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| Walter Klepac The Order of Words The Order of Things Deconstruction in Contemporary Art C Magazine #3, Fall 1984. [ 11,696 words ] When art enters into the world in the radically direct way it had from the early 1960s to the mid 1970s it calls into play the attitudes and the concepts which one normally draws upon in dealing with the world. It is not so much that one totally loses sight of the fact that one is dealing with a work of art and not a real life situation; it is that the criteria for judging the appropriateness of our response to the work are to be found to a great extent in our everyday congress with the world. Twentieth century modernist art has always been a self-conscious enterprise in one way or another. Within the decade of the 1960s alone, however, the focus of this self-consciousness shifted significantly: what was once a matter of questioning a given work's status as an art object turned into a question about its status as an object in the world. That is, the art of the 'anxious' or problematic art object gave way to an art in which the object was conceived of as a vehicle for investigating and revealing the fundamental episteme of the artist / viewer — the assumptions, cognitive habits and network of associations upon which the artist's and viewer's conception of the world is based. At roughly the same time, certain formal innovations appeared, particularly those initiated by major paradigms of conceptual art (throughout the last half of the 1960s), which effectively rendered the presence of the material object no longer necessary. However, in spite of this phenomenon, referred to in the literature of the day as the 'dematerialization of art', much of the best conceptual art did continue to concern itself with and investigate fundamental aspects related to our condition in and knowledge of the world. It can be argued that it was the persistence of such concerns which gave underlying continuity to the move on the part of artists in the late 1960s and 1970s to a diverse array of media and forms, such as, text and language, performance, mixed media installations, etc. Furthermore, it was the move into these new, i.e. non-traditional, media and forms that provided artists with the tools and formal wherewithal to expand and extend their investigations into territories that otherwise would have remained inaccessible. This reciprocal stimulation between formal means and 'content' characterizes the most resonant and at the same time most rigorous advanced art of this period. On the one hand, a distinct content gave focus and purpose to the recently enlarged formal means available to artists. On the other, the radical formal innovations gave form, coherence and enhanced modes of access to investigations of content (i.e. subject matter, the epistemic concerns). Together the two increased the scope and profoundly expanded the power of abstraction of contemporary art. The radical innovations of the 1960s and 1970s had in effect transformed modernism: they altered its terms, direction and nature in a fundamental way, showing it to have evolved into something quite different than what it started as. So much so, that one could say the late modernist practice drastically exceeded the parameters of modernist theory. Indeed, there was considerable resistance on the part of most of the commonly accepted versions of modernism to absorb this new direction, or to accept or even acknowledge its consequences. A good deal of this reluctance can be traced to the tendency within modernism to define art as an essentially self-reflexive concept or mode of discourse. That is to say, modernism was above all primarily concerned with the need to distinguish art from other forms of discourse and the 'work of art' from ordinary 'things'. In his updating of modernism, Clement Greenberg insisted on interpreting the radical formal developments from Cézanne and Cubism onwards in terms of attempting to purify art of all elements or references that were extraneous to that which was essential to a work's being art. This was crucial to his understanding of the idea of abstraction in modernist art. The formal breakthroughs, from Jackson Pollock and David Smith, to the post painterly abstract painting and the sculpture of Anthony Caro in the early and mid 1960s, had refined the traditional media of serious art, painting and sculpture, to their absolute and fundamental properties. However, once it departed from the traditional modes of painting and sculpture, modernism was left with two general options — both of them based, in different ways, on the premise that art has to be about art. As advanced art moved into new media it became imperative that the work clearly and demonstratively reveal the specific nature of its chosen medium. Thus by insisting that self-reflexiveness was to be understood as an end in itself, modernism could endorse works in video, text, film, performance and multi-disciplinary installation, et al., while at the same time it contained and limited them. The other option interpreted the mandate 'to be about art' more or less anthropologically, and consequently sought to locate the causes or sources of the phenomenon of art within a particular culture at a given time. Rather than indulge in metaphysical speculations about the ultimate nature of art, modernism instead seemed more interested in investigating the cultural institutions, the social and political systems and economic factors that made it possible and gave it its final character and shape. This option was Duchamp's legacy to modernism. Actually, the more conservative element within modernism tended to reduce this category of self-reflexiveness into a tautology: thus, anything properly processed and endorsed by the dominant art institutions was by definition to be considered art. After all, these institutions ratified their choices by writing history and securing a place for these choices. As it now stands, this conflict within modernism — in particular, its refusal to reformulate its basic theory in light of the implications of its radical formal innovations — remains unresolved. In fact, there has been a pronounced tendency on the part of certain artists and critics within roughly the past nine or ten years to largely ignore the internal disparities, distinctions and conflicts just mentioned and reduce them all to a set of manageable generalizations and attitudes which they then systematically reject. This is important to keep in mind when one attempts to clearly and critically understand the new art that has come to be known under the name postmodernism. While this body of aesthetic and critical doctrine first gained prominence in the fields of literature and architecture, its prestige and influence in the area of contemporary visual art has become, since the mid 1970s, considerable, and it continues to grow. The concepts and key intellectual strategies which give postmodernism its strength and scope are rooted in the school of thought that has grown up around the writings of a group of predominantly French intellectuals referred to as the Structuralists. (1) The connection between the two is so profound that postmodernism seems virtually inconceivable as well as inarticulate without structuralism in one form or another. While it is not at all uncommon in Western culture over the past 200 years for a new art movement to bring with it new intellectual allegiances, postmodernism does not appear to be just another style or movement with its attendant new jargon; its affinities, fundamental attitudes and habits of mind suggest a thoroughly new and different way of looking and thinking about art. By completely revising the conditions under which works achieve meaning in the existing cultural context, postmodernism has drastically altered the very conception of art. The present critical terrain has been transformed to the point where it is virtually unrecognizable from what it was less than a decade ago. A large part of its persuasiveness has been due to its apparent aptness and applicability to the new art. Postmodernism readily claims under its banner and validates representation for all media in recent contemporary art, figurative painting as well as all the various hybrid art forms unleashed by the radical formal innovations of the late 1960s and 1970s. It has not