File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1995/avant-garde_May.95, message 9


Date: Sat, 13 May 1995 19:50:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-AT-panix.com>
Subject:  The Whitney Biennial, Philoctetes' last stand (a bit long)



(please forgive the cross-posting)




WHY I SHOULD BE KILLED


Tiffany says "You're taking it too seriously. Cultural politics is just 
that, politics!" 

You say "That's what I'm talking about. So I'm going to break out. I'm 
not following the form any more! Klaus Kertess, I knew him once! Let the 
man run on! Listen to him now:"

"What is being proposed here is not a return to formalism but an art in
sensuousness is indispensable - whether as play or sheer joy or the kind
of subversity that has us reaching for a rose and grabbing a thorn. Art is
a platform for experience, not a lesson. The artist's mind/body becomes an
instrument of the eye - an instrument that submits to and is orchestrated
by the requirements of the work being made. The interaction of the art-
ist's unique mental structure (even the most rigorous depersonalization
carries a monogram), the artist's culture, and the medium the artist has
chosen to embed with meaning is so complexly layered and cross-circuited
that ambiguity is, if not willed, certainly entailed." 

Later he goes on to explain about Sue Williams: "Williams subversively
pits the physical and verbal abusiveness of her subjects against the
physical gratification of her painting; and through the enjoyment of her
painting, the viewer becomes implicated in the messy goings on of her
subjects. There are no answers here, only questions about the nature of
pleasure. Williams' painting distills more than it defines; it seeks
meaning, know well there may be none; it alarms us into wonder and
wondering." 

Then he adds: "Art's alarm goes off on a slow clock. Even in times as 
disaster prone and obsessed as our current millennial moment, the artist 
must assume the arrogance of eternity."

This is Klaus' "Postcards from Babel" in his Whitney Museum 1995 Biennial
Catalog. The world is changing at an enormous rate; whole peoples and
species are near extinction; the classic nationstate is questioned
throughout Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa; the Internet is under
attack and increasing numbers of people are identifying themselves with
on-line communities: and Sue Williams' work is subverted into perennial
beauty and allegiance with Merleau-Ponty's essay on Cezanne. But Williams'
work is precisely content, ambiguous or not, and there is discomfort
there, art or not. 

Tiffany says "You're not saying anything, damn it! You're talking about life 
and death, about suicide/murder, _Lustmord,_ Jenny Holzer: What's going 
on here?"

You say "It's the language. It's everywhere. It's imperial. It's putting
the lid on. It's a rape of the truth. It's an insistence on truth. Listen:
Why _must_ the artist assume the arrogance of eternity? Don't you see, the
nuclear family in disguise once again, the strait-jacket of organized
religion, it's all there! Listen: "art in which meaning is embedded in
formal value." Not "embedded in form" but "formal _value_" and there you
have it, the circuitry of aesthetic capital, the circuitry of capital if
you will. It's not that I'm for politically-correct art or political art -
it's that there's a return here to effacement, to the 50s' disdain for the
discomfort of the social order until the beats came along. And then
there's the "ought" everywhere in this writing: "Art _is_ a platform for
experience, not a lesson." But why not? Why _should_ art be one thing and
not another? I realize he's using the copula, not the _ought,_ but the
ought is implicit; the sentence is performative - he's the perfect curator
for the 1990s! And there's the return to the inherent formalism of the
work - which is the fetishistic work of totality, the practice of totali-
ty, the artist's "mind/body" becoming "an instrument that submits to and
is orchestrated by the requirements of the work being made." I am reminded
of the orchestras, in fact, that played in the concentration camps, also
submissive - and I don't find the analogy far-fetched. The language reeks
of Kristeva's "clean and proper body," reeks of purified aesthetics, Leni
Riefenstahl. All this in the guise of "a snapshot of our contemporary
world and an exploration of the various visions it inspires." (Geoffrey C.
Bible, the Sponsor's Statement) -" 

Tiffany says "And you're angered, towards death, because you believe 
there is no progress, which means you believe in progress, which means 
you're already strangled -"

You say "Not strangled, not even believing in progress, but this return 
which is everywhere in our culture sutures over the wounds, from the body 
(look at what happens to Sue Williams in the essay) onward; if art is to 
be relevant, it need not be of course political (in the overt sense) or 
politically correct, but this is a call for disengagement, cauterization, 
in disguise. What's occurring in the artworld is an insistence on irre- 
levance, on interiority, metaphor (not the allegory of postmodernism, but 
the metaphor of disconnection), the beauty of the pristine..."

Emote self-strangling beyond the shadow of a doubt!

Emote being misunderstood as the gaunt and avant-garde artist he isn't!

You say "I'm occupying this space, filling it with words, broken like
splintered teeth against the almost-murder of Philoctetes. I'm the shroud
that holds blood in! I rage against cleverness, wit, the disguise of
Virgil, the stunted marrow of the Internet, I am martyred in the war
against language itself. My tongue is torn out by placid Europe's frozen
detonation of nuclear bombs raged across four continents!" 

Tiffany cries "That is not art! Hold the pen/write, pose your hands above 
the finger-board, strike the keys gently, make music with the words, wire 
your wrists with silver cords, bend your body into the inscription of 
disbelief, rise up into violation fabric!"

Tiffany cries "Fool them with your death. Become Lenny Bruce, Andy Kauf-
mann, Mary Magdalene, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, return beneath the
surface of the earth, strangle the paintings themselves with mold, with
scale, with rust, with fungus, with lichen: bacteriality of the worlds
destined to kill with a single glance of the infected!" 

Tiffany cries "Die to fool them with your death!"

Tiffany cries "Don't forget America-bomb, internal-ghetto bomb, don't 
forget body-bomb, don't forget terrible beauty indeed!"

Emote death-machinery eco-culture capital!

Emote caverns legs mouths liquid teeth of blood!

Tiffany screams "Die to fool them with your death!"

You beg "Klaus, kill me! Klaus kill me with your song! Klaus, I'm going 
to lead the armies against Troy! Klaus, give me the bow back! Klaus, make 
me strong! Klaus, strangle eternity! Klaus, down with the beauty meaning 
of art! Klaus, I'm raving at you! Klaus, I'm raving at you! I'm raving at 
you, Klaus! I'm raving!"


_________________________________________________________________________



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