SOCIAL ART PRACTICE AND
CORPORATE SOCIAL IDEOLogy
The rationale and interpretations of social art practice—of
which most dominant discourses have been articulated in the North—do not fully
relate to the ways in which public or community engaged art in Latin America
has developed in the past decades. Just consider some of the leading voices on
this matter: Nato Thompson, Grant Kestner, Claire Bishop, among several others.
They have influentially championed, critiqued, and created standards or
taxonomies of the modalities and ends of this kind of expanded public art
practice. They have, thankfully, given visibility to historic or ongoing art
projects that are, for the most part, difficult to grasp, whether because these
are process-based to be experienced rather than discrete objects or
installations to be seen; because these are using unconventional, perhaps new,
artistic languages and grammar yet not fully comprehended by art specialists
and its audiences; because they happen at the margins of society, its
institutions and narratives; because they do not engage art specialists but
instead general audiences turned active participants as collaborators,
co-producers and, at times, also as the sole receptors of a project. The list
of reasons can go on.
However, there may be no need to point out that, in the North,
institutional infrastructure for the arts has a very different history and
funding structure—private, for the most part. Neither, that its cultural
histories diverge with those of the South—just take the experience of
colonialsm, revolution, dictatorships. The notions of the public and the
practice of civicism have a different basis, depending where and when one is
acting. The analysis of social practice in contemporary art raises a number of
interesting issues that relate to aesthetic theory and political history,
namely, around art’s function in society. The point is this: What is being
thought in Latin America about social practices in contemporary art? The
instrumentalization of art (By who? For the sake of what?), the antagonisms it
may generate or represent, the intended or naïve complicities it creates, are
among these issues explored in this critical essay by Carlos Salazar. First a
lecture in “Art and the Market” at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia
(April 24-28, 2006), and later published in the online blog EsferaPública
(November 27, 2012), this is the first English translation of Salazar’s essay.
The original title of the lecture was “Social Practice and Social Corporate
Responsibility; the text here has been translated by Phillip Penix-Tadsen, with
permission of the author and in collaboration with EsferaPública.
-Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy
Written by Carlos Salazar and originally published in Spanish by
EsferaPública on May 02, 2006. Translated by Phillip Penix-Tadsen.
(Text adapted and edited for the web based on
the presentation “Social Practice and Social Corporate Responsibility,” part of
the “Art and the Market” series at the University of the Andes, which took place
from April 24–28, 2006)
“He has the malice, the cleverness, the wickedness, the
sharpness of wit, the hardness of heart, stipulated for loving the world
profitably. He will never die of it.”
Katherine Anne Porter. Flowering Judas. 1930
“What’s that word you say, boy?”
“Social responsibility,” I said.
“What?”
Ralph Ellison. The Invisible Man.1947
“C’estl’opportunisme qui fait la fonction.” *
Contemporary
social practice or contemporary political art is not the inheritor of the
Brechtian enlightenment that inspired the liberal culture of the 60s, as might
be deduced from the attempts of those trying to establish its historical
prestige. Brecht, and Piscator before him, attempted to make art and especially
theater into an instrument of social praxis and political
consciousness-raising, terms that have been euphemized ad nauseum as
political art, relational art, responsible art, historical consciousness,
social consciousness, social responsibility, ethical responsibility, duty to
report, etc.
Nor
is contemporary social practice a vindication absorbed into capitalism by a
pioneering segment of the artistic community consisting of artists, academics,
and curators, a “Corporation of Social Practice” which sees itself as the only
morally valid entity within the cultural superstructure, to the extent that we
have ever more testimonies by curators and artists self-promoting and selling
themselves, as if singing Brecht’s own “Ode to Dialectics.”
“Let us show you the
path.
The hungry will feed
you.”
For
beyond the circular delirium of what seems ever more like the central committee
on culture, like the Prince’s Party sought by Gramsci, contemporary social
practice is in fact a microcosmic reflection of neoliberal corporate policy
inspired by Andrew Carnegie and his belief that society should be left to the
care of corporations through corporate social responsibility and philanthropy (Hymn
to Wealth, 1899). That is, its origins are not in the aesthetic theories of
Marx, as was suggested in Brecht’s time and through the aforementioned
enlightenment aesthetic of the 60s, but rather they can be found concealed
behind a discourse “hostile” to capitalism, in the basic theories of capitalism
itself with regard to the design and reactionary use of culture as an ideological
vehicle for the corporation.
The existence of a paradox of this nature is
nothing new, having been brought to light by Trotsky’s observation that every
new tendency in art begins with rebellion. As rebels who are at the same time
seeking to climb the social ladder, artists—who almost always belong to the
middle class and whom Trotsky denominated the “petty bourgeois”—“are inevitably
influenced by opposing ideologies and impulses from the left as well as the
right, with a great preponderance of the right over the left.” (1) Contemporary
social practice is a good example of this contrast between opposing ideas:
Marx’s terminology, Carnegie’s strategy, and in practice, the preponderance of
the latter. Lenin himself, in his definition of the term “leftist opportunism,”
would speak of adopting “the tactics of the right to achieve the goals of the
left.”