only submerged each of these new developments in its own vocabulary, assumptions and overview, it has reinterpreted the entire line of radical innovations that lead up to and made possible most of the above mentioned developments. The present essay will question the validity of postmodernism's revisionary account of the radical formal innovations (particularly those of minimal, postminimal and conceptual art). It will also suggest an alternative account that emphasizes a continuity rather than a decisive break between those innovative paradigms and the art that followed them. Finally, it will attempt to separate postmodernist criticism from postmodernist art. One of the most essential structuralist concepts in the postmodernist's arsenal is the notion, or should one say the project, of deconstruction. By itself deconstruction is an intellectually ambitious and audacious idea. Simply stated, the basic objective behind deconstruction is to destabilize accepted or traditional meaning. It directly challenges the assumption that language — taken in the broadest sense of the term — can adequately and objectively describe the world. It contends that meaning is not transparent, inherent, or 'natural' but rather a product of an essentially arbitrary, historically relative, system of signs. The postmodernist (structuralist) brand of deconstruction holds that the complex internal dynamics of such a system subverts the intention, reference and meaning of even the most ostensibly unambiguous assertion or communication. The built-in disposition or biases of that system virtually predetermines the field of references and meanings. The postmodernist version of deconstruction attempts to reveal the biases and limitations of the system by jamming the gears of language and turning it in upon itself. Its main contention seems to be that thought is trapped within language and, if deconstruction does not show the way out of that trap, at least it wants to make us sure of the trap's existence. In doing so, however, it imposes what many feel are its own biases and limitations with regard to the nature and function of language. For this reason the second section of this essay will present an alternative mode of deconstruction. In his essay 'Re: Post' (2) Hal Foster argues that strategies of deconstructing established art conventions and practices are not the exclusive property of postmodernist art and criticism — as is widely believed today. He points out that 'Picasso, Pollock and Smithson all destructured modes of signification that they inherited. Magritte, Johns and Laurie Anderson all pose forms of rhetorical interference. They cannot all be recouped as postmodernist or proto-postmodernist. The strategy of appropriation, as seen in Duchamp and again Rauschenberg, is modernist in origin, as is the deconstructive impulse . . .' Foster concludes that deconstruction has been an integral part of modernism from the beginning and that what is perversely fascinating about so called 'postmodernism' is its attempts to see in recent art-making the emergence of an entirely new set of premises and objectives. His critique of perhaps the most systematic postmodern visual art critics (Rosalyn Krauss, Douglas Crimp, and Craig Owens) acknowledges the efforts of these writers to provide a coherent theoretical framework for the new art based on language and concepts borrowed from the structuralists. The value of Foster's essay is that its thoughtful examination of the logical structure of this framework enables us to discuss postmodernist deconstruction without becoming lost in its seductive and amorphous vocabulary. Furthermore, it allows us to see that the implications and import claimed for the new work by postmodernism is as much due to the particular theoretical orientation of the critics as it is to the nature of the work itself. However, in order to even conceive of the possibility of an alternative mode of deconstruction that could effectively deal with the issues and themes currently monopolized by postmodernist criticism, one has to seriously question postmodernism's interpretation of the radical innovations introduced by late modernist art. This interpretation is crucial because, with it, the postmodernists are able to establish a clear point of departure for the new art they espouse and convey a strong sense of its historical inevitability. While not all postmodernist critics select the same artists as examples for their particular views, there are a number of artists whose work figure centrally in the general postmodernist scheme of things. In particular, critics have claimed that the spatial sculpture of Robert Morris, Alice Aycock, George Trakis, as well as the video installations of, among others, Dan Graham, 'decenter' the art object and expand the field of reference of sculpture. As a result, the long-standing assumption about the physical integrity (internal unity) and discreteness, the fundamental independence and autonomy of the work of art are all called into question. The point here is not that a work can no longer be located in or identified with a particular object but that it has no clear focus, something coherent and cohesive with which it can confidently be identified. Postmodernist critics point to this 'de-centering' phenomenon as evidence that a shift has occurred within the making of art: from a concern with an artwork's syntax to a concern with its semantics. (For postmodernism, the concept of deconstruction is directed at what is thought to be the heart of modernism, i.e. the notion that a thing or an image is complete and knowable in itself or that an artwork, regardless of its form or manifestation, is an ultimately unanalysable, irreducible, complex symbol. The postmodernist's attack on the integrity and autonomy of the concept of the work of art is, to my mind, the single most important issue broached by them. To think of decentering in terms of a strictly formal art-making strategy is one thing; to extend it to cover the concept of the work of art as a whole, is quite another. For if the notion of decentering is taken to its logical conclusion, it is almost impossible to imagine how the concept of the work of art could remain tenable, theoretically, at least. Not even the postmodernists themselves could prevent complete closure of the concept.)Another point of general agreement among postmodernists is the view that the developments in sculpture and installation art from Serra and Smithson to Acconci and Oppenheim to Graham and Asher is, in effect, a direct assault on the supposed late modernist view that advanced contemporary art has to be medium-oriented. That is, postmodernism holds that this work actually undermines and refutes the idea that whatever medium is chosen as the vehicle for a work of art, whether it is sculpture, i.e. three dimensional constructions of a specific material; painting; video; photography; etc., that work must reveal by its appearance the fundamental nature of that medium. Postmodernism is inclined on the whole to take this dictum at face value and to then foreclose on the entire enterprise. But if medium-centredness in minimal and post minimal art had a point, it was not that the imperatives of medium or material were to be thought of as an end in themselves. It was rather that they were to be regarded as a touchstone of the work and, hence, inextricably involved in the statement made. The viewer has to start with them in order to get to the work. The kinds of questions that occur to us spontaneously and naturally when we are confronted with some unfamiliar object in normal, everyday situations — such as, what material is it made of, how is it constructed or supported, what relation does it bear to its surroundings, etc. — are the very questions that lead to a total engagement with the work. As attention shifts to the material or medium itself, a detached, highly critical self-awareness becomes imperative on the part of both artist and spectator. Faced with the stark, unembellished substance that is the work, the observer is thrown back upon himself as it were. One is forced by the nature of the work to deal only with what is there and yet, at the same time, one is drawn inevitably to relate this particular confrontation to one's experiences in the world in general. It is because of this that the best work is able to cut deeply into and reveal