1 ✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥ Theories of the avant-garde ✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥✥It has been said that the degree to which a revolution isdeveloping qualitatively different social conditions andrelationships may perhaps be indicated by the devel-opment of a different language: the rupture with thecontinuum of domination must also be a rupture withthe vocabulary of domination.Herbert Marcuse 1 Introduction In his Theory of the Avant-Garde(1974) Peter Bürger sets himself thetaskof producing a definition of the progressive artistic move-ments of the early twentieth century that will both distinguishthem from earlier avant-garde phenomena as well as from othercontemporaryartistic movements of the modernist period such asaestheticism. 2 Although Bürger’s model offers what purports tobe a general definition of the historical avant-garde it is clear thatfor the most part his theoretical descriptions and analyses areoriented specifically towards dada and surrealism, his examplesbeing drawn almost exclusively from these movements and inparticular from the plastic arts rather than from literary texts.Notably absent from Bürger’s analysis of the movements of theavant-garde, for example, is one of the seminal phenomena ofearly twentieth-century literature, film and art, namely Germanexpressionism.Bürger adds a suggestivenote tothe effect thatone 1 An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 33. 2 Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). Here I referwherever possible to the English translation by Michael Shaw, (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Unless otherwise noted, all other transla-tions throughout are my own. 1 © Cambridge University Presswww.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press0521648696 - Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and theProblem of PostmodernityRichard MurphyExcerpt More information

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might, within certain limitations, discover a number of essentialavant-garde features in expressionism, such as its critique of theinstitutionalizedcharacter of art and its characteristic rejection notsimply of previous movements but of the tradition of art in itsentirety. 3 Yet having noted that these similarities remain to beworked out concretely in future analyses Bürger himself skirts thecentralproblemof expressionism and its relationshipto theavant-garde.In the light of the current debates on postmodernism there hasbeen renewed interest both in modernism and the avant-gardeand, more particularly, in the nature of their mutual relationship.Postmodernism has frequently been seen for example as a phe-nomenon which is neither totally new nor a movement constitut-ing a radically innovative stylistic breakthrough, but rather as theattempt to reconfigure in contemporary terms some of the ques-tions already faced by modernism and the avant-garde. 4 In thissense, any definition of postmodernism must inevitably dependupon a prior understanding of those earlier phenomena. Post-modernism might then be thought of as a change of ‘‘dominant’’within modernism, 5 or as a realignment of a constellation ofmeaning mapped out in the shifting relations between the refer-ence-points denoted by modernism, the contemporary and theavant-garde.Given this configuration of terms, the issues dealt with byBürger’s bookbecome especially important in helping to establishthe various distinctions and interdependencies operating be-tween modernism and the avant-garde. The omission of expres-sionismfrom Bürger’s discussion is then all themore surprising inview of its importance as a crucial space in which the avant-gardeconfronts modernism and in which the differences between the 3 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 109, note 4. 4 See for example Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, MassCulture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) 168. 5 Brian McHale employs the Formalist concept of the ‘‘dominant’’ (derived fromTynjanov and Jakobson) in order to describe the transition from modernism topostmodernism. McHale sees a shift from a period dominated by epistemologi-cal issues to one concerned more with ontological matters (such as the confronta-tion between different realities). See McHale’s article ‘‘Change of Dominant fromModernist to Postmodernist Writing,’’ Approaching Postmodernism, ed. HansBertens and Douwe Fokkema (Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins,1986), 53–78, and also his book Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987)where this idea forms the central thesis. Theories of the avant-garde2 © Cambridge University Presswww.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press0521648696 - Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and theProblem of PostmodernityRichard MurphyExcerpt More information