All the dialectical and opportunistic juggling
involved in the conceptual discourse of social practice—that hyphen whose parts
never come together—and all the impossibility of what Spinoza calls “ethical
coherency,” comes from the clash between rebellion, on the one hand, and need
for social ascension on the part of the artists on the other. Or, as Marx put
it in March of 1850:
“The democratic petty
bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of
the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change in the social
conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable
for themselves as possible.”
Heroic language—hostile syntax, a discursive
overdose of serotonin and plenty of posturing; the language of pessimism and
suspicion, which according to Goebbels are “the best teachers in our earthly
valley of sorrows”—is born out of the necessity of rebellion. Social practice
replicates the market strategy of the corporation by way of the artistic
mainstream, which is dazzled by corporate efficiency, power and presence.
This impulse is born out of the drive for social ascension, as in collector
Robert Scull’s classic declaration, “I’d rather use art to climb than anything
else.” But above all, it attempts to copy from the corporation its great
capacity for permanence and its grandiloquent appearance of moral
impenetrability.
Frederic Jameson recognized in 1991 that:
“The new political art
(if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism,
that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational
capital.” (2)
The
parentheses are Jameson’s own, and this is significant because they insinuate
that political art’s nature is pure appearance, and put us only a step away
from contemporary political art as the Wagnerian “Total Spectacle” or “Gesamtkunstwerk”
of global capitalism. While in the heart of modernism’s development the theater
sought to develop “social praxis,” postmodernism ended up converting “social
praxis” into theater: into “SozialGesamtkunstwerk,” which, we might
note, is meant to be a symptom of the beginning of its moral ending. (3)
Basically then, contemporary social practice,
whatever red makeup it might put on to stage its act, is the aesthetic
materialization of capitalist corporate social responsibility. But most
important, contemporary social practice, both in the opportunistic way it comes
about and even down to the very letter, adopts the strategies of corporate
marketing, which maintain that a product—and the artistic product is no
exception—is more marketable when accompanied by a social cause. Said social
cause should be the one most highly publicized to the community through
communication media (socially committed spectacle), winning the product a great
deal of moral prestige (moral capital) among consumers at the same time it
receives a great deal of market mobility ahead of the small businesses whose
products lack the means to introduce socially responsible action into their
strategies—normally small business struggling to stay afloat—making those
businesses seem disinterestedly inhumane, greedy and selfish. The moral essence
of corporate greed is concealed in a magical-ideological act, while increasing
the probability that competitors will collapse due to their lack of attachment
to a social cause, much to the delight of the monopoly.
1. THE COMPASSION MARKET
“We
must entertain each other in brotherly affection.” John Winthrop. A Model
of Christian Charity. 1630
“DO ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?” Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The
Cry of the Children. 1842
Winthrop. A Model of
Christian Charity. 1630
However,
the contemporary idea of corporate social responsibility has its roots, as we
noted early on, in the writings of Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie, founder and
magnate of the steel industry in the United States, articulated two principles
that he believed necessary for capitalism to function with an aura of moral
validity:
1. The Charity Principle, which urges the
wealthiest members of society to assist its less fortunate members, including
the unemployed, the disabled, the ill, the widowed and the elderly. These groups
could be helped directly or indirectly through institutions such as churches,
shelters and community organizations.
2. The Administration Principle, which urges
businesses and the wealthiest individuals to consider themselves administrators
or overseers of this policy. Carnegie believed the rich should infuse their
money with an aura of moral confidence before society at large, thus making it
possible to use it and invest it in any area and for any purpose with a spirit
of legitimacy.
Carnegie’s ideas were widely accepted because,
by adding social concerns to economic considerations, corporations could reduce
the risks of the threat of intervention and regulation by the state, and they
had an open field for the accumulation of capital at their fingertips.
Carnegie’s idea of corporate social
responsibility was finally consolidated by a decision of the U.S. Congress in
1946, which offers a tax deduction of up to 5% for charitable donations.
More recently there have been two papal
encyclicals, “Quadragesimo Anno” (Pious XI, 1931) and “CentesimusAnnus” (John
Paul II, 1991), which have discussed the role of corporations and emphasized
that, while it is legitimate for them to accumulate capital, the fundamental
rule of doing business is to serve the common good.
Many of those opposed to this vision, inspired
by Milton Friedman’s arguments in the 1970s, argued that corporations had no
responsibility to society beyond making money in accordance with the legal
rules of the game of capital, and considered social responsibility an issue for
the government, not for corporations. Their primary responsibility was to their
stockholders and their sole obligation was to guide the company’s operations
toward an increase in those stockholders’ earnings.
Today, business ethics dictate that
corporations should set aside part of their resources for cultural and social
service organizations. Over the past 20 years the most commonly held belief in
business schools and societies has been that the moral quality of a company
should be evaluated in terms of corporate social responsibility.
So for more than 50 years, inspired by the
spirit of Carnegie, American corporations have financed art museums, encouraged
to commit to social responsibility by laws for “Enlightened Charitable Taxes”
and the opportunity to cultivate audiences. Each year corporations
provide more than a billion dollars in funding for said museums, and they
naturally expect in return—through directorial and curatorial policy—the
implementation of the social programs of their choosing, the corporate vision
of social responsibility (7) that favors what Kevin Jackson calls their
Reputational Image, and most important, supports their ideology.