some original and acute insight into the structure of perception, thought or psychic processes. (Ironically, it is this version of medium-centredness that one finds, more often than not, operating in much of the best radical sculpture and installation art of the 1970s; the same work which postmodernist critics claim had subverted the concept of medium-centeredness!) Postmodernism's treatment of medium-centeredness is typical: it is a commonly accepted tactic of postmodernist criticism to bracket a particular work of art in terms of a given style and then assert that that style, by definition, has only such and such a range of meaning, references, etc. In other words, the viewer is required to relate to any work of art exclusively in terms of the predetermined and generalized conventions of some existing art form or art historical style. That is, individual artworks are to be seen simply and primarily as examples of a particular art form or style. Bracketing of this sort can, I think, be put off by considering the approach adopted by Arthur C. Danto in his The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. (3) Simply stated, Danto is attempting to formulate a conception of art that will successfully address the apparent tendency evident in early modern art, and dramatically accelerated in contemporary art, to eradicate the distinction between the objects, situations and events denoted as art and their counterparts in real life. Danto insists that there is a difference and advances the view that art is a kind of free space which the culture allows for the artist and the spectator alike to confront and/or contemplate interests and concerns in a sustained and rigorously independent manner. Its being art seems, in this view, to guarantee that our attention will be focused intensely on that object of concern and will not be readily distracted by extraneous thoughts, associations or practical motives. What makes the work of art art and insures its integrity as art has to do with the form of the work's engagement with some aspect of the world. The setting up of particular terms, and the creating of tensions between, or dialectics involving, these terms, are all ways in which form is manifested in works of art. It is clear that Danto's view demands the full participation of the critical faculties, judgment and the imagination, both in the creation and the contemplation of a work of art. It is equally clear that Danto's view suggests a more open-ended conception of art than that offered by postmodernism or by postmodernism's modernism. In order to properly understand the evolution of contemporary art forms, particularly those having to do with the nature of the transition between minimal and post minimal sculpture and the various developments in the art of the 1970s, it is essential to stress that what has applied in the case of the former with regard to solid, physical materials was in effect transferred to media in general, eg., film, video, photography, text, etc., in the case of the latter. What complicates matters is that the majority of these media also serve as vehicles for communication and as modes of representation within the culture at large. Postmodernism has seized upon and exploited these complications So much so that as artists have become preoccupied with the representational aspect of these media in recent years, it has virtually monopolized the discussion. II Perhaps one of the most impressive examples of the transition from material to medium in a manner which preserves the sense of the medium as material is to be found in Michael Snow's Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, 1974. In a way, Snow's film can and has been seen as an almost encyclopedic exercise in deconstruction. Snow's comprehensive and penetrating exploration of the inherent properties of the medium of film possesses a richness, flexibility and complexity that turn out to be unexpectedly responsive to the artist's investigation of language as mediation between ourselves and the world. The fact of the matter is that the mimetic or representational aspect, indeed the very possibility of illusion, in film is entirely dependent upon the nature of the medium itself. One can sense even in the case of commercial films the essential artificiality of the medium as a narrative mode. The element of time, for example, is an almost infinitely malleable variable and never, with one important exception, a constant. For the most part, however, past and present can be arranged and rearranged at will and can be run backwards, forwards and simultaneously. Time can be speeded up, slowed down, be made to unfold continuously or served up in discrete fragments — in any order the artist chooses. Among a host of other things, the fundamental relationship between sound and image is also subjected to manipulation: basically they can be presented in sync or out of sync. The expectation of consonance in this area in particular is extremely powerful, enough so that any tampering with it automatically puts the spectator on alert. Either a rationale is to be found within the structure of the work or mechanical failure is blamed and boredom soon sets in. In short, Snow transforms all the resource inherent in the film medium needed to create and sustain illusion into distancing factors that virtually compel the spectator to hold the representation or narrative in suspension and to consider all that he sees and hears as open to critical scrutiny. Snow is able to turn what could have been an exercise in medium self-reflexiveness into a brilliant, externally oriented critical investigation. What distinguishes Rameau's Nephew from the postmodernist deconstruction of language is that the latter, drawing heavily on the precedents of modern linguistic and recent literary theory, employs the written and printed word for its model of language. (4) Given the nature of film itself, however, Rameau's Nephew is able to approach the concept, practice and properties of language based on the model of speech, of interpersonal verbal discourse. Snow's film, in effect, naturalizes language. It gives us a fresh understanding of the nature of a host of fundamental contexts from which language takes its basic shape, and in so doing it redefines for us, by means of what one could almost call oblique reminders, the nature of the medium of language. It constructs basic situations that exemplify language as it is used, or some particular aspect of its use (and then turns them on their head). The complex, accelerated fluidity of the sequences, their density and intensity, keep the viewer constantly re-examining contexts and, in the process, continually questioning assumptions about how language works. Because it takes the phenomenon of speech as its model, Rameau's Nephew directs our attention to the subtle and multiplex interaction between speakers rather than to the meanings of the words alone, which in most cases are fairly commonplace and decidedly unproblematic. Referentiality, in the strict sense, as used by postmodernist critics, requires a more stable, if not static, field in order to properly take effect. Such stability is needed before one can confidently ascribe particular meanings or clusters of meanings to the individual sign or image. In terms of the postmodernist's strategies of representation, however, a great deal of attention is paid to the matter of the reference of signs, that is, to those things denoted or depicted by those signs, etc. (5) It is claimed that signs are a valid and even essential part of the culture and that, as such, the references they carry with them connect up to the objective, external world. The problem is that the web of references generated by such an approach exists outside (one is almost tempted to say above) the work itself. Barring further justification in terms of the context of the work itself one is forced to conclude that such references (i.e., the connections made between a sign and an object) are, in fact, subject to the personal interpretation of the individual spectator. In order to avoid this apparent regress into subjectivity, the postmodernist's move is to locate all signs and their references to an extant system of representation that is presently operative in the culture. But because Snow's method of representation in Rameau's Nephew so thoroughly militates against isolating