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two are negotiated. For although expressionism has been labeledthe ‘‘historical modernist movement par excellence,’’ 6 besides itsmodernist characteristics – such as its shift from transparent,realist representations of a common world, towards abstraction,obscurity, and the investigation of subjectivity and the uncon-scious 7 – it also shares many of those keyfeatures, in particular therevolutionary, counter-discursive and anti-institutional func-tions, by which Bürger defines the historical avant-garde.This overlap is itself significant. For the various contradictoryimpulses within expressionism illustrate that the avant-garde is amuch more ambiguous and heterogeneous phenomenon thanBürger – with his narrow focus on dada and surrealism – wouldsometimes have us believe. More typically the avant-garde servesas the political and revolutionary cutting-edge of the broadermovement of modernism, from which it frequently appears to betrying with difficulty to free itself. Modernism and the avant-garde often seem to be locked into a dialectical relationship inwhich the avant-garde questions the blind spots and unreflectedpresuppositions of modernism, while modernism itself reacts tothis critique, at least in its later stages, by attempting to take intoaccount its own poetics some of the spectacular failures andsuccesses of the historical avant-garde.The current debates on postmodernism and its relation to mod-ernism and the avant-garde have not only renewed interest inearly twentieth-century art then, but have provided both freshperspectives with which to re-read the texts of this period, as wellas new questions and theoretical strategies with which to ap-proach their characteristic problematics. The goal in re-readingexpressionism through Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde and inthe light of the recent discussion on the modern (and postmodern)period is thus twofold.Firstly, it is important to interrogate Bürger’s influential workand to develop his argumentation by testing it against a broaderrange of avant-garde and modernist phenomena than Bürger’sown examples providein order to discover the extent to which the 6 For example by David Bathrickand Andreas Huyssen, ‘‘Modernism and theExperience of Modernity,’’ Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism,ed. Huyssen and Bathrick(New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 8. 7 See Walter Sokel’s definition of expressionism in terms of modernism in his bookThe Writer in Extremis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 18. Introduction3 © Cambridge University Presswww.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press0521648696 - Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and theProblem of PostmodernityRichard MurphyExcerpt More information

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various methodological categories which make up his theory arecapable of distinguishing between the contemporaneous phe-nomena within the modernist period. For example, to what de-gree does expressionism fulfill the avant-garde’s role of produc-ing a fundamental re-thinking of the artist’s social practice,together with a full-scale interrogation of the social and institu-tional conditions of art? To what extent does it remain caughtwithin modernism’s predilection for aesthetic autonomy and itsdrive for purely technical and formal progress?Secondly, by re-reading the texts of expressionism in the con-text of some of the new questions which have been thrown uprecently by the postmodernism debate as well as by the relateddiscussion surrounding Bürger’s theoretical model, it is possibleto observe the extent of the ‘‘epistemic’’ or ‘‘paradigmatic’’ shiftwhich has taken place between the progressive movements of theearly twentieth century and the contemporary culture of post-modernity. Re-examining expressionism in this light forces us toreconsider both the degree of real innovation brought about bypostmodernism, as well as allowing us to appreciate the extent towhich the expressionist avant-garde preempts postmodernism indeconstructing and re-writing the established images and con-structions of the world – the anticipatory effect that JochenSchulte-Sasse has called a ‘‘postmodern transformation ofmodernism.’’ 8 In this respect my investigation into expressionism and itsrelationshiptomodernism and the avant-gardeis also intendedasa contribution towards the ongoingdebate on modernism and thepostmodern by undertaking precisely the kind of concrete analy-sis of individual texts that has become rather rare in the dis-cussion. It has become a pressing obligation to focus in detailagain upon some of the important literary texts which subtend thetheoretical categories employed in this discussion, since theirspecificity has frequently been lost from view at the level ofgeneralization on which much of the theoretical debate has beenconducted.German expressionism is itself notoriously difficult to define,and one hesitates even to use the term ‘‘movement’’ in connectionwith this multi-faceted phenomenon, given that term’s implica- 8 Jochen Schulte-Sasse, ‘‘Carl Einstein; or, the Postmodern Transformation ofModernism,’’ Modernity and the Text, ed. Huyssen and Bathrick. Theories of the avant-garde4 © Cambridge University Presswww.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press0521648696 - Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and theProblem of PostmodernityRichard MurphyExcerpt More information