2. ART AS REPUTATIONAL CAPITAL
“His greatest strength is the art of taking from others while
giving them the impression that he is doing them a service.” Gide
“Every
act of kindness, every deed of charity, she had
ever performed, were produced to the public.” Catharine Maria
Sedgwick. Cacoethes Scribendi. 1830
There are three aspects of moral
responsibility based on the concept that corporations and the artistic system
are not just legal agents but also agents with moral responsibilities, and
these deal with:
1. People, in this case artists, who have
shown themselves to be socially responsible through a “social action” in the
past, which guarantees present and future responsibility.
2. The responsibility of the individual, in
this case the artist, for the care, wellbeing and treatment of others according
to prevailing social conventions.
3. A person’s individual capacity to make
moral and rational decisions, in this case an artistic or curatorial decision.
The recognition of social pluralism is, along
with the moral conduct of business, the motivation for the members
involved—academics, critics, curators, artists and supporters—to make “serious”
moral decisions. What is fundamental is for these decisions not to harm the
efficiency of the corporate market in any way.
Kevin Jackson, professor of Business Ethics at
Fordham University in New York, argues that corporations need to take for
granted that they have a social responsibility to build, by way of the prestige
granted by social responsibility, the reputational capital that is the
equivalent of a new “brand” to be sold. (8)
While a company uses its reputational capital
to attract better employees, raise its prices, do better business, attract new
investors and have a greater margin of security in the case of a crisis, social
artists use it in a similar way, to attract better clients for their work,
raise their prices, make themselves known to potential buyers and collectors,
and to have greater reserves in case of a crisis in dealing with art’s purely
symbolic and ephemeral form of capital.
Social practice is not only reputational capital
in and of itself, but also every artist and every intermediary or dealer
seeking to market themselves must, aside from their “socially responsible” work
as such, build reputational capital based on some type of “community
work.” In accordance with the corporate moral imperative to “do well by doing
good,” they stimulate the exercise of “compassionate capitalism” by using one
of the most popular methods for building reputational capital: philanthropy and
“enlightened charity.” The enlightened culture represented relates to popular
culture in a kind of feedback loop, almost always in a vampirical manner, and
uses it as elitist reputational merchandise in line with the market. That is,
it isolates popular culture in the form of “ethnic” rural or urban culture, and
is little more than a continuation of the taste for the aesthetics of local
color in popular U.S. literature, which dates back to authors such as
Longstreet.
To define it further, TirdadZolghadr and
Martine Anderfuhren have termed this phenomenon the “Ethnic Market,” a product
of “xenophilia” or love for the foreign, a love of a purely aesthetic
nature.
The
strategic market objectives of the contemporary social artist do not in fact
differ in some aspects from the “light” culture he so abhors. Like him, pageant
queens and Miami celebrities base their market reputation on their stock with
the abandoned sectors of society. Even artists considered frivolous or
superficial in the past have taken on a heroic attitude and market strategies
based on social responsibility, which is a symptom of the extent to which they
are functioning as a market. As Adorno stated, “light” art is just the “social
bad conscience of serious art.” (10)
3. THE MISSING MORAL LINK IN THE MARKET CHAIN
“It is true without untruth, certain and most true:
that which is below is like that which is on high,
and that which is on high is like that which is below;
by these things are made the miracles of one thing.
And as all things are, and come from One, by the mediation of
One,
So all things are born from this unique thing by adaption.”
The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus
The cycle cannot end in the social act alone.
This reputational capital is not effective if it is not publicized and made
into spectacle, another concept against which the social artist is supposedly
engaged in intrepid struggle.
This socially committed spectacle is developed
through bureaucracy and media that puts it into contact with the chain of
distribution represented:
1. By the cultural institutions of the state,
the postmodern corporation being the most relevant (A. Kojéve. “The Roots of
Postmodern Politics” St. Martin’s Press. NY. 1994.)
2. By museums that are obligated by financing
from the Corporations to promote the aesthetics of corporate social
responsibility. (11)
3. By the local and international
critic-curatorial system, which is truly the validating force, both
ideologically (valid art vs. useless art, historically conscious art vs.
frivolous art, responsible art vs. irresponsible art, etc.), as well as in
terms of “exchange value,” the status of social responsibility in the work of
the artist in accordance with the codes of the corporate method of selection.
This method of selection replicates the aesthetic and structural spirit of corporate
social responsibility.
Thus,
in some way, underneath the Brechtian “enlightenist” sheen of the “committed”
artist, we have been witnessing the rebirth of the dictatorship of the 19th century Academy. Only now, the Gramscian
State monopoly on the use of ideology through culture is appended to the
management of culture by the corporation. The Roman mythology and civic deeds
“in illo tempore” of Neo-Classicism have given way to a mytho-Biblical vision
of compassionate capitalism’s social uprooting. To paint a simple picture, what
we are seeing is a corporation of “enlightened” individuals who, using a
Brechtian image and discourse hostile to capitalism, are spreading the ideas of
Carnegie.
4. COERCIVE CULTURAL FINANCING
“Allow me to be so far a Censor Morum for this end of the
Town.” Samuel Stewall. Diary. 1692
“When civil fury first grew high…” Samuel Butler.