individual terms and prescribing particular references of meanings for these terms, it does not depend on positing any one given system of representation. To sum up, Snow's method in Rameau's Nephew functions, by and large, in a heuristic, exploratory and critical way rather than in the 'archeological' or purely structural approach advocated and practised by the postmodernists. If Snow's method of deconstruction is successful then it must be able to convince us, as I think it often does, that its probe of language has penetrated to the level of discourse prior to that upon which representation holds sway and effectively determines the context, structure and meaning of our thought. In the course of everyday events, as in the best contemporary art, our critical faculties and judgment are applied to our experiences in order to differentiate various kinds of things from one another, to compare the relations between things, to determine the nature of things as well as the limits of our ability to do so, etc. In the case of Rameau's Nephew, however, the experience at hand is not, strictly speaking, our own. We watch, as we normally would in any film, something happen to somebody else. We are spectators to experiences, situations and events. As a consequence, judgment seems to be exercised at one remove from immediate experience. It is the fact that the work makes us acutely aware of the manner in which these experiences are presented to us which, in the end, provides us with a secure frame of reference for contemplating and analysing that experience. Another way of making this point is to say that one of the fundamental conditions of the medium of film is that the spectator is rendered a passive observer. In film, as opposed to painting and sculpture, it is the artist who determines what the spectator sees, when he sees it, and for how long. The camera, in effect, does the walking around and the looking for the viewer. The only 'real' time (time as a constant) involved in film is the time that the viewer spends watching the film unfold from beginning to end. All the while the viewer is being subjected to the extreme fluctuations of tempi and rhythms within the various sequences of Rameau's Nephew, a relentless and strictly literal order of time prevails and preempts everything else. This time is one of pure duration. In Rameau's Nephew, durational time is made palpable: no matter how repetitious and seemingly interminable a particular sequence may be, it does eventually end. (Obviously, for a film the length of Rameau's Nephew, roughly four-and-a half hours, duration becomes an abstraction; it cannot be comprehended except in terms of the film's individual sequences.) By differentiating the sequences as effectively as he does, Snow is able to enlist the property of duration in order to produce isolated segments of a kind of experience not available in any other medium. The discreteness, the particularities of its content, and the unique impression made upon the viewer are all expanded and intensified by strong contrast between a given sequence and those which precede and. follow it. Faced with the vast complexity and sheer density of Rameau's Nephew, imagination and judgment can be exercised only in reflection and after repeated viewings. The shape and texture of the sequences and the particular kind of critical reflection they each elicit are all to be thought of as being part of the subject matter and the ultimate statement of the film. It is this viewer experience, demarcated and given form within durational time, rather than the second hand, depicted experience of the participants in the film that provide judgment with its material. There are at least two broad types of sequences in Rameau's Nephew and each subjects the viewer to a distinct kind of experience. On the one hand, there are a number of sequences that are characterized by a manifest lack of comprehensibility whatsoever. In this type, language is either reduced to the level of noise, unintelligible sound, or it is dubbed over totally unrelated visual images. The viewer is confronted with confusion and disorientation: meaning and reference are not merely destabilized; they are entirely inundated by an opaque mass of seemingly random sensations. The viewer is shown a number of persons within a single district setting: an empty nondescript room, someone's studio or apartment, etc. The people seem to be engaged throughout the sequence in a basic repertory of actions or gestures. In the majority of these sequences actions or gestures are articulated or developed up to a certain point, then abruptly repeated from the beginning. Each subsequent repetition is complicated by some variation on the original action. While these repetitions or recurrences eventually build up a sense of expectation in the viewer, the overall effect is of being repeatedly battered. However, even in the cases where the viewer can clearly recognize the nature or object of the action or can begin to discern a coherent pattern of activity he is unable to match what he sees with what he hears. The densely layered sound track in these sequences piles up fragments of raw auditory information until the point where the viewer finds himself suspended in a medium of pure sensation. So dense and all enveloping is this medium that the viewer is no longer able to orientate himself by means of the faculty of hearing at all. His condition is close to that of anarthria, for he virtually no longer seems to have the power to discriminate articulate speech. Words, phrases, and sentences have been effectively reduced to the level of sound. This type of sequence is Snow's metaphor for the noncognitive element in human experience. In them Snow deprives the viewer of his customary moorings and leaves him to deal with experience purely as a state of mind. What is so striking and poignant about these sequences is the desperate, if necessarily fitful, efforts on the part of the viewer to penetrate, to somehow structure and comprehend his surroundings, in order, as it were, to get outside of his head and into the world. In his published notes on Rameau's Nephew Snow refers to speech as thought's body and remarks that speech and thought are not generally considered to be separate activities. (6) Snow has managed in these sequences to elicit from the viewer a self-conscious awareness of the operations of the mind deprived of language. It is extremely significant that Snow insists upon keeping the settings, incidents and persona in his film ordinary and matter of fact; by rigorously eschewing any overtones or intimations of the mystical, psychedelic and other-worldly, he has denied us any easy out for the profound bewilderment he has forced us to confront in ourselves. The other major sequence type is one in which the viewer is witness to a fairly coherent, more or less straightforward, presentation of an exchange between members of a small group of speakers. The group's activity is, for the most part, focused around the playing out of a simple but extended language game of one sort or another. These range from the prodigious and relentless torrent of puns aboard the otherwise empty jetliner, to the tedium of teaching and learning the refrain of a Bob Dylan song by rote in a later sequence set in a large mansion. It does not take the viewer long before he begins to realize that the most rudimentary conventions of language are decomposing before his eyes and ears and within his mind. Such sequences reveal that when language is allowed to get caught up, as it were, in its own mechanics, the self-perpetuating abstract structures and inherent ambiguities within language take over and meaning and reference, and indeed language's fundamental connection to the outer world and to the essential conceptual frameworks within a particular culture, radically destabilize. The experience of the viewer in this second type of sequence is epitomized by a strong sense of detachment and distance. The viewer is a strictly disinterested, fully conscious, critical-minded observer to the various speech acts he is being shown. As a result, Snow's exuberant playing with the film medium is now firmly set within a clearly comprehensible context. It is to be regarded as yet another relevant dimension of the topics under discussion by the characters in the film. That is, what is being done to the film