music from Our Literal Speed Soundtrack Recordings, Twenty Minutes by The Size Queens featuring Guillermo Gomez-Pena

APRIL 2010, NOTES FROM SELMA

OUR LITERAL SPEED
“Modernism After Modern Art”

It was Saturday, 6 March 2004, 4pm. Los Angeles. The Getty Center.

We were not sure what was about to happen. The email we had received said that there would be a “theory installation” on Saturday organized by Art & Language, a British conceptual art group that had been around since the 1960s. Made up of Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden, and Charles Harrison, Art & Language was working in league with another organization called the Jackson Pollock Bar, an art and theater collective based in Freiburg, directed by Christian Matthiessen. As it happened, Charles Harrison, had been at the Getty in the preceding few weeks doing research and we had exchanged greetings with him a few times. He seemed to be a pleasant, intelligent guy. The upcoming “theory installation” was entitled “Theses on Feuerbach.”

The San Diego Freeway hummed dully in the distance, as we settled into the back row of a trapezoidal room, the sun still high behind rows of mechanized blinds. This was the Getty Research Institute’s main conference space, a Bauhausy construction joined to the main museum building by a dirty white travertine walkway. In theory, the theory installation was open to the general public. It could have been attended by any one of the Los Angeles Metro Area’s eighteen million souls, but by ten after four only about thirty people had filed in.

A few minutes later, three men appeared and sat down at a conference table set up with nameplates for the three members of Art & Language. However, these three men were not Art & Language. They were, we guessed, actors from The Jackson Pollock Bar. They then began lip-synching to a track of voices and sound effects that the audience eventually assumed to be a recording of Art & Language discussing the conditions of production and reception in the contemporary art world (We later learned, as we suspected based on the oddly American accents, that it was an audio recording of hired actors reading a script produced by Art & Language).

Later, the men at the conference table would be interrupted by an aggressive female questioner in the audience, who also lipsynched her lines. What is more, the Bar performed the “theory installation” while members of Art & Language looked on from the audience.

Among other things, in the theory installation, the actors said: “The theories of theoreticians, and indeed the theoreticians themselves, no longer form a neutral abstract background to the aesthetic.  They have developed so as to constitute its material. The “aesthetic” has become discursive and “discourse” has become aesthetic.” [1]   The statement itself openly echoed Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” which lament an “idealism that does not know real, sensuous activity as such…but regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude…” [2]

Upon the theory installation’s conclusion, the Jackson Pollock Bar and Art & Language launched another panel discussion that fielded questions from the audience about the just “performed” panel discussion.  At the conclusion of the event, we were left with the uncanny feeling of having watched culture performed, rather than having watched yet another perfunctory cultural performance. The event was artful and arresting, even captivating, yet extremely difficult to describe in the terms of art or art history. 

As such, it brought to mind Michael Fried’s now hackneyed invocation in “Art and Objecthood” of Tony Smith’s nighttime car ride on the unopened New Jersey turnpike. But it also recalled one of Theodor Adorno’s recollections about living in Southern California. Adorno wrote:

“In America, I was liberated from a naïve belief in culture, and acquired the ability to see culture from the outside…In America, no reverential silence reigned before everything intellectual as it does in Central and Western Europe… the absence of this respect induces the spirit to critical self-reflection.”[3]

Until that day at the Getty, we had not really understood what those words meant. As we went back to our offices, we were seized by a sense of liberation, a surge of intoxication provoked by a thoroughly bland audio recording produced by a trio of British artists who were nearing retirement age, played in a half-full lecture hall. We recognized the feeling:  it was exactly the same feeling that you have when you hear a song for the fist time and as soon as it’s over all you want to do is hear that song again.

Fastforward five years. It is Sunday, 10 May 2009, around noon. We are about to give a presentation at a conference called Between Text & Performanceat the University of Chicago. The conference features a who’s who of specialists in music and theater. The president of the American Musicological Society was there; a professor from Harvard who had written three or four important books on the history of opera, a well-regarded performance theorist, and the host institution’s dean of the humanities.

Our idea was to show a video instead of giving a talk. The video, which had been filmed several months earlier, showed a woman and man giving a PowerPoint lecture about the need to reimagine the ways that academics approach art and culture in the twenty-first century.

The talk had been given in English in front of an audience of thirty or so viewers in Karlsruhe, Germany. We intended to stand at the podium and watch with the audience as the video played, and then we planned to take turns discussing why academics feel the need to present their scholarly material as individuals, in person, and not through forms of mediation, such as through videos or actors.

We were planning to say that academics’ habits of writing and public presentation betray a longing for the false authenticity of the univocal, powerful, truth-speaking scholar. Unfortunately, when we showed up, we realized that the audio and video in the room were sketchy---not terrible, but the lecture space was obviously designed for musical or theatrical productions, not for video.

Anyway, the organizers promised us that everything would be okay. So I sat back and watched the event unfold. The talks were fine; some more inspired and inspiring than others, but all in all a pleasant academic time was had.

Then when our time to speak rolls around, there are problems–problems with the audio cables, problems with the video projection, other problems and more problems. But instead of complaining or holding up the schedule, in a moment of what we hoped would turn out to be brilliant improvisation, we said, “Just forget it–let’s show the video as is.”

So we go to the back of the room with the tech guy and we turn on the dvd. The sound is beyond horrible. Unbelievable amounts of static and distortion are bellowing out of the speakers above the audience’s heads; the words from the video can barely be heard over the rumble and the video looks like a pirated transmission on an East German console screen. We overcame the instinctive reaction to cut off the video, but just barely.  It continued to play.