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tion of a cooperative endeavor or single-minded tendency. Theexpressionist generation was such a broad and varied group ofwriters and artists, that it is unlikely to yield to any single defini-tion or generalization. Since conventional categorizations of suchliterary movements frequently have the tendency to obscure dif-ferences by reducing a diverse and varied phenomenon to theterms of a broad homogeneity, it would seem more appropriate todescribe the position of expressionism by locating it insteadthrough its relations to the reference-points of modernism and theavant-garde. The central principles and functions that these cate-gories embody would then figure as the points between which ismapped out the area occupied by the art of expressionism.Given that Theory of the Avant-Garde tends to confine the hetero-geneity of the avant-garde within certain narrow limits, expres-sionism as a diverse and multidisciplinary cultural event is per-haps the ideal example with which to test Bürger’s theses. At thesame time Bürger’s criteria concerning the avant-garde bring tothe existing scholarship on expressionism important alternativesto those traditional approaches to the movement which havefrequently obscured its radical and oppositional characteristics.Let us now examine in detail some of the central categories ofBürger’s model (in particular the notions of montageand aestheticautonomy), and propose certain revisions to Bürger’s theorywhich will be important in describing some of the essential fea-tures of German expressionism in the chapters ahead. Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde: ideology-critique,affirmative culture and the institution of art Previous studies of the avant-garde such as Matei Calinescu’sFaces of Modernity have frequently defined it merely as a later,more radical and more ‘‘advanced’’ phase of modernism, distin-guished by its ideological and overtly political orientation fromthe more formal, aesthetically purist and ‘‘subtly traditional’’character of mainstream modernism. 9 Bürger’s study is unique intrying to define the nature of the avant-garde not only by relatingit to the literary-historical context but with regard to certainchanges in the perception of the social functions of art. 9 Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (1977;Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 96, 149. Introduction5 © Cambridge University Presswww.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press0521648696 - Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and theProblem of PostmodernityRichard MurphyExcerpt More information

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Bürger sees the development of art within bourgeois society ascharacterized by its historical shift towards increasing aestheticautonomy, a condition he defines with Habermas as the ‘‘inde-pendence of works of art from extra-aesthetic uses.’’ 10 This pro-cess of liberating art from all practical demands external to itculminates in the movement of aestheticism or ‘‘l’art pour l’art.’’Nineteenth-century aestheticism figures as a radical attempt first-ly to turn art in upon itself, and secondly – as with modernism’scharacteristic interest in issues such as the poetics of silence andthe crisis of language – to concern itself largely with the mediumitself. It is consequently through the excesses of aestheticism, itsextremes of hermeticism and aesthetic self-centeredness, that ‘‘theother side of autonomy, art’s lackof social impact also becomesrecognizable.’’ 11 And it is in response to this recognition that the‘‘historical avant-garde’’ emerges as a movement defined by itsopposition to this shift towards hermeticism.To extend Bürger’s argument, one could say that it is not theemergence of the phenomenon of aestheticism in itself that sud-denly and miraculously reveals the practice of autonomy andwhich consequently calls down upon itself the wrath of the avant-garde. Art’s claim to autonomyhad existed in bourgeois society inGermany for example at least since Kant and Schiller. If we lookbeyond the narrow confines of the immanent theory of the devel-opment of art – from which Bürger uncharacteristically appears tobe arguing at this point – we can see that the crucial moment ofchange to which the avant-garde responds is not only the ex-tremism of the aestheticist movement and its characteristic ges-ture of turning its backon the real world. Rather, it is the fact thatthe aestheticist movement should take this course at this particu-lar historical juncture, in other words, at the beginning of twenti-eth-century ‘‘modernity,’’ and in a period of unprecedented andmomentous economic and technological revolution in society.Aestheticism’s characteristic reaction of retreating into hiberna-tion and hermeticism is all the more shocking since it contrastswiththe kind of artistic response one might have expected, namely 10 ‘‘(Die) Selbständigkeit der Kunstwerke gegenüber kunstexternen Verwen-dungsansprüchen.’’ Jürgen Habermas, ‘‘Bewußtmachende oder rettendeKritik,’’ Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt: Suhr-kamp, 1972). Quoted by Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, 46 note 13; Theory of theAvant-Garde, 110, note 13. I have used my own translation in this case. 11 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 22. Theories of the avant-garde6 © Cambridge University Presswww.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press0521648696 - Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and theProblem of PostmodernityRichard MurphyExcerpt More information