medium per se is to be thought of as a comment on that subject or issue being raised. This is never clearer than it is at the end of the film in the 'Hotel' sequence (the one made famous through its censure by the Ontario Film Board). Here, for possibly the first time in the film, Snow gives his characters extended conversations on recognizable, nontrivial topics such as questions of how we can be sure of what we think we see and know, and the relation of fantasy and reality in the area of sexuality. The range of topics covered in this 'Hotel' sequence is especially interesting because they are the same as those which now pre-occupy postmodernist criticism. Considered from the prevailing climate of postmodernism, Rameau's Nephew is an astonishing anomaly. I would hasten to add that it is also a profoundly instructive one. Snow shows, again and again, in innumerable ways, that thought can operate in language outside or beneath the level of representation and does so in a manner which adds to our understanding of the world and of our place in it. III There is wide spread consensus among postmodernist writers that late modernist art, particularly from minimalism on, is fundamentally self-reflexive or, more precisely, self-referential in character. Postmodernist theory seems to depend so heavily on this over-extended, wooly-minded notion of self-reference that it has become virtually indispensable to the very definition of postmodernist art in general. (7) The fact of the matter is that not only does the self-referentiality thesis profoundly obscure the actual achievement and full scope of (what purely for the sake of convenience we are calling) late modernist art, but that it also provides a false and misleading foundation for postmodern art as well. For once this straw man of a thesis is rejected, the question remains whether it can be shown that there is something about the nature of postmodernist artworks that clearly distinguishes them from their predecessors. In other words, does the postmodernist work in fact break new ground with regard to the making of art formally? Or does it simply depend on the predisposition of the viewer to interpret them in the particular way set out for them by postmodernist theory and criticism? The answer to such questions will bring with it an understanding of another major misconception sanctioned by postmodernist criticism: that postmodernist art spearheaded the effort to return subject matter or content to advanced contemporary art and, furthermore, that these new territories of investigation (which include the cultural, political and the spiritual underpinnings of contemporary western society) could only be dealt with adequately by postmodernist art and the critical assumptions under which it operates. It should be noted in passing that postmodernism would also lay claim to the host of formal properties that mark advanced contemporary art from the late 1960s on: 'Appropriation, site specificity, accumulation, diversity, hybridization — these diverse strategies characterize much of the art of the present and distinguish it from its modernist predecessors.' (8) Generally speaking, the issue of reference is central to the postmodernist position as a whole. For most modernist critics, as well as for the majority of structuralists, the concept of reference is absolutely indispensable to their views because it provides the theoretical mechanism by means of which the work of art (or any statement for that matter) is taken beyond itself and connected to things in the external world. Above all, postmodernism insists upon the distinction between and their reconcilable separation of the work of art and the world. It is the concept of reference that enables the postmodernist work of art to have, as it were, a foot in both camps at once. Concern over referentiality reflects in an important way certain attitudes that not only underlie, but may motivate, postmodernism. In short, reference becomes an overriding and central issue when you feel that you can no longer take the things you see and read at 'face value,' i.e. in and for themselves. The very idea that some particular object or image in the world has an intrinsic nature, meaning, or value no longer seems to be credible or valid. All this reflects a highly developed and extremely self-conscious awareness of the fact that human knowledge and the language used to communicate it is, in the last analysis, an artificial construct, i.e., both are man-made. The primary focus of intellectual and creative activity would, by this light, seem to be that of deciphering, decoding, or appropriating rather than discovering 'the nature of things.' For this reason, there seems to be a fundamentally anthropological orientation to postmodernism. As a consequence, there is a tendency to bracket any attempt to describe particular objects or conditions in the world and consider it, rather than to describe or investigate those things first hand. The question is not whether some particular statement is true but why it is thought to be true by a particular group of people or culture at a particular time and what criteria confirmed its truth. Furthermore, postmodernism seems very much disposed toward viewing reference and meaning as profoundly influenced and even determined by the dominant ideological and cultural forces at all levels. Besides, language tends to preserve much of its basic vocabulary and grammar so that old words and constructions are constantly being given new uses and meanings. Hence, the conviction that language is not stable and that, in a word, words cannot be trusted to guarantee meaning or reference. These attitudes are a stark contrast to the literalism that has characterized contemporary art since Pollock. This literalism and the rigorous formal impulse that provided its logic seemed to 'reduce' art to the status of an object in real time and space. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and long into 1970s, advanced contemporary art maintained its adamantly literal-minded imperatives. In both painting and sculpture the natural behaviour or disposition of the materials used in a work had to be manifested directly and immediately, without attenuation or the least hint of artifice. Throughout this period, and especially so in the case of minimal and postminimal sculpture in the 1960s and the early 1970s, this literalism often took on a pronounced philosophical resonance and, consequently, considerable intellectual and imaginative power. It was as if only by the direct encounter on the part of the spectator with actual materials of the everyday world displacing real space that the artist could quell and possibly subdue the nagging threats of skepticism and solipsism that disturbed the empirical convictions the artist shared with his peers at the time. Paint had to look and act like paint; constructions of steel, earth and wood each had to reaffirm the properties of their very specific materials. The direct, unmediated experience and perception of the spectator was essential to the work's artistic truths and to the epistemological issues it addressed. To paraphrase Frank Stella's famous dictum, 'what one saw was what there was.' The artist's intention and the particular insights that his work shed on the nature of the external world were confirmed and validated by the observations of the spectator. Gradually however, the literal, along with the physically present (i.e. palpably real), and the directly perceivable, began to lose its authority as the once deeply felt urgency over strictly empirical questions subsided. An increasing number of artists no longer felt internally compelled to raise, let alone answer, such questions in their work. Furthermore, the literal also seemed to lose its aesthetic interest as well. Even critics of the day eventually were to find the severe, uninflected forms of minimal and postminimal sculpture insufficient in themselves to sustain attention and curiosity. At one point in her Passages in Modern Sculpture, Rosalyn Krauss suggests that these forms were no longer enough to look at and think about and that, as a result, serious advanced sculpture of the mid 1970s had to break out of the confines of the discrete object and disperse itself in pieces throughout the space it occupied. In effect, what has happened is that, even within the writing of the advocates of