Hudibras, Part I. 1663
Contemporary
social practice also recovers mechanisms of dictatorial participation from the
19th century academy that correspond in our era to
the birth of the concept of vertical corporate participation about which Karin
Geiselhart speaks. (12)
So, while the culture’s democratic values of
information are based on:
1. Alternative sources of information that are
transparent and easily accessible
2. Diversity of points of view
3. Mechanisms of communication between
sectors, levels and interests in a communication “by many for many”
4. Deliberate participation in the design of
the system; strong interaction
5. The possibility of deliberation at each
stage
6. Open access to information and decisions
7. The possibility of reflection about these
principles
8. Freedom from direct or indirect censorship
9. Maximization of the protection of
individual privacy;
the values of globalized information adopted
by the social practice corporation and reproduced by the contemporary
bureaucratic and curatorial system, copied from the mechanics of corporate
participation and (in the opportunistic melding of which Trotsky speaks) from
Gramsci’s theses about the need for conquest by an authoritarian cultural
hegemony prior to a “Prince Party” taking power, are based on:
1. Centralized sources of information that are
the least transparent possible
2. Monoculture
3. A “one for many” model of vertical
distribution
4. Trivialization of the participatory model
through acceptance of purely instrumental decisions; intermittent consultation
or trivialized participation
5. Direct and indirect control over the agenda
by an elite. Schemes for action reflect decisions made in advance
6. Secrecy about process and methodology
7. The functioning of the system is taken for
granted
8. Close supervision
9. Unilateral protection of the privacy of
members of the corporate elite.
This
mechanics of discrimination, as in the 19th century,
is expressed through the imposition of exclusionary thematic patterns, or as
Jan Jagodzinski more crudely calls them, “fantasies of popular ‘resistance’.”
It is on their foundations that the space of contemporary social practice is curatorially
constructed within a framework of democratic populism, based on symbolic and
non-material vindications of ethnicity, identity and memory that seek to fit
the collective desire for justice into an intangible mold permitting capitalist
relationships of production to remain intact and achieving a transferal of
class struggle into community struggle. The poor have been divided, fragmented
and taxonomized according to their local cultural color, and the risk of a
break in the consensus has finally been neutralized and controlled. (13)
The
thematic patterns are generally few in number and their lingo is less heroic
and pompous than that of the 19th-century
Academy:
“memory,” “identity,” “popular emergence,”
“rituals,” “resistances,” “hybridisms,” “alterities,” “transit,”
“itinerancies,” “uprootedness,” “pilgrimage,” “disputed territories,”
“emergence,” “deterioration,” “violence,” “tolerance,” “imminence,”
“displacement,” etc., etc. What is relevant is that, in spite of their semantic
origin and the subliminal litany of their use of the “hermeneutics of
rejection,” they are themes that:
1. Adapt to the corporate aesthetic of
philanthropic roots and are the topics envisaged by cultural aesthetics driven
by “capitalist urbanity” from Erasmus, Winthrop, Carnegie and
Rockefeller, to the contemporary corporation, and which are directed toward a
neoliberal “community ethics.”
2. Do not have the slightest possibility of
subverting corporate policy or the structural functioning of society given that
they are designed according to the principle that, as purely symbolic objects,
they do not affect the essence of the system—that is to say, the already
legally constituted property—much less the function of the flow of business.
Simple propagandistic testimony says that corporations, the state, and culture
“are doing well” and any ethical questioning directed toward them is rendered
null.
What is certain is that, as Freeman observed
in 1991, the moment in which social practice became cosmopolitan, “The idea of
corporate social responsibility has failed to help create the good society.
Long seen by academics and managers alike as the missing link in capitalism,
the concept of corporate social responsibility has not delivered on its
promise.”
5. THE TERROR AND GRIEF MARKET
This exquisite, horrible misery… Jonathan Edwards. Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God. 1741
“Everything is used today. Even misfortune.” Chateaubriand.Memoirs
from Beyond the Grave. 1836
The absurdity of a rational being who thinks himself honored in being
permitted to encounter abject poverty, oppression, famine, disease, mutilation,
and evident death.
Tomas Smollett. Roderick Random. 1748.
The other major aspect of contemporary social
practice deals with terror; not the “frivolous” or “light” terror of the film
entertainment industry, but the terror that through art becomes the barometer
for social responsibility. As noted earlier, though both forms of terror are
“politically antagonistic,” they originate out of the same regressive
aesthetics of culture.
Since the “shipwreck with a spectator” about
which Lucretius spoke in the 1st century, the great aesthetic attraction of
terror has not only been supported by a pleasure in the morbid but rather it
has always been controlled by those in power as an evaluative form, as a way of
taking a reading of the moral level and of citizens’ capacity to respond to the
demands placed upon them by the system. This was certainly how Robespierre
conceived of it when he celebrated terror as the inexorable path leading to
virtue in his speech from February 5, 1794:
“Terror without virtue is fatal; virtue
without terror is impotent.”
Although
due to their cultural hegemony they have formulated an anthropological system
of “seeing without being seen,” Anglo-Saxon nations also possess “identity,”
“memory” and “folklore,” historically rooted customs and inherited traits;
magnetic poles toward which and from which their Weltanschaung emanates.
We could create an anthropological system through which we could examine our cultural
customs and motivations. We peripheral countries provide the Rousseauian
spectacle with our suffering, our wars and our customs, but it is essential to
realize that it is possible—as it was for the characters of Uzbek and Rica in
Montesquieu’s “LettresPersanes”—to break the taboo and lift the veil of
taxonomical protection.