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a more socially oriented response in art, or at least the attempt toformulate these new socio-historical experiences in contemporaryaesthetic terms. The historical significance of aestheticism for theemergence of the avant-garde lies then in the conjunction ofhistorical factors: the extreme turmoil of contemporary societycombined with the crassness of aestheticism’s blankrejection ofany need toreact to it. It is this response that begins to raise doubtsconcerning the legitimacy of such autonomous art forms, and soultimately mobilizes the avant-garde.According to Bürger, it is the particular character of the avant-garde’s response to aestheticism that is important. For with thehistorical avant-garde movements the social sub-system of artenters a new stage of development. Dada, the most radical move-ment within the European avant-garde no longer criticizes theindividual aesthetic fashions and schools that preceded it, butcriticizes art as an institution: in other words with the historicalavant-garde art enters the stage of ‘‘self-criticism.’’ 12 In order to 12 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 22. Although dada’s ‘‘self-criticism’’ of theinstitution of art is indeed very powerful, Bürger is quite wrong in assumingthat dada is not equally concerned to attackits ‘‘rival’’ movements, including itsmost immediate predecessor, expressionism. Indeed, this onslaught on expres-sionism is an essential feature of much of the early writing of both the Zürichand Berlin phases of dada, and expressionist idealism forms a favorite target fordada’s familiar vitriolic attacks. The first dada manifesto (1918) for exampletakes as its starting point its own distance from expressionism’s ‘‘pretense ofintensification’’ (‘‘Vorwand der Verinnerlichung’’) which allegedly stifled anyprogressive tendencies and served merely to hide the expressionists’ ownbourgeois leanings. See Richard Huelsenbeck, ed., Dada. Eine literarischeDokumentation (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984), 31–33. Similarly, in Raoul Haus-mann’s text ‘‘The Return to Objectivity in Art’’ (‘‘Rückkehr zur Gegenständlich-keit in der Kunst’’) Expressionism is described as ‘‘the culture of hypocriticalstupidity ’’ (‘‘die Kultur der verlogener Dummheit,’’ Huelsenbeck, Dada, 115).Meanwhile Richard Huelsenbeck’s various ironic attacks in ‘‘En avant Dada’’(1920) describe expressionism’s critical response to modernity as merely ‘‘thatsentimental resistance to the times’’ (‘‘jener sentimentale Widerstand gegen dieZeit’’) and illustrate its alleged naivity – thereby tarring the entire movementwith the same brush – by citing Leonhard Frank’s ‘‘Der Mensch ist gut’’ (dada,118–119). In the context of our discussion it is interesting to note that dada’sproponents see themselves in an explicitly avant-garde role, ‘‘gathered togetherto provide propaganda for a form of art from which they lookforward to therealizationof new ideals’’ (‘‘zur Propagandaeiner Kunst gesammelt, von der siedie Verwirklichung neuer Ideale erwarten,’’ Dada, 120). Consequently, dadasees itself as having given up any remnants of the ‘‘l’art pour l’art Charakter’’and having changed its goal: ‘‘instead of continuing to create art, Dada hassought out an enemy . . . The movement, the stuggle was uppermost’’ (‘‘anstattweiterKunst zu machen, hat sich Dada einen Gegner gesucht . . . Die Bewegung,der Kampf wurde betont,’’ Dada, 120). Introduction7 © Cambridge University Presswww.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press0521648696 - Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and theProblem of PostmodernityRichard MurphyExcerpt More information