the minimal and postminimal movements, the literal was being equated with its surface appearances. (9) This represents a very serious turn for it seems to reduce the actual to the status and condition of an external image or sign. One is tempted to say that no room has been left for the object to take on the amplitude and complexity that it has, even under normal conditions. Similarly the nature of the spectator's engagement with the work has, as a consequence, been radically constricted. The best minimal and postminimal sculpture, for example, has always set up an on-going critical dialectic between what appeared or what was assumed to be the case and what upon closer, more considered inspection was in fact there; it illuminated and interrogated the interaction between the mind and the senses. The activities of experience, judgment, reflection and testing called forth by such works have been collapsed in favour of reading or deciphering a sign. The question of what a thing means or stands for has now, in effect, replaced the question of what that thing is and how we comprehend its nature. It is little wonder then, that semiotics — the study of signs — has gained the central place it has for postmodernist thinking in general. Its analysis of everything in terms of signifier / signified has become the norm for current critical discourse. It has also become a precondition of postmodernist work for this signifier / signified approach to be applied to the images, objects and words presented by the artist in his work. What 'closes off' work of the minimalists and postminimalists, and indeed all forms of modernism, for the postmodernists is that it is impossible for the latter to understand how an autonomous, self-contained work of art can relate to or implicate anything in or any part of the world outside of itself. Modernism is thought to exhaust itself because the work it endorses inevitably turns out to be empty and isolated. A large part of the reason for the postmodernists thinking is that, for them, the only possible way that a work of art can connect to the world is, as we have said, by reference. For the postmodernists, the object taken in the public, i.e. the non-subjective sense, can be understood only at face value, in terms of its external appearance, such as a sign. They implicitly deny even the possibility that a work of art can function as an analogue to things, circumstances, conditions and events in the world at large. Douglas Crimp's point about mediums and medium-centeredness in his essay, 'Pictures', is aimed at demonstrating that the best of the new, postmodernist art has clearly and simply nothing to do with 'the integrity of the various mediums — those categories the exploration of whose essences and limits constituted the very project of modernism.' (October 8, p. 76) He insists that 'the formal descriptions of modernist art . . . were topographical, that they mapped the surfaces of artworks in order to determine their structures,' (October 8, p. 87) and were, consequently, not relevant to the formal structure of the new work nor to the way those works achieved meaning. The hybrid installations and tableaux of postmodernist artists (Crimp mentions the work of Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman) virtually render the issue of medium incidental and of marginal interest. The concern of this work shifts instead to the image or picture presented by it. More importantly, one has the distinct impression that the image presented is somehow out of context and that what would under normal circumstances be regarded as familiar is being called into question. It is as if the images in the work, by virtue of simply being in the work, were being enclosed by quotation marks. The viewer is made conscious of the image as a kind of appropriation of sorts and of its being a part or a fragment of something, like a language or code. One becomes aware of the image in terms of the particular way in which it organizes certain thoughts or feelings and presents them to us. One sees it as being connected to particular unstated cultural assumptions or tacit valuations and hence, as almost a theoretical device intended to elicit an appropriate, stock response. As Crimp puts it, those processes of quotation, excerption, framing and staging that constitute the strategies of postmodernist art necessitate uncovering strata of representation. Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of significance: underneath each picture there is always another picture' (October 8, p. 87). In effect, and on a number of levels, the viewer is being drawn out of the work, as it were. The largely rhetorical question that Crimp asks at the end of 'Pictures' actually underscores the extremely problematic condition in which postmodernist art leaves the concept of the work of art: 'And if it is impossible to locate the physical medium of the work, can we then locate the original artwork?' In 'The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism' parts I and II, Craig Owens has elaborated what is probably the most comprehensive theory of postmodernism to date. Not only does his exposition enumerate the largest number of distinct features of postmodernist art, but it also attempts to unify them within the terms of a single concept, that of allegory. In many ways and for an increasing number of writers, Owens's views have come to represent something of the standard overview for postmodernism in the area of contemporary visual arts: that is, many of the moves, and a good deal of the terminology, are the same. Owens deploys key concepts of the structuralist thinkers, such as Benjamin, Barthes, Derrida and Lacan, in a way that has become characteristic of and essential to postmodernist art criticism. It is for this reason that Owens's allegorical account of postmodernist art is of considerable importance. Criticisms of that account can therefore have far reaching implications for what are presently thought to be both the points of departure and the achievements of postmodernist art in general. To state the matter simply, I want to argue here that the individual parts of Owens's theory do not mesh into a uniform and consistent argument, and that only some features described by it are valid or radically new. Furthermore, I think that the challenge of postmodernism to the autonomy and integrated wholeness of the work of art is serious but ultimately flawed. One of the hallmarks of postmodernist art is the degree to which the element of complicity on the part of the spectator is involved in the meaning and structure of the work. This work, in effect, forces one to complete it, that is, to locate and fix the references of its images and signs. On the whole, references within postmodernist art are said to be highly problematic. In that art it no longer seems to be a simple matter of confirming one's initial impressions of the work by means of direct observation and critical analysis (i.e. judgment). Perhaps in large part because of the nature of its subject matter and its particular areas of interests, the literal (strictly material) aspect of postmodernist art seems instead to direct attention toward the possibility of a distinct and independent system of meanings beneath the surface of the work That is, the work appears to affect a definitive disjunction between its outward (literal) appearances and its implicit, rhetorical bias (what the former seems to have been programmed to say or mean). The spectator, as a result, soon finds himself drawn into what amounts to a critique of values. The incompleteness of postmodernist work has to do with the need for the spectator to not only recognize and acknowledge this disjunction but to tacitly commit himself to rejecting the two (literal and rhetorical) as equivalent. One is in effect asked by the work to see oneself as either the subject or the victim of an imposed system of representation which is so pervasive and so completely internalized as to be for the most part invisible, i.e. construed as natural and neutral, 'objective,' just the way things are. The object of much of this work seems to make the spectator see the rhetoric behind the image in the work as a form of propaganda. For all the alleged problems of reference in postmodernist work a particular attitude or position seems to be favoured. But one should keep in mind that the