So it would seem—and in this way it attempts
to publicize itself and build its prestige in the market—as if the great
Anglo-Saxon attraction for the art of terror, on the one hand, and the art of
sympathy for the distress of others on the other, were the product of a great
epiphany of responsibility, something that can already be seen in the 30s in
North American painters such as Thomas Hart Benton who admired Siqueiros, but
who began to come into fashion in the 80s with the ascension of Beuys’ term
“social sculpture.” Beuys, who turns the activism of the 60s into gallery
activism and “museum activism,” in fact takes the concept from Goebbels, who
wrote in 1931 that, “For us the mass is but shapeless material. Only the hand
of the artist can bring forth a people from the mass and a nation from the
people,” and that “The statesman is an artist too. The people are for him what
stone is to the sculptor.”
So
why, in a large-scale epiphany at some point in the 80s, does the world of
culture suddenly turn “good”? Why is it that since that day of collective
revelation, artists, curators and collectors have all taken communion, been
forgiven and become good? In the past, the panorama of market sources was, for
better or for worse, more varied: Machiavellian patrons like the Medicis and
the Borgias; licentious ones inclined toward pornography like Charles II of
England, the “happy king”; libidonous ones like Godoy or Khalil Bey, the Turk
who commissioned Courbet’s “The Origin of the World”; madmen like Louis of
Bavaria, sponsor of Wagner’s Lohengrin; and megalomaniacs like
Goering.
The world of culture, that world that
consisted of the militant Brechtian avant-garde through the enlightenment of
the 60s, decided to give itself over to the masses in the 80s and, on an
epidemic level became contemplative and opportunistic—though there were
exceptions like the conceptual artist Ian Burn. Springsteen, Bono and Sting set
a populist precedent, bastardizing the confrontational legacy of Woody Guthrie
and leaving it written in the public memory that the strategies of corporate
social responsibility could be applied to the promotion of a product without
having to resort to a union or a strike to exhibit one’s belligerence. Where
Guthrie’s only reward was material scarcity, they encountered a gold mine.
If we strain ourselves a bit like Uzbek and
immerse ourselves in the Anglo-Saxon aesthetic traditions, we will find that
what really occurred was that the Anglo-Saxon victory in World War II
represented the triumph of its traditions and regressions over global culture;
of its folklore contaminated with its puritanical interpretation of the Bible,
or vice versa; in a word, its cultural syncretism—though even its existence is
denied out of a virginal fear of taxonomical abduction—remains a central part
of its ethnic culture, as with any other group.
Beginning in 1945 and for the first time in
history, the Mediterranean Catholic culture with Greco-Roman origins that had
ever dominated the west was replaced by a Protestant culture with strong
barbarian roots. And one of the most important components to come out of this
new culture was its version of the ritual therapy of terror. The cult of terror
was already present, as in many other celebrations around the world, in the
festival of horror masks and costumes of Shamain, or the Festival of the Living
Dead on the last day of the harvest, in which it was believed that the dead
returned to their homes to share and to eat with their families. Shamain would
derive into the medieval “All Hollow’s Eve” or the modern Halloween. On the
other hand we have examples like the German cult of Holda or Hella, the Queen
of the World of the Dead of those who do not die in battle (those who die in
battle go to Valhalla). Hella had the terrifying appearance of a living corpse,
sad and decomposed, and was accompanied by the ghosts of horsemen, children and
dogs on what was known as her “savage hunt.”
Regarding
the Festival of Hella, Winifred Hodge tells us that the Ladies of the Night or
the Ladies in Hella’s Service made the pilgrimage to mount Walpurgis on the
first day of May, disguised as her, apparently riding animals, and once there,
they would frantically dance under her watchful eye. The ladies of Hella
became, in the Middle Ages, the witches we all know, but when they were
persecuted by the church, the festival of Walpurgis was syncretized into the
cult of Saint Walpurga, the patroness saint of the dead. Today, for her festival
on May 1st, people leave the windows of their homes open so
that the flying goddess in a white tunic can escape from the wind-borne dogs
and ghastly horsemen that pursue her by passing through the cross formed by the
window frame. (Winifred Hodge. Witches and Walpurgisnachts.f)
Between 1743 and 1750 the poetic current known
as the “Graveyard School” flourished in England, earning its name because its
works tended to take place in cemeteries and its content tended to center on
death, tombs, anguish and grief, preceding Romanticism and the great authors of
the horror novel by fifty years. We have poems such as “The Grave” by Robert
Blair (1743), Edward Young’s “The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death
and Immortality” (1745) and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard” (1750). The Graveyard School would have a great impact on the
development of the “Schaueroman” or German horror novels of E.T.A. Hoffman,
which with their scenes of shameless terror, ghosts, living dead, and sexual
relations with demons would in turn influence authors like Mary Shelley, author
of Frankenstein, or painters like Fuseli or William Blake; their echoes can
even be heard in contemporary authors like Anne Rice.
Shortly thereafter, in an event central to the
history of Anglo-Saxon aesthetics, Edmund Burke synthesized the
phenomenological explanation of aesthetic pleasure provided by terror and
sadness, elevating them to aesthetic values based on sensorial experience. The
value of sensorial experience is itself inspired in the idea that comes about
in the intellectual cosmos of the 18th century: Locke’s idea of “empirical
affection.” For Locke, who was himself inspired by Epicurus, “All our knowledge
is founded in experience.”
