Dieter Mersch
›Aisthesis‹,
›Ekstasis‹, and ›Askesis‹.
Movements of Avant-garde Art
The term
›avant-garde art‹ does not designate a uniform concept; rather, it embraces a
collection of diverse movements, styles and experiments. Their common focus is
the »withdrawal of art from art« (Joseph Beuys). Its pathos derives from an
explicit repudiation of the art of the past - especially the art of the
classical and the Romantic periods - a revolt against the idea of art, its
identity, its symbolic order and the institution of art. Inherent in the art of
the avant-garde there is a law of reflection - in the Hegelian sense - forcing
it into unceasing contradiction with itself. »It must turn against that which
constitutes its own concept,« says Theodor W. Adorno in his Ästhetische Theorie, »and in so doing it
will become uncertain right down to the very fibers of its being. It is not,
however, to be dismissed as an abstract negation. By attacking that which the
entire tradition considered to be guaranteed, the bedrock on which it stood, it
transforms itself qualitatively; it turns into another.«
Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys (1980), Sammlung Marx, Berlin[1]
The
aesthetic process of the avant-garde therefore does not consist as much in an
›innovation‹ in progress - the extension of the language of images, the use of
new techniques and materials - as in a ›destruction‹. In the Heideggerian
sense, this does not mean a demolition, but a ›dismantling‹ of the traditional
stocks of metaphysics and aesthetics; in the ruins are to be found other
fundaments upon which art can be established anew. In so doing, it carries out
a radical transformation of its being. The artistic avant-garde no longer
create ›works‹ that denote something, represent a scene or reproduce a mood,
rather its manifestations are signs that refer first and foremost back to
themselves. Its aesthetic becomes self-referential and thus, step by step,
cancels out the constitutive conditions of the art of the last four hundred
years: its autonomy, the subjectivity of the expression ›mimesis,‹ the means of
representation, the artist’s conception of himself as magister operis, master of works, the singularity of his creative
achievement, form, poiesis, the
temporal mode of permanence, of the museum’s stocks, of eternal value (Walter
Benjamin).
»The
sculptural avant-garde reacted to the dissolution of the painter’s craft by
embarking on a search focusing on the question, ›What is painting?‹« according
to the catalogue of the Immaterialités exhibition
in Paris in 1985, organized in collaboration with Jean-François Lyotard. »The
premises and prerequisites for the exercise of this métier were put to the test
one after the other and thrown into question: local colour, linear perspective,
quality of reproduction of the colour tones, framing, format, base, medium,
tools, exhibition site and many other assumptions were graphically questioned.«
The same applies for music and poetry when they disrupt the order of tonality
and its notation or the meter, rhythm and linearity of poetic language.
The
characteristic feature of the art of the avant-garde is thus the constitution
of an art ›about‹ art. It becomes systematically caught up in a discourse with
itself; a structural paradox is inherent in it. This paradox consists in the
thematisation of its own immanent codes, based on and applying precisely that
syntax and semantic that it thematizes. The break that it enacts is a rupture
in itself: this renders access more difficult and explains the furious rebuffal
- of its projects and actions, its denunciation as »non-art,« as absurd
provocation or merely an expression of the degeneracy of culture. But its
paradoxical structure accords with the difficulty of the transition itself, the
endeavour of an art against art that always has yet to overcome that which
enables its destruction. The paradox therefore does not bear witness to the
failure of the avant-garde, its necessary self-obstruction, but rather to the
dynamics peculiar to its self-liberation.
This
liberation is not enacted in a linear fashion; rather, it takes place as
renewed endeavours, initiatives and metamorphoses that try to intensify the
crisis of art and to overcome it at the same time. Herein lies the specificity
of the logic of the development of avant-garde art. Its objects and
interventions are ›destructions‹ in that they venture to penetrate anew to the
foundations of the aesthetic, in order to dissolve them again the next moment.
All the concepts of the artistic avant-gardes are double-faced: they evince
themselves productive to the same extent as they are destructive - productive in
destruction and destructive in production, in that they seek to attach their
work of critical decomposition to points that at the same time offer visions of
a new aesthetics. These concepts can be described in the vocabulary of
classical antiquity, aisthesis, askesis and
ekstasis, and through the recovery of
the auratic that modern art lost by becoming detached from rite, according to
Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis. It is to the very rigour with which the
avant-gardes carry out the destruction that they owe in turn their radical
drive in taking up these points.
