Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 09:31:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: Neil McLaughlin <nmclaugh-AT-mcmail.CIS.McMaster.CA>
Subject: [FRA:] sociology, philosophy and art





Philosophy predates the social sciences, of course, and philosophical
issues must be (and generally are) important in sociological discourse,
especially in the sub-field of theory where I work.
What kind of philosophy? And how these issues are linked to research are
clearly controversial issues, in the field of sociology and outside.
I do think that many of this list like to talk about philosophy as if it
has no borders or boundaries, or professional self-interests.
Personally, I think Randall Collins's The Sociology of Philosophy has
very
useful things to say about the social base of philosophy, ideas that could
be applied to how the boundaries and borders of "critical theory"
are created and enforced.
A useful version of this discussion is not likely to be undertaken on this
list (for a variety of sociological reasons, actually), so best focus on
things that might be useful.

The New Yorker has a piece on a new show at the Whitney, that I have
forwarded. I am not
endorsing this piece nor critiquing it, since I have not yet seen the
Whitney show.
But I am curious if there are Frankfurt School influenced intellectuals on
the list, who have seen the show, and have things to say about it that
relate to critical theory.
Or if critical theory has things to say of use that relate to the more
general issues of contemporary art, america and the world raised by this
particular show.


The Art World: TARGET AMERICA --
The view from abroad at the Whitney.
===================================
by PETER SCHJELDAHL
from the New Yorker
Issue of 2003-08-04
Posted 2003-07-28

"The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United
States, 1990-2003," a show at the Whitney Museum of
American Art of recent works by fifty mostly little-
known artists, filmmakers, and collaborative groups
from thirty or so countries, purports to explore
foreign views of the U.S.A. The art in it is the
typical fare of international exhibitions these days:
heavy on mildly diverting installations, videos, and
photography and given to easy conceptual japes, which
curatorial wall texts carefully explain. With a few
sharp exceptions, the works are second-rate or, really,
no-rate: hybrid in form and forced in content,
belonging to no vital tradition, responding to no ones
need. They dont so much advance the shows theme as
huddle under it. The oddly poignant effect brought to
my mind J. Alfred Prufrocks self-assessment: "not
Prince Hamlet" but "an attendant lord . . .
Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious,
and meticulous; / Full of high sentence, but a bit
obtuse." Public-minded contemporary art today is ever
more Prufrockian: parched and riddled with compunction.
Most of the artists at the Whitney are young, but many
seem in a hurry to be careworn with age.

Here are examples of what I mean by no-rate art: a big
installation by the Frenchman Gilles Barbier in which
veristic sculptures of geriatric superheroes (Superman,
et al.) slump in the television room of a nursing home;
photographs by Danwen Xing of masses of parts from
junked computers, which, we are told, are exported from
America to be picked over for salvage by poor Chinese;
photographs by Yongsuk Kang of a South Korean island
that is used by American forces for bombing practice;
photographic self-portraits of Fiona Foley, an
Australian Aborigine, posing as a Seminole Indian; and
a cowboy image rendered in cutout coca leaves by the
Colombian Miguel Angel Rojas. All these works are
derivative of established artists -- Edward Kienholz in
the case of Barbier and Richard Misrach in that of Kang
-- but "influence" is too strong a word for whats
afoot here. The artists neither develop nor challenge
received artistic ideas but churn them.

In tone, "The American Effect" is vaguely reproachful
of America while anxious to mollify thin-skinned
viewers. It is like a lavishly illustrated op-ed piece
of the virtuously worried sort, which takes up some
current discontent and, after sufficient on-the-one-
hand-and-on-the-othering, sets it back down in the same
place. The show and its attractive catalogue emit
whiffs of the anti-Americanism that is common today
among the worlds intelligentsias (parts of our own
included), but is "balanced" with tokens of affection.
At the show, I heard a middle-aged man remark with
palpable relief, "Well, it could have been worse!" It
just couldnt have been very enjoyable. Determinedly
political art is generally depressing. It forfeits
creativitys inclination to praise life. An overriding
sense of worldly emergency can vindicate the sacrifice,
but I feel little such urgency in this show. There is
mainly a conventional righteousness. Artists naturally
strive to please their patrons. The marching order at
the Whitney is soft-core critique.