In a return to Epicurus, Locke sets aside the
medieval concept of knowledge originating in the spiritual interior in order to
place the focus on sensorial knowledge, where it will remain until the advent
of Romanticism. Later, it will be resuscitated once again by Impressionism and
the Imagism of Pound, and spurned once again by postmodern internal morality.
Burke (1729-1797) is the father of, among
other ideas, the “Intervention Principle,” which legitimates the right of
states to intervene in other states which “pervert the natural order,” inaugurating
the philosophy of Imperialism. (15) However it is his best known work that
concerns us: his 1757 “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful,” which sets in place two basic principles of
Anglo-Saxon aesthetics that have been mentioned previously, namely terror as
the lived experience of the sublime, and the positive effects of sympathy on
the distresses of others.
Let
us allow Burke himself to explain, in the first place, the question of terror:
Part I, Section VII.- Of the Sublime
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the
ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or
is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to
terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the
strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”
“But as pain is stronger in its operation than
pleasure, so death is in general a much more affecting idea than pain; because
there are very few pains, however exquisite, which are not preferred to death:
nay, what generally makes pain itself, if I may say so, more painful, is, that
it is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors. When danger or pain
press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply
terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may
be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.”
Part II, Section I.- Of the Passion Caused by
the Sublime
“The passion caused by the great and sublime in
nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and
astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended,
with some degree of horror.”
Part II, Section II.- Terror
“No passion so effectually robs the mind
of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an
apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual
pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too,
whether this cause of terror be endued with greatness of dimensions or not; for
it is impossible to look on anything as trifling, or contemptible, that may be
dangerous.”
“And to things of great dimensions, if we
annex an adventitious idea of terror, they become without comparison greater.”
“Indeed, terror is in all cases whatsoever,
either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.“
Part II, Section III.- Obscurity
“To make anything very terrible,
obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent
of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the
apprehension vanishes.”
And let us allow Burke himself to explain the
question of sympathy in the distress of others.
Part I, Section XIV.- The Effects of Sympathy
in the Distress of Others
“I am convinced we have a degree of delight,
and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others; for let the
affection be what it will in appearance, if it does not make us shun such
objects, if on the contrary it induces us to approach them, if it makes us
dwell upon them, in this case I conceive we must have a delight or pleasure of
some species or other in contemplating objects of this kind.”
“…terror is a passion which always
produces delight when it does not press too closely; and pity is a passion
accompanied with pleasure, because it arises from love and social affection.
Whenever we are formed by nature to any active purpose, the passion which
animates us to it is attended with delight, or a pleasure of some kind, let the
subject-matter be what it will; and as our Creator has designed that we should
be united by the bond of sympathy, he has strengthened that bond by a
proportionable delight; and there most where our sympathy is most wanted -- in
the distresses of others.”
“...there is no spectacle we so eagerly
pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity; so that whether the
misfortune is before our eyes, or whether they are turned back to it in
history, it always touches with delight. This is not an unmixed delight, but blended
with no small uneasiness. The delight we have in such things, hinders us from
shunning scenes of misery; and the pain we feel prompts us to relieve ourselves
in relieving those who suffer; and all this antecedent to any reasoning, by an
instinct that works us to its own purposes without our concurrence.”
Burke on the Sublime
and Beautiful by Thomas Cornell. 1785
And
so the contemporary artistic act of terror and grief as aesthetic values, and
of course as values of change and exchange, was not born in the 80s, nor is it
the product of a spontaneous generation of empirical consciousness about
immorality. It is simply that after 1945 cultural values followed a different
path. The contemporary declaration about the immorality of terror and the grief
of others is just the passing mention necessary in order to enjoy them in just
the way that Susan Sontag perceived them with nostalgia at the end of her life.
In the same way that the regressive pleasure of the unspeakable terror of pagan
rituals melded in the 19th century into the sublime of the gothic novel, the
contemporary way of dealing with terror and grief is a cultural melding that
evokes Germano-Celtic archetypes, the medieval Christian consecration of the
imagery of the afterlife, the gothic novel and Victorian phantasmagoria. In the
same way that the pagan ritual of Hella was converted into the Christian ritual
of Walpurga, contemporary culture—19th-century, academic and Victorian par
excellence—makes regression acceptable to the clan, in this case in the
apparently politicized form of art and culture. Apparently politicized because
contemporary politics and the enlightened social practice it inspires, to the
extent that they are not nor will they be capable of transforming society by
making it more just, are merely a novel form of religion with its subtle aroma
of opium. Contemporary culture, like the Anglo-Saxon romantic novel, is merely
an exciting fiction that oscillates between the morality of terror and
sentimentalism.
But how does the contemporary regressive
impulse toward terror become something socially acceptable? In reality, the
contemporary educated liberal society that consumes terror and grief functions
no differently from what Freud had already discovered about transference
mechanisms in sexually repressed or neurotic individuals. The process involves
four stages of development.