2.
The early
modernities - Expressionism and Fauvism - do not yet proceed in a manner that
is properly avant-garde; nevertheless, they do belong to the ›archaeology‹ of
the avant-garde. Without exception, they retain the style, frame and subject
matter of the traditional aesthetics of the work of art, and yet they already
ensure its consistent deretrenchment [Entschränkung].
The concentration of that which is represented, the deformation of the figural,
the distortion of space and perspective, and the detachment of colour from its
former function of representation all belong to the category of deretrenchment.
The early modernities therefore carry the subjectivity of expression and the
mimetic too far, right to their inner limits, as in the transition from
tonality to atonality in the New Music. Everything about Expressionism is
intensification, augmentation; painterly in the Cubist paintings of Georges
Braque and Pablo Picasso, compositional in the twelve-tone techniques of Arnold
Schönberg, its intensity is heightened and finally transcends the dividing line
to autonomy of structure. Henceforth art, in accordance with the aesthetics of
Paul Valéry, becomes pure »construction.«
No longer is
art subordinate to the sovereignty of the gaze and its mimetic order; on the
contrary, paintings become planes composed of elementary geometric forms and
figures - lines, circles, triangles, squares, spheres and so on. Cubism
therefore does not represent but instead replaces the ratonality of
representation with a variety of symbolic structures and geometries. Breaking
with the logic of central perspective, it opens up a multitude of possible
organizations of the picture, but its reference point - as in Juan Gris’ Gitarre (1913) or Braque’s Bouteille et journal (1911) - remains
an object or an ensemble of things. Like twelve-tone music, it turns out to be
an aesthetic constructivism that does not refer to art as art reflectively, but merely to the multitude of possibilities
of constructing the world. »We are living in an epoch of art,« wrote Pierre
Reverdy about Cubism, »in which stories are not told in a more or less
comfortable way, but rather in which works [...] that lead their own existence
are produced.«
If
Expressionism and Cubism maintain the continuity of traditional aesthetics by
retaining its central relation between image and reality, the early
avant-gardes, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, rupture that continuity. Their programmes are articulated in the
form of staged manifestos and proclamations. They are part of their own
rhetorical self-acclamation which, like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s First Futuristic Manifesto, relentlessly
›declares war‹ on art, without having a new one to offer. The theatricality of
its appearances is a symptom of embarassment. The Dadaists in particular set
off veritable fireworks of manifestos and anti-manifestos which were already
equal to the first Happenings in the degree of their provocation. »Everything
is Dada. Everyone has his Dada. [...] Dada is neither a literary school nor an
aesthetic doctrine. [...] Dada destroys and is content with that.« Thus the
Dadaist Manifesto saw itself as primarily negative; it took its stand on the
border of art, it was entirely action, spectacle, ridicule of the bourgeois,
even performative self-nullification that strived to confound all of
aesthetics’ concepts. Its literal non-sense signified the refusal of every
question about the meaning of art.
Yet in the
end, it remained empty iconoclastic, because an alternative was lacking. That
alternative was established in Surrealism, along the opposition between
rationality and fantasy. In this way it created the first ›language‹ of the
avant-garde, out of which - overcoming it - a plethora of further projects were
to arise: Assemblage, Frottage, Environment, Action Painting, etc. The
objective was to settle accounts with what André Breton called the »abhorrence
of the marvellous« in his Surrealist
Manifesto of 1924. His intention was to deliver us from that abhorrence by
liberating the unconscious from the fetters of consciousness and reason with
the aid of the psychoanalytic techniques of free association and automatism, in
order to return art to its origins in dream and imagination. »We are still
living under the sway of logic,« he continued, »perhaps the imagination is on
the point of reentering into its rights.«
All the
properties of avant-garde art can already be discerned: its rigourous challenge
to art, its self-referential trait, its destructive dynamics, and lastly, its
search for an origin, a new determination of aesthetics - destined solely to be
surpassed by future developments and swept away.
3.
It is only
with the intervention of abstract painting that the process of the avant-garde
sets out on its self-seeking course. Already at the turn of the century,
Maurice Denis had announced that every work of art was in essence a flat
surface covered with colours before it became a naked woman or an anecdote.