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appreciate the full significance for the avant-garde of this devel-opment towards ‘‘self-criticism’’ it is important to understandhere exactly what Bürger means by the term and how it relates toother analytical approaches in progressive art, in particular to‘‘ideology-critique.’’Bürger takes as the starting point for his discussion of ‘‘self-criticism’’ firstly Marx’s analysis of religion as ideology and of thetwofold character of such ideology; and secondly Marcuse’s ap-plication of this analysis to the field of art. 13 From Marx’s analysisBürger draws the following conclusions for his own model: 1. Religion is an illusion. Man projects into heaven what he would like tosee realized on earth. To the extent that man believes in God who is nomore than an objectification of human qualities, he succumbs to anillusion. 2. But religion also contains an element of truth. It is ‘‘an expres-sion of real wretchedness’’ (for the realization of humanity in heaven ismerely a creation of the mind and denounces the lackof real humanity inhuman society). And it is ‘‘a protest against real wretchedness’’ for evenin their alienated form, religious ideals are a standard of what ought tobe. (7) The social function of religion, like art, is therefore characterizedabove all by its twofold character, that is, by what we can call its‘‘duplicity’’: it permits the experience of an ‘‘illusory happiness’’but to the extent that it alleviates misery through illusion, it makesless pressing (and thus less likely) the possibility of any genuinechange leading to the establishment of ‘‘true happiness.’’Herbert Marcuse’s famous essay ‘‘On the AffirmativeCharacterof Culture’’ (1937) precedes Bürger both in adopting Marx’smethod of analyzing the duplicitous character of religion and inreapplying it to the similarly ambiguous ideological function ofart in society. 14 Marcuse maintains that, like religion, art has thepositive function of preserving society’s unfulfilled ideals and‘‘forgotten truths.’’ 15 It thus contains an important critical el-ement: it protests against the deficiencies of a reality in whichthese ideals have disappeared. But on the other hand, in as far asart serves to compensate in the realm of aesthetic illusion 13 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1970). Herbert Marcuse, ‘‘The Affirmative Character of Culture,’’Negations, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 88–133. 14 Marcuse, ‘‘The Affirmative Character of Culture,’’ 120–122. 15 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 11. Theories of the avant-garde8 © Cambridge University Presswww.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press0521648696 - Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and theProblem of PostmodernityRichard MurphyExcerpt More information

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(‘‘Schein’’) for these real-life deficiencies, it simultaneously subli-mates and defuses this protest. Paradoxically then in preservinglife’s unfulfilled ideals art may take on a quietist and ‘‘affirmativecharacter’’ in as far as it serves merely to stabilize and legitimizethat reality against which it protests.In both of these analytical models the practice of ‘‘ideology-critique’’ lays bare the grain of truth contained within the illusioncreated by religion and art, while simultaneously demonstratingthe ideological constraints on implementing this truth which areimposed by these institutions themselves. If the emergence of theavant-garde marks art’s entry into the ‘‘stage of self-criticism,’’ italso signifies the beginning of a similar form of ‘‘ideology-cri-tique’’ through which artisticpractice is turned against art itself asan institutional formation. It means that art’s critical power nolonger operates merely in an ‘‘immanent’’ fashion, that is, as thekind of criticism that remains enclosed within the social institu-tion (such as when one type of religion criticizes another) andwithin which it would consequently be blind to the institutionalrestraints operating upon it. In as far as it analyzes the overallfunctioning of the institution itself – and especially its social andideological effects rather than the individual elements of the sys-tem – self-criticism operates as a form of ideology-critique per-formed from within the limits of the institution, yet directedagainst its institutional functions. What this self-criticism means inpractical terms for the ‘‘historical’’ avant-garde of the early twen-tieth century is that, unlike previous avant-garde movements, itssubversive or revolutionary character is demonstrated by the waythat it turns its attention increasingly to the institutional frame-workthrough which art is produced and received, and to the‘‘dominant social discourses’’ which emerge in art through theseinstitutional mediations.As we have seen, the institutionalization of art reaches a crucialstage where those seemingly perennial conditions of art, namelyautonomy and the absence of social consequence, are valorized asgoalsin their own right, in particular bythe movementof aestheti-cism. The ‘‘historical’’ avant-garde’s critical response to this situ-ation takes two forms.Firstly, it deconstructs the claim that these ‘‘universal’’ prin-ciples of autonomy constitute the inevitable conditions of thepossibility of art. Similar to the way in which the avant-gardeIntroduction9 © Cambridge University Presswww.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press0521648696 - Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and theProblem of PostmodernityRichard MurphyExcerpt More information