1. Transference or Paraphilia.
The individual negotiates sexual gratification
with gratification achieved through socially permitted terror and grief. The
spontaneous sexual impulse, which has been systematically repressed through the
presuppositions defining the collective behavior of parishioners regarding
sexuality, is redirected toward the excitation produced by the horrific or
unfortunate deed being observed. Unlike in masochistic Catholic paraphilia, in
which the sexually alienated individual self-inflicts damage, in sadistic
Protestant paraphilia, the sexually alienated individual contemplates the
damage inflicted upon others.
2. Sublimation.
In this case on the moral level, which
redirects the original unacceptable impulse of terror as regressive pleasure
toward another socially accepted target that substitutes it: terror is
presented as social denunciation and as an essential link in political consciousness-raising.
3. Altruistic Rendition.
In which social regression projects its
necessities for such a pleasure in a vicarious manner, which is to say through
others, in this case artists. Artists who are overly dependent on the reception
of the paraphilic consumer are likewise a second filter: the alchemical flask
that even more crudely neutralizes the horrific or compassionate experience and
turns the lived experiences of terror for the original actors—meaning the
victims themselves—into something digestible to a museum-going audience. It is
in this sense that they eventually come to reject that which is “demagogic” and
“crude,” and morally validate their presentation by adopting styles that
incorporate metaphor, metathesis or a multitude of minimalist hermeneutic
acrobatics that make their product mysterious, consumable and museum-worthy.
Here we see put into practice what Burke demanded for the rational enjoyment of
terror and grief. But lest we forget, it retains “certain distances and certain
modifications.” The distance and modification are such that it becomes a
touristic or televised experience. When Burke was asked why suffering and grief
can give us pleasure, he replied, “Because they do not touch us too closely.”
It is at this point that the merchandise is immersed in the current of the
ethnic market. Terror and grief construct a new gothic cultural palace where,
as in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” the protagonist is an artist like a new
Marlow, and where exotic and foreign ghosts wander about, coming from countries
that are not, as Burke would have it, too close. All of this allies itself with
the indispensable ingredient of the emotional and sophisticatedly sentimental
shock absorber of moral content and social responsibility. Now the product is
ready to be consumed in developed nations, and it is now that we finally enter
into the fourth phase of transference.
4. The Neurotic Satisfaction of the Superego
The circle of consumption of the merchandise
of terror and grief comes to a close when the dealer, curator, museum and
collector turn the immaterial transference that is social work into exchange
value. That is to say, into merchandise. The only thing left is to export it.
It is then that the greatest and most chilling of phantasmagorias appears. A system
that advertises itself as subversive and marginal is possessed by the words of
its worst enemy, saying, like him,
“We
will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth…”
George W. Bush. 2002
Social practice has not been, is not, nor will
be capable of achieving a better society because, just like corporate social
responsibility, it is designed as a symbolic delirium of distraction from the
inherent immorality of globalization. It is designed precisely like a “deus ex
machina” of culture in order to avoid a historical turn anywhere but in a
dramatic theatrical staging. Social practice, to the extent that it is
attributed the dictatorial right of moral validation and at the same time does
not achieve it in practice, is most certainly an ethical paradox, the “missing
link” of culture under capitalism.
Brustein, who introduced the concept of
coercive cultural financing—coercive financing that circulates from
corporations to museums, from museums to curators and from curators to
artists—observes that the artistic community is simply forced to be the vehicle
of equality and social change, rather than achieving such goals through
legislation on property, thus “distracting our artists and absolving our
politicians.” In his own manner, Egyptian Samir Amin complains of it more
radically still. (16)
“...the current state of the world is not
about culture, national identity and religion but about imperialism, capitalist
development and underdevelopment and, ultimately, class.”
Nor is it a question of memory, immaterial
heritage, or fantasies of rebellion within a museum of white walls and Nordic
pine flooring, in a Swiss collection or an exquisite art fair in Basel, doing
business—as Lichtenberg said—“with small-scale darkness.”
One might think that within a few years and
due to nothing more than its intrinsic contradictions, Henry Brooks Adams’
ideas will come back into vogue:
“Artists...disappeared long ago as social
forces. So did the Church.”
However this does not seem to be the case so
long as corporations exist, with their need to morally legitimize themselves
through social culture and artists, intellectuals and writers who fulfill their
Hegelian will to power with a “critical commitment” that, as Adorno observes,
“is often nothing but a lack of talent or concentration, a slackening of
energy” that they impulsively transform into social content. (17)
The market tactics and strategies of social
practice are moderately far from being rejected by the world of culture. Art in
the era of opportunism and the taking of art by populism will be a reality for
some time, at least until its Enigma Code (18) has been deciphered.
Carlos Salazar*
On the blog Carlos Salazar uses an alternate
title that the author considers equally pertinent: “The Taking of Contemporary
Art by Populism: Social Practice and Corporate Social Ideology.”
Notes
* (“Opportunism is what makes it work.”)
Antoine Danchin. La Recherche. 1996. Antoine Danchin is a mathematician,
geneticist, and discoverer, in 1997, of the complete genome of the bacteria
“Bacillus Subtilis.” He is director of the Unit for the Regulation of Genetic
Expression at the Pasteur Institute. Within the context in which we are
writing, the word “function” also has a theatrical function, as we will see.
Moreover, opportunism may be the only truly democratic form within
postmodernism. It does not presuppose that individuals anxious to get out and
be accepted by the system are of a “good” or “bad” nature. Humans are
opportunistic by nature and opportunism is a mechanism of natural survival,
only within the system, as in Sade’s “Justine,” in Nietzsche and Duchamp,
success often demands ethical sacrifice.