exemplification of an attitude or the implicit indication of a commitment to or against a particular set of beliefs is not to be regarded as incontrovertible proof that the world or society is constituted or structured in such and such a way. For the most part then, attitudes of a certain sort are called forth in postmodernist work but they are not tested or demonstrated. This is where the element of tacit complicity enters into the postmodernist aesthetic. The element of detachment and sustained critical enquiry seems strongly compromised. For that matter postmodernist work and its explication in postmodernist critical writing rarely offer the spectator two sides to the question or issues it raises. More often than not, it is apparently enough to say that the meaning or significance of a particular image or sign has been coloured or prejudiced in a given manner. No alternative to the rhetoric and the values it exposes are proposed, let alone explored. The valuation questioned within and by the work is simply to be rejected as a bad thing a false description, an imposed reality. One of the most radical and most characteristic features of postmodernist art is that of its discursiveness. It is almost an inevitable by-product of the postmodernist brand of deconstruction. Discursiveness takes on the form of a wide-ranging commentary and allows for a freer play of meanings and associations than had been tolerated under the rigorous discipline and the highly focused organization of orthodox modernist art. By its very nature, it eschews even the possibility of the single truth or the single, all encompassing meaning that resolves all internal ambiguities and ties up all loose ends in a given work. Structurally, it enables work to change (its meaning) in and through time: it ensures an openendedness to the work that permits the spectator to continually add something new or different to the work. The very notion of discursiveness implies that the spectator has, in effect, become a reader rather than a viewer and that art has become a text to be read rather than an object to be looked at, or encountered in, real space and time. The potentially profound ramifications of postmodernism on the traditional conception of the work of art (one that remained intact throughout the reign of modernism) can, I think, begin to be appreciated only when one considers the importance being assigned to the spectator's role as a reader. (As a reader the spectator definitely does play a crucial role in postmodernist work.) All this is best summed up in the famous excerpt from Roland Barthes essay, 'The Death of the Author' which is quoted in The Allegorical Impulse and throughout postmodernist art criticism: The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this designation can no longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the trace by which the written text is constituted. In spite of the vast and complex apparatus that surrounds postmodernist art that includes such things as discursiveness and the transformation of viewer into reader there are a number of instances (works) which and of themselves, can be seen as important extensions of the formal language of contemporary art. There is a quality of ambivalence in the works of Laurie Anderson and Robert Longo, to name two examples, that is new to contemporary art. The terms, images or signs used in their work each carry conflicting or contradictory meanings. The meanings and resonances that are yoked together in these works often carry with them, and in them, powerful emotional charges. The joint meanings never converge or even neatly reconfigure to emerge as clean paradox. Instead, they achieve and maintain a state of constant antagonism and antitheses. They are both permanently incompatible and irreconcilable. What makes this ambivalence and bipolarity so impressive and unnerving is that it is entirely and inextricably part of the 'language' as it us used today. Those works call attention to the fact that language in general is the medium of our thought and feeling about our interaction with the world and with others. It is through that medium that we have knowledge of the world and others, and indeed, ourselves. As such it is imperative that that we comprehend as accurately as possible the actual nature of this medium itself. That this art depends completely on our immediately being able to recognize the conflicting and irresolvable meanings inherent in particular signs and images that are themselves incontestably part of the vernacular of everyday speech. Language is not a transparent window to the world; it is continually being 'clouded up' or short circuited by, for one thing, terms of double or multiple valences. As Owens points out, 'In a recent series of aluminum reliefs entitled Boys Slow Dance, generated from film stills, Longo presents three images of men locked in ... deadly combat? amourous embrace?... Suspended in a static image, a struggle to death is transformed into something that "has all the elegance of dance." Yet it is precisely this ambivalence that allows violence to be transformed into an aesthetic spectacle in photographs and films and on television.' (PTD p. 43) While Owens acknowledges Anderson's parables and Longo's images as 'emblems of that blind confrontation of "antithetical meanings"' he goes on, however, to characterize both as 'allegories of unreadability.' Such a characterization, however, brings with it an inclination to destabilize meanings and to create opportunities for discursiveness by exaggerating the imprecision of the terms involved and filling in the crevices and breaches with commentary. But it is evident from Owens's own remarks about the work of artists such as Anderson and Longo that the ambivalence that typifies their images and signs is something discrete, specific and contained. As such they do not seem to offer an appropriate occasion for discursiveness. There is also an immense difference between the phenomenon of opacity or what Barthes refers to as 'obtuse meaning' found in postmodernist work and the function assigned to it by postmodernist allegorical theory. Although literary critic Walter Benjamin elaborates a concept of the opaque (or obtuse) within the context of his overall effort to rescue the allegorical mode from the oblivion to which it had been assigned by both romantic and modernist aesthetics, he does so in a way that emphasizes the density and intractability of the opaque. For Benjamin, the element of melancholy is paramount. If it is true, on the one hand, that the gaze of melancholy causes the life in an object to flow out of it and renders it 'quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own' so that any significance it does possess 'it acquires from the allegorist' it is also true that the allegorist does not have an entirely free hand in giving the object or sign any meaning he wishes. The disposition of the allegorist, especially the allegorist of the 17th century literary variety Benjamin happens to be discussing, is all-important:
Rather than merely advocate the projection of meaning upon an otherwise empty sign or object, there seems to be a strong overtone of the memento mori in Benjamin's discussion of the opaque object. If the latter is unreadable it is because it is locked in a past that cannot possibly be retrieved or revived. Its essence as a sign or image or object is its distance from us. It would seem that for someone like Benjamin the task of the allegorist is to articulate or interpret the human significance of that distance, that fundamental condition of distance and separation. If, for example, an opaque or obtuse term, by the nature of its opacity or obtuseness calls to mind the universal inevitability of entropy, the allegorist is not, by this interpretation, committed automatically to adopting a nihilistic attitude of 'anything goes because its all the same in the end any way;' instead it is the lot of the allegorist, particularly if the allegorist is an artist, to acknowledge the effort to comprehend the human dimensions of that inevitability and to give that effort form. Consider the approaches of two prominent postmodernist critics on the work of Troy Brauntuch. Both critics are attempting to explain how Brauntuch's enlargements of Hitler's drawings or photographs of concentration camp victims, exhibited without captions, become opaque:
In the quote that follows note the shift in emphasis from the prominence accorded to the fact of distance to that given to the need to 'read into' or, in the author's words, to 'decipher.' Brauntuch's images simultaneously prefer and defer a promise of meaning; they both solicit and frustrate our desire that the image be directly transparent to its significance. As a result, they appear strangely incomplete — fragments or runes which must be deciphered. (12) Both the postmodern allegorist and a number of structuralists make use of the distinction and the relationship between the literal and the rhetorical. These are other words for signifier and signified, or for a sign (image or object) and its referent or meaning. Whatever the terms are called this basic formula pervades postmodernist thinking and its analysis of language in general. In ordinary discourse, as well as in non-allegorical literature, language is treated as if it were to be understood as being transparent; that is, the literal and the rhetorical are assumed to go together. Allegory or deconstruction has to do with unhinging this equivalence. Opacity, Barthes's obtuse meaning, is thought by postmodernists and certain structuralists to be a crucial if not indispensable instrument of this unhinging of the literal and the rhetorical. It is regarded primarily in terms of the function it performs rather than as something significant in itself. The absence of obtuse meaning is, in fact, the very condition of communication and signification, but its presence works to problematize these activities. Since the obtuse meaning has no objective, independent existence, it depends upon the literal and the rhetorical, which it nevertheless undoes. An unwelcome supplement, it exposes the literal level of the image to be a fiction, implicating it in the web of substitutions and reversals properly characteristic of the symbolic. The actor is revealed as the (metaphoric) substitute for character; his facial contortions, the emblem of grief not its direct expression. Hence every image that participates in what photography criticism calls the directional, as opposed to the documentary, mode is open to the intervention of obtuse meaning.' (13) By definition the meaning or reference of the literal is fixed at the level of its surface. The literal is the outer shell or husk of an image or sign. Its relation to meaning or reference is restricted by the theory and views under consideration to a very limited number of options — it can be transparent; disjoined, i.e. no longer transparent because for one reason or another the meaning or reference has become dislodged from the literal and the rhetoric that has supported this association has become increasingly conspicuous; or it can be empty, because the literal simply does not, or no longer has, any specific meaning or reference in the public mind. For the opaque or obtuse term to function in the way described by Owens it would have to be, in effect, empty. But the opaque is unreadable because we cannot decipher it: we are acutely aware of our inability to make out, determine, its meaning or reference. The very density or resonance it still possesses for us is a signal that there is a meaning or reference that we cannot make out. If a term or image is empty, however, it is neutral, unoccupied and completely ready to be reappropriated for general use. We simply fall into reading the empty and unused term, once a meaning or reference was attributed to it the way we would any term that was part of our 'language' today. It would, in a manner of speaking, simply be re-absorbed into the 'language.' In other words, the opaque, unlike the empty term, cannot reasonably be considered to be a free-floating signifier. In conclusion, it can be seen in the examples chosen by the postmodernist critics themselves, namely the works of Anderson, Longo and Brauntuch, that they are deconstructive and even 'unreadable' in the postmodern allegorist sense of the word, just because they force the spectator to confront their ambivalences (precisely stated polarities) or opacity in a way that cannot be readily dismissed or equivocated. These works may elicit, as part of the spectator's or the critics' response to them, a kind of discursive commentary, but it should be clear that this commentary is not essential either to their substance or to their structure as works of art. One final point. The strategy of appropriation common to a large number of postmodernist works may turn out to be a very important but at the same time, very special case of what Craig Owens has identified as the allegorical mode. One of the primary aims of this strategy seems to be that of opening up a fissure within the language at large in order to reveal a split between the outward signs or images used in everyday communication and the dominant rhetoric that, in effect, determines their meaning for us. It seems to presuppose that the function of postmodernist art is to engage in an analysis of what Owens, among others, call the literal component (the signs and images) in terms of a particular rhetoric and the ideology behind that rhetoric. The object of such a work of art is therefore to make the spectator aware of the sign or image as an integral part of a given ideology's representation of the world. The film 'stills' of Cindy Sherman clearly manifest this object. Indeed, the strategy of appropriation best suits those familiar, public images that can be shown to exemplify fundamental social attitudes and the representational systems of a particular dominant ideology. Their very appearance in what one has reason to believe is a sophisticated contemporary work of art is enough of a tip-off that something beside the obvious is afoot and that one is in effect being asked by the artist and the work to reconsider what seems at first glance so obvious. Because of this and related reasons, the strategy of appropriation cannot be applied across the broad range of postmodernist works; it does not fit (i.e. satisfactorily account for) a number of key examples given by writers such as Owens or Crimp. It is simply that certain gestures, such as that of capacity in the work of Troy Brauntuch or ambivalence in the works of Anderson and Longo, cannot be convincingly integrated into that strategy. In fact those features would defeat or at least derail it as we have shown. At best then one can say with considerable justification that the strategy of appropriation is a subspecies (one of several) of the general allegorical method outlined in Owens's pioneering essay, 'The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.' (14) Furthermore the clearly drawn connection between the literal and the rhetorical that the strategy of appropriation necessarily requires and a theory like Owens's virtually demands, is not relevant to a number of postmodernist paradigms. In most such cases it would either diminish the intensity or autonomy of the sign or image (the literal) in question or it would attempt to superimpose an otherwise gratuitous reading on it. It seems to me therefore that Postmodernism's ostensible challenge to the fundamental nature of the work of art, which has been one of the chief and persistent worries of the present essay, is not as radical or as wide sweeping as some theorists have alleged. One is tempted to go even further and ask whether the strategy of appropriation by itself subverts in any serious way the traditional conception of the work of art as an autonomous, integrated whole. By and large, the strategy of appropriation operates within the parameters of a fairly determinate field or circumscribed frame of reference. Thus, the clarity of the intentions of such a postmodernist work as well as its reference to the world external to it and to the particular system of representation it seeks to exemplify, ensure that it will fit the traditional conception of a work of art, for if it does not, it cannot hope to succeed on its own self-defined terms and conditions. Rather than open up the work by destroying its boundaries and its autonomy the strategy of appropriation instead needs a general complicity on the part of the spectator with regard to the ultimate meaning or interpretation of the work in question. C Magazine #3, Fall 1984. Text: © Walter Klepac. All rights reserved.
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