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reveals that even realism or mimetic representation – longthought of as perennial and unchanging criteria of value in theAristotelian tradition – are actually merely a set of culturally-privileged codes which have simply attained a special institu-tional status, so it also exposes the notion of autonomy as anarbitrary value which is institutionally imposed upon art.Secondly, the self-critical response of the avant-garde leads toan awareness of the fact that with the progressive detachment ofthe ‘‘sub-system’’ of art from the practice of life – a separation thatis part of a more general process of what Max Weber calls thedifferentiation or ‘‘rationalization’’ in modern society – art’s du-plicitous or ‘‘affirmative’’ function is reinforced. Although auton-omy offers a degree of independence and critical distance fromsociety, art simultaneously suffers from this isolation. For anysocial or political content is instantly neutralized when the workof art is received as a purely ‘‘imaginative’’ product, an aestheticillusion that need not be taken seriously.In connection with this self-critical impulse of the avant-gardethe concept of the ‘‘institution of art’’ becomes one of the keynotions used by Bürger to analyze the social administration of theaesthetic sphere. He uses this term torefer both to the ‘‘productiveand distributive apparatus’’ of art but also more particularly tothe ‘‘ideas about art that prevail at a given time and that deter-mine the reception of works.’’ 16 Bürger further defines the institu-tion of art in a later article as that set of social conditions whichdetermine the particular functions of art in a given historicalperiod, and he emphasizes further that although alternative con-ceptions of art may exist, the institution of art at any given time isalways predisposed towards the dominance of one conception ofart in particular. 17 Thus, the term describes both the attitudestaken up towards art in society as well as the ideological andinstitutional limitations imposed upon art’s possible effects.The importance of the institution of art may be measured by thevehemence of the avant-garde’s attacks upon it. These attacks alsoillustrate the degree to which the more progressive artists and 16 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 22. 17 Peter Bürger, ‘‘Institution Kunst als literatursoziologische Kategorie. Skizzeeine Theorie des historischen Wandels der gesellschaftlichen Funktion derLiteratur,’’ Vermittlung – Rezeption – Funktion (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979),173–174; 177. Theories of the avant-garde10 © Cambridge University Presswww.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press0521648696 - Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and theProblem of PostmodernityRichard MurphyExcerpt More information

La querelle de l'art contemporain 

Auteur : Marc Jimenez 

Adhérent : Gallimard 

Date de parution : 10/03/2005 

EAN : 9782070426416

Format : 18 x 11

Thématique : Autres - Autres

Adhérent : Gallimard

Opération : E-catalogue en sciences humaines et sociales

Présentation Electre 

Depuis une dizaine d'années, des débats opposent les défenseurs et les détracteurs de la création artistique actuelle. Est-il possible de redéfinir les conditions d'exercice du jugement esthétique vis-à-vis des oeuvres contemporaines ? A supposer même que celles-ci soient n'importe quoi, peut-on tenir sur elles un discours argumenté et critique ?

Présentation de l'éditeur 

La querelle de l'art contemporain

Controverses, polémiques, voire débats virulents opposent les défenseurs et les détracteurs de la création artistique d'aujourd'hui.

S'interroger sur les normes d'évaluation et d'appréciation esthétiques qui permettent de porter un jugement sur les oeuvres d'art est une question pertinente ; elle rejoint les réactions du grand public, souvent perplexe et désorienté devant des oeuvres qu'il ne comprend pas.

La modernité artistique du XXe siècle s'est chargée de disqualifier les catégories esthétiques traditionnelles. La question posée par l'art depuis une trentaine d'années est celle de l'inadéquation des concepts - art, oeuvre, artiste, etc. - à des réalités qui, apparemment, ne leur correspondent plus. Or, paradoxalement, c'est sur le thème de la décadence de l'art contemporain que se centre la polémique, en France comme en Europe, depuis des années.

Est-il possible de redéfinir les conditions d'exercice du jugement esthétique vis-à-vis des oeuvres contemporaines ? À supposer même que celles-ci soient « n'importe quoi », peut-on tenir sur elles un discours argumenté et critique ?