Wassily Kandinsky accordingly described the picture as a »combination of pure
colour and independent form« and proponed the emancipation of the »composition
of colour and form.« This emancipation had already taken place with the
exhibition of Casimir Malevitsch’s Black
Square on White Ground in 1915: the picture exemplified the negation of the
picture, became self-reference, tautology. It is what it is, like Lucio
Fontana’s stroke or pure line, or Josef Albers’ Hommages to the Square, multiple responses to Malevitsch (since
1949).
What is
crucial is the context of the discussion that the individual productions
engender: a complex discourse of art in which the pictures and objects react to
each other and comment on each other reciprocally. The structure of the
dialogue necessitates the radicalization of the analysis: thus the
suprematistic compositions of black, red, yellow or blue forms structured
according to strict geometrical dimensions follow Malevitsch’s Black Square . Kandinsky would create
complex symphonies of spaces, surfaces, figures and unmixed colours, crossing
them with organic shapes. The composition is the mystery of free balance, for
Paul Klee, poetry of rhythm and sound. Finally Piet Mondrian reduced the entire
picture to its individual components: to the vertical and the horizontal and the
three primary colours, red, yellow and blue on a white surface, and synthesized
them into designs of simple harmony. The process of analysis ends with abstract
Expressionism and Barnett Newman’s large monochrome later works from the series
Who’s afraid of red, yellow and blue (1967-68) polemically turning
against Mondrian, or Ad Reinhardt’s silent black tableaux.
The
development has by no means reached an end, but it is stagnating, repeating
itself, and only introducing nuances at best - like Gotthard Graubner’s
colour-space-bodies or the endless rows of white canvases crowding the
exhibition halls right up to the late Seventies. Yet the endpoint of the
emptiness opens up into quite a different one: Already Barnett Newman’s
surfaces of colour overcame the materiality of the picture in favour of mere
colouredness as meditative space. The picture as mutilated language becomes
absolute presence and in precisely this way refers to a transcendency that
cannot be symbolised: »infinity, strictly speaking, is monochromatic, even
better, colour laid bare,« remarked Piero Manzoni about his sequence of
unalloyed white pictures, »for me, the issue is to render an entirely white
(or, better, entirely colourless, neutral) surface, outside of all painted
appearance [...]: a white that that is not a polar landscape, nor an object of
association, not a beautiful thing, not a feeling, not a symbol or anything
else: a white surface that is a white surface.«
In this way,
in the midst of the dissolution of the concrete, another form of seeing opens
up: perception itself, that is no longer perception of something, but rather
the gaze without intent that arises out of the emptiness of meaning and for
that reason is essentially contemplation. It is linked to the original meaning
of aisthesis: the appearance of that
which, of itself, shows itself. It was for this reason that Lyotard, like
Barnett Newmann himself, had recourse to the category of the »sublime,« in
order to release modernity from the tyranny of the »beautiful.« The experience
of the sublime, according to Immanuel Kant, is based on an ambivalence which is
not to be resolved, because the imagination fails in its attempt to conceive of
the great as such [das schlechthin Große], and Reason celebrates the idea of
the infinite in it. In this sense, the large monochromatic planes of colour
confront the unrepresentable as such: they are ›emanations‹ of pure aesthetic
experience and as such, they recall to mind the mystical that had got lost.
4.
Surrealism
raises not only the question as to the constitutive elements of a picture, but
also and in the same measure, as to the creative act, the process of design,
the aesthetic imagination - in short, the question as to the subject as opposed
to the object of art. This question is not posed in abstract and monochrome
painting; in this way, the avant-garde advances from the destruction of the
picture to the destruction of the artist.