We’re in the back—way in the back—so we cannot see the audience’s faces, but from the shuffling in the seats, and the nervous glances around the room, I can tell that things are going really badly. We let the video roll for 15 minutes, found a reasonable place to pause, shut it down, and the room goes from cacophony to silence.

We shuffle to the front of the room, each footstep banging against the wooden stage, and as we reach the podium and turn to the audience, it is as if we are diving into a swimming pool of scholarly fury. My leg starts to shake uncontrollably. I can barely breathe.

We immediately realize that we have just leapt into some unknown, utterly destructive territory, some incomprehensibly weird place—a place where there are no more rules, just wild, fastmoving professorial anger and pedagogical chaos. What made it so much worse, was that we had created this space of our own free will. 

After a long pause, we tried to speak into the mic, but someone yelled:

“It’s turned off. Don’t you have any idea what you’re doing?”

And from there, the whole scene just descended into shadows and shock.

Most of what followed is fuzzy and repressed. Standing there, we grasped this was not the utilitarian dismay of people upset over a poorly conceived talk, or colleagues concerned about a slack argument.  No, these people were irate because my actions were an affront to culture, to learning, to everything that mattered in our academic lives. Something sacred was being defiled here and their anger was righteous and belligerently dismissive. We thought to ourselves this is what it had to feel like when the Futurists were getting fruit hurled at them.

Just as we were both about to be pulled off the stage, I finally, meekly said something like this, “We want you to know that every conceivable aspect of our talk has been a failure and that this failure has been real, a literal failure. This failure has not been a representation of failure, it has been failure, and there’s no paraphrase for that; there was no way for us to describe that experience adequately for you. You had to experience it. Thank you.”

We climbed down from the stage to unsteady applause. We felt as if we had been through a near death experience, the feeling you get when your plane hits heavy turbulence, or your car skids across the highway. We felt exhausted and unsure of ourselves, of what we had done, or what we were doing, or what this would mean for our professional standing, but, most important, maybe for the first time in our lives, we understood without any doubt exactly what a non-trivial, non-anesthetizing scholarly culture would feel like. The answer was obvious: It would feel like art and it would feel like modernism.

Stuff Near ArtThat Is Not Art, Which Is Treated As If It Were Art, Is Now The Substance of Most Serious Art

This statement offers a concise description of the situation of the modern mind in the contemporary art world. The statement argues that much of the important art produced today is made out of materials, situations, atmospheres, and attitudes that had not earlier been considered to be meaningful parts of one’s experience of art.

That is, the artist’s talk in the work of Walid Raad is not an additive to his artworks, it frequently is the art itself; or for Tino Sehgal, museum employees always play far more significant roles than any object created by the artist (there are no objects, in fact); or for Tania Bruguera who treats the openings to her art exhibitions as performance events, although she does not necessarily notify attendees of this fact beforehand.

These sorts of gestures underscore that the most compelling art of the last decade vivifies the heretofore “neutral,” merely “decorative” surfaces that have surrounded the discussion, production and display of artworks.

In a similar fashion, the performances of Andrea Fraser, the photographs of Rainer Ganahl, and Anton Vidokle’s multifarious activities as entrepreneur and organizer have pioneered a sensibility in which design, documentation, education, institutionalization, even lifestyle, have provided modes for a renewed and expanded sense of expressive possibility. 

In other words, stuff near art that is not art began to be treated as if it were art, and in the process modern art's paratactic decoration became the unlikely substance for its subterranean elaboration.

All of this then has been a long preamble to the real question: What happened to modernism? Where did it go? 

The answer is that it never disappeared. It just migrated into the forms, materials and procedures that once surrounded works of modern art. Modernism never vanished during the "postmodern era," it simply ceased to be visible as art because its manifestations began to emerge in odd places at odd times. Modernism’s “rhetoric of progress” became a fugitive from its own history.

Over the last forty years we have witnessed the appearance of complex bodies of work that belong to the trajectory of modernism, even if they are not precisely “modernist” in a chronological-historical sense. Call it altermodernism, paramodernism, or modernism after modern art.[4]

A mobile cloud of evaluative anxiety has engulfed art-making—and as a result those who occupy areas near this art, but who are not artists themselves, are beginning to find that even their labor is being enveloped by this same fog of non-differentiation.

This presents an unfamiliar problem, because now the most run of the mill activities of the art historian, curator or critic—from lecturing, to conference organizing, to the gallery talk—are being illuminated by the reflected glow of ambitious art practice. 

As a result, the professional and discursive framing that has allowed us to rapidly, almost automatically, distinguish art from its near-art, yet non-art surroundings, has been transformed in challenging ways.

Once museum guards, audio tours, ticket takers, exhibition openings, gallery talks, PowerPoint presentations, and press conferences become active players in the production of art experience, then one inevitably wonders about the framing around all art and non-art.

In this situation, art critics, curators, and art historians can no longer assume that their heretofore “neutral,” rather banal activities can remain “neutral” any longer. Artists have “aestheticized” or “artified” these practices and procedures, and both art and its descriptions are changing in important ways. 

On this score, it is often noted that many artists of the 1960s acted as if they were art historians.In fact, many were art history students.[5]  However, few commentators have deduced the larger symmetry here: if the artists of the 1960s became art historians who produced objects, then is it not similarly true that art historians began to act as “discourse performers” who expanded the scope of modernism through lectures, panel discussions and other modes of public performativity?  We may even eventually realize that these art historians were mobilizing “the history of modernism” as a kind of artistic medium itself.[6]  

From this perspective, we may eventually realize that Art & Language’s Charles Harrison who straddled the zone between conceptual artist and historian of modern art for over three decades may not have been alone; perhaps he simply realized and made explicit the strangeness of his position much sooner than most. That is, perhaps we have not been dealing with historians of modern art, but with a band of modernist discourse-performers all along.

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