Jean-Philippe Domecq, Artistes sans art ? La Querelle de l’art contemporain : le titre de l’ouvrage est trompeur (1) ; son sujet n’est pas la controverse qui se développa enFrance tout au long des années 1990 sous le nom de “crise de l’art contemporain” (2) et dont l’historique reste à faire, mais un essaide réponse à la question posée par Olivier Mongin dans le n°173 de la revue Esprit, en juillet-août 1991: “Y a-t-il encore des critèresd’appréciation esthétique ?”, qui lança un débat laissé depuis en suspens. Il est vrai que les auteurs sollicités (Jean Molino, Jean-Philippe Domecq, Marc Le Bot) avaient répondu d’avance en arguant rageusement de la disparition pure et simple de tout critèreet de toute norme pour passer au plus vite à la mise en accusation d’un “art contemporain” abscons, laid, vide, bête, vulgaire,coupé du public, jouet du marché et des institutions, intoxiqué par une critique “aux ordres” et traité globalement : d’“hallucina-tion collective” (Domecq), de manifestation du “n’importe quoi” (Molino), de souk (Domecq), d’imposture à réduire sans tarder(Le Bot), tantôt frappé de nullité aseptique (Baudrillard), tantôt assimilé à de la merde (Domecq, Clair), avant de réclamer, séancetenante, sa mise à mort.Querelle paradoxale, “intempestive et décalée, en retard sur la production esthétique d’une époque”, note avec raison MarcJimenez, qui survient bien après la dissolution du concept classique d’art et la généralisation des arts plastiques et de leurconception élargie à des modes de création sans plus de rapport avec les anciennes catégories de l’œuvre d’art ; querelle d’au-teurs, d’ailleurs peu concernés par des modes d’expression qu’ils méconnaissent et détestent (l’art international des années1980 et 1990 est quasiment absent de leur dispute) ; et, surtout, ce qui ne manque pas de surprendre, querelle à laquelle niEsprit, ni Le Figaro, ni Télérama, entre 1991 et 1997, n’invitent les artistes – à l’exception de Krisis, revue de la “nouvelle” extrêmedroite, qui convia Ben.Cette absence délibérée laisse planer sur un débat strictement hexagonal un doute sérieux. Et si celui-ci ne concernait pasles artistes, occupés ailleurs, et pas plus les critiques des nouvelles générations – que le “front anti-art contemporain” metdans le même sac-poubelle – pour se limiter, note Jimenez, à un “huis clos entre initiés” ? Ce qui est encore faire grand casd’auteurs bien peu “initiés” dont l’expérience esthétique, déclare l’un d’eux (Domecq) s’est arrêtée à Giacometti et MaxErnst.Au reste, la critique faite à la critique n’est pas nouvelle. Son rôle, lit-on, ne serait plus d’apprécier la qualité des œuvres etde contribuer à la formation du jugement, mais d’assurer la promotion de produits artistiques sans autre valeur que cellequ’elle leur affecte pour d’obscures raisons, avec la complicité passive du monde de l’art. Il n’est pas sûr, objectera-t-on, queles deux attitudes puissent être si nettement distinguées et qu’on ait raison de dénoncer comme une évidence une “critiquedans l’impasse”, sous le prétexte qu’elle aurait renoncé à exercer sa faculté de juger d’après des critères immuables et univer-sels devenus obsolètes. Ou bien encore, au motif de “l’écart croissant, relevé dès les années 1960, par Jürgen Habermas, entre,d’une part, les minorités productives et critiques, constituées par les spécialistes et les amateurs compétents […], et d’autre part legrand public des médias” (3) .A rebours de ces fausses pistes, c’est tout l’intérêt de l’ouvrage de Marc Jimenez que de présenter, après une rapide mise enperspective historique des différents mouvements artistiques de l’art des années 1960 à aujourd’hui (historicité fâcheusementabsente de la “querelle”), les principaux courants de la pensée esthétique du second XX e siècle. Avec Clement Greenberg etTheodor Adorno, Marc Jimenez (qui joua un rôle majeur dans la diffusion en France de ce dernier) dessine la fin du grand récit“d’une construction linéaire, continue et progressiste de la modernité” fondée sur le principe d’autonomie du champ artistique. Lesnouveaux modèles d’interprétation – principalement liés au “monde de l’art” et à ses différents acteurs, en l’absence de toute ana-lyse du contexte social – que développent les “esthétiques de la pluralité et de la diversité” de la philosophie analytique anglo-saxonne, introduite en France dans les années de notre “querelle”, apportent-elles une réponse satisfaisante à la question des cri-tères d’appréciation esthétique? Les paradigmes du pluralisme culturel, de l’hétérogénéité des goûts, de l’extrême diversificationdes pratiques artistiques, symptômes de l’individualisme contemporain, ou les critères de cohérence, de pertinence, de réussiteesthétique et de singularité avancés par Nelson Goodman, Arthur Danto ou George Dickie sont-ils assez opérants pour juger desœuvres? Pour ne pas jouer au “jeu institutionnel et promotionnel du système culturel”qu’elle accompagne de fait, la théorie de l’art,répond Marc Jimenez, doit créer les conditions d’une “interprétation toujours renouvelée et d’un dialogue permanent et inachevé avecautrui pour autant que, face à l’art, aussi contemporain et actuel qu’il soit, note Luigi Pareyson, ‘on se trouve devant une chose et on ydécouvre un monde’” (4) .De cette médiation heureuse entre œuvres et spectateurs, de ce gai savoir de l’art, qui mêlerait attention aux œuvres,mémoire historique, transmission des savoirs et travail critique, les articles rassemblés sous le titre Artistes sans art ?, de Jean-Philippe Domecq, offrent le parfait contre-exemple. Leur relecture, dix ans après la première édition, reste aussi éprouvante (5) .On n’y apprend rien sur les œuvres, rien sur les artistes, rien sur les nouvelles approches critiques, rien sur les nouvellesformes de l’art. Page après page, Domecq déverse dans le style du brûlot sa “rhétorique de l’exécration” (6) contre quelques bêtesnoires, tels Buren, Warhol, Dubuffet, Stella, Ryman, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, que le distingué critique, bien “seul à ne pas tomberdans le panneau publicitaire”, se propose, en émule de Camille Mauclair, de renvoyer à leur ténèbres extérieures, hors du “grand