It is
already prepared for by Dada’s accidental products, for example, Jean Arp’s Ordonné après la loi de la chance, aussi
nommé points et virgules of 1944, but also Max Ernst’s dessins automatiques. That which they have in common is the
systematic eradication of creative subjectivity. The picture invents itself,
independently of that which the artist had wanted or had been able to do at the
time, and it erects its own, non-intentional order. The same effect is later
achieved by Wols and ›Action Painting,‹ through the unremitting exaggeration of
aesthetic spontaneity at the moment of its excess. It is not ›something‹ that
becomes thematic in the picture, not even the picture as picture, but the pure
corporeality of the act of painting or the hand movement with which a line is
drawn and scratched out, paint applied, smudged or thrown onto the canvas. In
so doing, the production of art makes itself into the object of experience, raw
and coarse in Jackson Pollock and Georges Mathieu, subtle and calculated in Cy
Twombly. The picture thus becomes a non-picture, a surface upon which something
takes place, a tableau on which inscriptions are made, during which the whole
body is called upon and must exhaust itself or discipline itself. It was
therefore logical that Roland Barthes should borrow the description for it from
the language of the theatre: the canvas is like scenery that permits a variety
of types of event: »a fact (pragma),
a coincidence (tyche), a starting
point (telos), a surprise (apodeston) and a plot (drama).«
Gesture and
means are given primacy, while the result itself becomes unimportant and
functions, at best, as the protocol of an action or of a creative delirium.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Dionysiac and Georges Bataille’s
aesthetic of ecstasy now enter onto the stage: the aesthetic process takes
place beyond all control and direction, as the adventure of the exhaustion of
self that the artist, acting for us, takes upon himself. And yet such extreme
subjectivization of art only prepares its inversion, its complete
de-subjectivization. This was carried out, most radically perhaps in the New
Music, through the transition from Serialism to Aleatoric and the chance
compositions of John Cage; in painting, de-subjectivization took the form of
the extinction of all traces of individuality in Concept Art. The idea is the
»machine [...] that does the work« said Sol LeWitt. It is not the artist who
creates something, not the composer who converts his ideas to tones or sounds;
rather, it is a structure »beyond the subject« that paints and discovers its
own pictorial or musical universe. Nothing can be questioned or interpreted in
respect to a will or a conclusive expression: chance confronts the unavailable.
It ›is‹ and files a claim for its innocent presence, independent of all
principles of taste and the truth. »I have never heard a rotten sound, not
one!« avows Cage in his conversations with Daniel Charles: chance forces the
asceticism of its acknowledgement on us. Askesis
means practice; it concerns here the surrender to the unavailability of that
which takes place each time. It is not that it bases itself on a passivity, but
rather demands the utmost concentration and attention. The endeavours of the
avant-garde end in an aesthetic of »letting be« [»Seinlassen«] and of imperturbability [»Gelassenheit«] (Heidegger). This new aesthetics goes hand in hand
with another way of living that is reminiscent of the serenity of Zen Buddhism.
5.
The
cultural revolutions of the Sixties, revolt fermenting everywhere, give impetus
to the process gathering speed in another headlong rush: art breaking out of
itself. It leads to that famous diagnosis of Adorno’s at the beginning of his Aesthetic Theory, that as far as art
went, nothing was to be taken for granted any more, »neither in it nor in its
relation to the whole, not even its right to existence.« This diagnosis is based
on the dissolution of all dichotomies sustaining the philosophy of art - the
differences between art and non-art, between high and low culture, between fine
art object and banality, between politics and aesthetics - that constitute what
was previously their concept. In contrast, a plethora of new stocks emerge: pop
art, Installation and Environment, Happening and Fluxus, Concept Art, Action
Art and Performance, but also a »longing for pictures.« A confusing chaos of
disparate and mutually contradictory directions and tendencies have come into
being since the Seventies, giving rise - not just in the domaine of aesthetics
- to the term »new obscurity« (Jürgen Habermas).
At first,
Dadaism and Surrealism continued to form the points of reference whose multiplicity
of inspirations were converted, transformed and worked out. Kurt Schwitters’
assemblages were continued into the three-dimensional such that, as in Arman’s
garbage accumulations or in the work of Jasper Johns, the things themselves
were glued onto the picture, or in reverse, pictures were mounted in the
objects and put together into tableaux rich in references and complex in their
interrelations. Art inscribes itself in the real, in relation to which it
situates itself not only symbolically, but also in occupying a place. In this
way it completes the transition from singular object to complex aesthetic
reality that is no longer observed, but must be expressly entered and in so
doing, thrusts itself itself upon the recipient - as in Edward Kienholz’ environments
- and holds up to him the mirror of his own voyeurism. At the same time, Claes
Oldenburg and Andy Warhol take up Marcel Duchamp’s Ready made again and arrange it into artifacts of the banal. No
longer is art capable of or in a position to outdo the aesthetic of articles of
mass consumption; rather, Warhol’s unadorned reproductions like Campbell’s Soup Can (1968) or the Brillo
Boxes (1970) are evidence of the utter lack of distinction between the fine
art object and the every-day object, and thereby penetrate to the core »of the
philosophical question as to the essence of art,« as Arthur Danto put it.
