or late he may have actually said this, it puts his abstracts in a context of
not being “subtracts” like the works of the Moderns Still was not focused on
form without feeling-fusion in perception and conception. He worked
aesthetically, as part of the “aesthetic regime” described by Ranciere, but
also readying us for the post-aesthetic regime already emerging where the
rhetoric embraces the viewer.
“I want the spectator to be reassured that something that
he values within himself (sic)
has been touched and found a kind of correspondence. That being alive, having
the courage, not just to be different but to go your own way, accepting
responsibility for what you do best, has value, is worth the labor.” Anfam
lifts that quote used by Thomas Albright in 1979 and makes it his punchline
(101). The word “labor” there is Still’s. Anfam calls the later works “paysages
moralisés” and links them to the
early Alberta works. He intelligently makes the artist’s vocabulary have an
“etymology—the ever-present verticals that were once living beings, the creepy
tongues of jagged paint that had been clawing hands, the tenebrous or noontide
light that formerly belonged to the landscape, and the parched or glistening
pigment skins that devolved from wasted and flayed anatomies” all contribute to
keep the figurative work alive in the abstracts “without their burdening this
new language with old baggage” (94). “Put another way, representational origins
or impulses are always subliminally apparent to the knowing viewer even as the
task of abstraction erased, shattered, opr propelled them to limits beyond
recognition. If this sounds paradoxical, then it is because Still’s gamble was
paradoxical. At their finest, his mature works possess all the strengths of
representational art yet without the distracting weaknesses.” (91)
These strengths and weaknesses are related to Still’s
response to the Moderns. His simplicities are different in a way that involves
his rhetorical position. He is addressing the “spectator.” His art is not “made
to decorate the walls of rich men” (qtd. in Anfam 100). It is made to be as
simple as the moment of perception: “The best works are often those with the
fewest and simplest elements—pictures that are almost obvious, until you look
at them a little more and things begin to happen” (qtd. In Anfam 67-68). “The
figure stands behind it all. It is like stripping down Rembrabdt or Velázquez
to see what an eye can do by itself, or an arm or a head—and then going
beyond…But by then it’s something else, of course, a whole new world, for which
there are no words.” (qtd. in Anfam 67) Breaking down but not simply breaking
apart, keeping the rhetorical address not addressing “art for art’s ache,”
these are moves of a post-aesthetic order.
Quotes from Daniel Spaulding at
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/value-form-and-avant-garde