(1) Trotsky. “On Literature and Art”
(New York, 1977) p. 104
“Oppressed minorities often reflect the
techniques of the bourgeoisie more brilliantly than some sections of the
bourgeoisie themselves. The psychological importance of this becomes evident
when one recalls that oppressed minorities, and especially petty bourgeois
sections of oppressed minorities, strive to assimilate the virtues of the bourgeoisie
in the assumption that by doing so, they can lift themselves into a higher
social sphere.” Richard Wright. Blueprint for Negro Literature. 1937
(2) Frederic Jameson. “Postmodernism, or The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” Verso, 1991.
(3) “History is thorough, and passes through
many phases when it conveys an old form to the grave. The final phase of a
historical form is its comedy. Why does history proceed this way? So that
mankind will separate itself happily from its past.” Marx. “Critique of the
Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’,” 1844.
(4) Robert G. Kennedy. “Does a Business
Corporation Have a Responsibility to Society?” Acton Institute. 2003.
(5) Alberto Lafuente. El País, February 2,
2003.
(6) Edward Freeman. “Corporate Social
Responsibility: A Critical Approach. Corporate Social Responsibility: No Longer
a Useful Concept.” Business Horizons, July-August, 1991.
“GOD ALMIGHTY in His most holy and wise
providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some
must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others
mean and in submission. (…)
“Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and
to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly,
to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit
together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly
affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for
the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together
in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each
other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor
and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community
in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the
spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell
among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our
ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth,
than formerly we have been acquainted with.” John Winthrop. A Model of
Christian Charity. 1630
“But another and better day is dawning; every
influence of literature, of poetry, and of art, in our times, is becoming more
and more in unison with the great master chord of Christianity, “good-will to
man.” The poet, the painter, and the artist now seek out and embellish the
common and gentler humanities of life, and, under the allurements of fiction,
breathe a humanizing and subduing influence, favorable to the development of
the great principles of Christian brotherhood. The hand of benevolence is
everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating
distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the
lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.” Harriet Beecher Stowe. Preface
to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852
(7) “Whose money? Whose power? Whose art
history? – Money, Power, and the History of Art.” James Cuno. The Art Bulletin.
March, 1997
(8) “The Burdens of Responsibility”. On
“Building Reputational Capital”. Kevin Jackson. Oxford University Press.The
Economist Global Executive. Jun 25th, 2004.
(9) “Whose money? Whose power? Whose art
history? – Money, Power, and the History of Art.” James Cuno. The Art Bulletin.
March, 1997
(10) “Art supplies the tragic substance which
pure entertainment cannot provide on its own yet which it needs if it is to
adhere to its principle of meticulously duplicating appearance. Tragedy,
included in society’s calculations and affirmed as a moment of the world,
becomes a blessing. It deflects the charge that truth is glossed over, whereas
in fact it is appropriated with cynical regret. It imparts an element of
interest to the insipidity of censored happiness and makes that interest
manageable.”
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. “The
Cultural Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Published in Horkheimer,
Max and Adorno, Theodor, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Sudamericana, Buenos
Aires, 1988.
(11) In an article published in the New York
Times in 1994, Robert Brustein cites an anonymous source who stated in the
Corporate Philanthropy Report, “We no longer ‘support’ the arts. We use the
arts in innovative ways to support the social causes chosen by our company.”
Robert Brustein, “Culture by Coercion,” New York Times, Nov. 29, 1994.
(12) Karin Geiselhart. “The Interactive
Organisation Does Democracy Scale? A Fractal Model for the Role of Interactive
Technologies in Democratic Policy Processes.” University of Canberra,
Australia. December 1999.
(13) Jan Jagodzinski. “Questioning Fantasies
of Popular ‘Resistance:’, Democratic Populism and Radical Politics in Visual
Cultural Studies”. The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education # 24. 2004
(14) Winifred Hodge. Witches and
Walpurgisnachts.f.
(15) Edmund Burke. A Vindication of Natural
Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind. 1756
(16) Al Ahram Weekly, October 24-30, 2002.
(17) Adorno. Aesthetic Theory, 355f.
(18) The Nazi army’s Enigma machine consisted
of a keyboard connected to a codifying unit. The codifying unit contained three
separate rotors whose positions determined how each letter of the keyboard
would be encoded. What made the Enigma code so difficult to crack was the
enormous number of ways in which the machine could be configured. First, the
three rotors of the machine could be chosen from a group of five, and they
could be changed and rearranged in order to confuse decoders. Secondly, each
rotor could be placed in any of twenty-six different positions.
The Nazi army’s Enigma
machine.
This means that the machine could be
configured in more than one million ways. In addition to the permutations
permitted by the rotors, the electrical connections on the rear of the machine
could be manually modified, permitting more than 150 trillion possible
configurations. In order to increase security even more, the orientation of the
three rotors changed continually, so that each time that a letter was
transmitted, the machine’s orientation—and therefore the codification—changed
for the next letter. In this way, typing “DODO” could generate the message
“FGTB”: the “D” and the “O” were sent twice, but were codified in a different
manner each time. Its code was finally deciphered in September of 1940.
(s.t)