The
radicalization of the questioning reaches its height in Beuys’ Expanded Arts. It seeks the emancipation
of art from the ghetto of culture, by revealing its autonomy as a phantom that
separates it, enclosed in its imaginary world, from society. Instead, Beuys
counters the crisis of creativity with the potential of fantasy to become the
real impetus behind social development. Thus he becomes a metaphysicist of a
universal concept of art: »Everyone is an artist« and »Art is God and the
world.« The aesthetic accordingly celebrates its boundlessness. And yet it
thereby loses in reverse any and all distinction in respect to its other: with
the absolute generalization of art, Beuys decrees its absolute negation. It
crosses that threshold beyond which the talk of art itself becomes meaningless,
and delivers it up to that narcissistic boundlessness that the representatives
of the classical avant-garde reproach the products of the postmodern of.
The negation
cuts the continuity of the avant-garde to the quick; for this reason, Beuys,
like Warhol, is the central figure of a fundamental change of position in a
culture that, with a new self-understanding of art, is already beyond the
modern period. Fittingly, Danto speaks therefore of an »art after the end of
art.« Something crystalizes out as alternative; it bears only provisory names,
and its definition is as yet unclear. The ›post-avant-garde‹ has been spoken of,
or - following Achille Bonito Oliva and Jean Baudrillard - ›trans-avant-garde.‹
Yet a tendency to that »performativity« which Lyotard showed to be
characteristic of postmodernism is common to all the different projects and
projects of the ›post-Warhol‹ and ›post-Beuys' era. A transition from the
primacy of meaning and legitimacy to the preeminence of impact and effect is
inherent in performativity. The Jungen
Wilden whose ›bad paintings‹ are classified as neo-Expressionism, the
Italian Arte Cifra or the American
New Image Painting can also be accused of this. They do not document a return
of pictures, any more than the repetitive music of Steve Reich or Philip Glass
documents a renaissance of the tonal, but rather a kind of composing that no
longer refers back to any tradition, but proceeds essentially performatively.
›Postmodern‹ means, then, neither plurality nor the absence of criteria, but
rather a lifestyle fundamentally transformed, in which art and aesthetic play a
different role and group themselves around the categories of ›strength‹ and
›intensity.‹ Therefore it is no longer a question of what art is, but what it
releases or triggers, how it intervenes in the practical, in politics, in the
concrete patterns of perception of the individual and his structures of
consciousness.
In other
words, art is becoming essentially ›event‹. Gilles Deleuze names
»pre-individuality,« »impersonality« and »incomprehensibility« as its
characteristics. This means that no event can be reduced to its individual
components, nor can it refer to an external order. Its ontological status is
rather that of singularity. It happens as unique, unrepeatable moment and
exhausts itself in the moment of its being. Naturally this does not mean that
it could not be produced - but its aesthetic production requires precise
practices and means of staging and organization. Techniques of symbolisation
enter into it, as well as the production of surroundings that necessitate exact
calculation and discipline in order to be successful as such. For this reason,
Michel Foucault said the event »is [...] definitely not immaterial, because it
is always at work on the level of materiality [...]; it has its place and
exists in relation to, in coexistence with, in the dispersion of, in the
overlapping with, in the accumulation and selection of material elements.«
Nevertheless, the event, although ›made,‹ always remains unanticipatable, it
kindles its own dynamics that, behind the actors’ backs, always produce
something quite different from what they could have imagined.
For this
reason, Allan Kaprow oriented the principle of the happening on the accident.
All accident happens; it dissolves all familiar ties, confuses the senses and
causes one to lose countenance. It is the event of the loss of countenance par excellence. The same is true for the
multimedia spectacles of the Wiener
Aktionskunst or the feminist Performance. It is in the disconcertedness,
the loss of orientation that the real radicality of the aesthetic performances,
their scenarios and shock pictures lies. »Radical« literally means
›to-go-to-the-roots.' It is the roots of that existential and bodily
›abandonment, being at the mercy of' [Ausgesetztseins]
that strikes one dumb and comes before
thought. In enlightened times and demystified reality art after the avant-garde
thus approaches again the mystery of the fateful passage. And it reimburses it
for that which it lost in the aftermath of its avant-gardistic experiments: its
aura. It seems that thus art at the
end of its avant-gardistic century returns to a restitution of the cultic that,
in the midst of pluralistic plentitude and beyond mere intellectual reflection
or aestheticism without consequences, lends it again religious lustre and its
original ethical significance.
Note