The catalogue introduction, by Lawrence Rinder, the
Whitneys curator of contemporary art, quotes
Crvecoeur and Tocqueville on the way to suggesting
that we Americans should be more attentive to how
others see us. This leaves out the difficulty of
specifying an "us" in a wildly heterogeneous,
essentially fictive nation; but let that go. Essays
range from a witty meditation on American-style
hyperabundance by Luc Sante to a shot of straight
polemical sulfur by the Pakistani Tariq Ali: "What we
are witnessing today is not a war against terror, but
the first shots in a new struggle for hegemony over
former allies." Best is a contribution by Ian Buruma,
"Sweet Violence," which addresses the thrill of
Schadenfreude that many well-off, educated people
around the world felt on September 11th. Buruma argues
that Americas ideals and promises guarantee resentment
precisely among people abroad who are most excited by
them. There are grounds other than personal bitterness
for opposing American power and influence, of course,
but a distinctive psychological tic has come to mark
the worlds cosmopolitan sets, which notably include
artists.

Buruma writes, "Those who dont aspire to American
success, or an American life-style, or American
recognition, dont feel that special humiliation of the
disappointed supplicant, that sense of inadequacy that
comes from longing for something forever out of reach."
That "special humiliation" is intensified by American
exports beyond movies and advertising. "Bookstores in
Beijing, no less than in Hamburg or Bombay, have
shelves piled up with the works of U.S. academics
theorizing about their own marginality. So it is not
surprising, really, that there are times when
frustration tips over into fantasies of revenge." Such
being the case, it speaks for Lawrence Rinders caution
that only two works in "The American Effect" managed to
offend me. An installation by the Chilean Cristbal
Lehyt finds significance in the fact that the overthrow
of Salvador Allende, in 1973, occurred on September
11th. Makoto Aidas huge hinged screen in many mediums
pictures an air raid by Japanese Zeroes on Manhattan.
More typical of the show is an installation by the
Irishman Gerard Byrne in which two actors, on video,
enact a dialogue between Lee Iacocca and Frank Sinatra
which appeared as a magazine ad for the Chrysler
Imperial in 1980. The exercise is passably droll but
awfully strenuous. Byrne chews more than he bites off.

Two terrific videos by a German named Bjrn Melhus
almost justify the show. Both say, in effect -- one
angrily, the other wistfully -- "America drives me
crazy." "America Sells," seven minutes long,
intersperses shots of gross American advertising in
Berlin with footage of an open-air performance there
(at a celebration of national reunification in 1990) by
an "inspirational" American singing troupe of talent-
free, frighteningly perky kids. They shrill, "America
lives in the hearts of all the people. / America, want
it for all," then pause while a barker hawks T-shirts.
Its mortifying. Melhuss other video, "Far Far Away,"
shot on film, stars the artist minimally dressed up as
two versions of Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz,"
conversing by telephone with each other in disjointed
snippets of dialogue from the movies German dub. One
doppelgnger speaks chipperly from outdoor sites in New
York and San Francisco. The sad other is confined to a
small apartment in Germany. Haunted by a sense of empty
distances, the thirty-nine-minute piece generates an
astonishing range of emotions. Dorothy in Germany pours
out her longings to Toto -- a banal ceramic dog
figurine. Dorothy in America looks lost and bereft,
even as she gushes about the Emerald City. In this poem
of an inaccessible Oz, one feels close to the heart of
Burumas "special humiliation." Few of the shows other
artists attain comparable sublimity -- two who do are
the Serbian Zoran Naskovski and the Canadian-born Mark
Lewis, with video projections about the John F. Kennedy
assassination and the good life in Southern California.

One penetrating criticism of the imperial culture of
the United States is tacit in the show. It involves
syntheses of native artistic traditions with American
forms and themes. Call this the hula-skirt syndrome:
the local becoming vestigial in a global forest of
signs, where the big trees are American. In one case,
the result is exhilarating. The Congolese sculptor
Bodys Isek Kingelezs very large "New Manhattan City
3021" features incredibly ingenious, funny, and
beautiful maquettes of futuristic skyscrapers; it
bespeaks a resilient, omnivorous integrity in West
African culture, which has been producing a fair amount
of buoyant art. More to the melancholy point are
paintings in the styles of Mughal miniatures, Japanese
prints, and Spanish colonial portraiture which
caricature American politicians and symbols. Rather
than efficiently mocking their subjects, such works
callously debase their own heritage. Cosmopolitanism
may be the worlds destiny, and even its best hope for
redemption, but theres no end of loss and pain in the
phenomenon. Those potent, consequential feelings are
ill served by an event as "politic, cautious, and
meticulous" -- and as trifling -- as "The American
Effect."




Neil G. McLaughlin     			KTH-620
Associate Professor			McMaster University
Department of Sociology			Hamilton, Ontario
E-mail: nmclaugh-AT-mcmaster.ca		L8S 4M4
Phone (905) 525-9140 Ext. 23611		Canada