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art” et de son “intériorité” perdue. Détestation trempée dans le brouet du ressentiment et de la vieille impuissance “à regarder,à admirer, à respecter, à aimer”. Critères d’appréciation esthétique toujours pertinents. X AVIER G IRARD (1) Une longue note argumentée en retrace les principaux épisodes (pp. 340-358). (Toutes les notes sont de l’auteur.)(2) Titre du dossier paru dans le n° 179 de la revue Esprit, février 1992, et du livre d’Yves Michaud, PUF, 1997(3) Cité par Marc Jimenez, p. 144.(4) Luigi Pareyson, Conversations sur l’esthétique, Gallimard, 1992.(5) Et plus encore Misère de l’art, sous-titré pompeusement : Essai sur le dernier demi-siècle de création, Calmann-Lévy, 1999.(6) Analysé par Georges Didi-Huberman dans une lecture faite à la Galerie du Jeu de paume le 1 er janvier 1993 et publiée dans L’Artcontemporain en question, Ed. Galerie nationale du Jeu de paume ; rééditée par la revue Lignes (n° 22, juin 1994) sous le titre “D’unressentiment en mal d’esthétique” et augmentée d’un post-scriptum : “Du ressentiment à la Kunstpolitik”.

What Art Is 

Anti-Art Is Not Art

by Michelle Marder Kamhi

The recent controversy provoked by the Jewish Museum's exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art is only the latest--and undoubtedly not the last--skirmish in a decades-long war between the public and the contemporary artworld. As in previous cases, the media have mistakenly attributed the conflict to the offensive content of the works. The fundamental problem, I maintain, is the anti-art tradition to which such work belongs.

In one of the disputed pieces, the purported artist inserted an image of himself, holding a Diet Coke, into a famous photograph of concentration camp inmates. In its press release, the museum claims that such work employs "the challenging language of conceptual art" to lead us "to question how images shape our perception of evil today." Outraged members of the public charge that images employing such banal references to commercial culture have the effect of trivializing the enormity of the Holocaust.

An underlying question that ought to be seriously debated, however, is the one alluded to by an elderly protester outside the Jewish Museum. He carried a sign that stated "This is not art."

For today's artworld, of course, the question "but is it art?"--so frequently raised by the public with regard to contemporary art--can never be answered in the negative. Anything made by anyone claiming to be an artist is, ipso facto, art. Anything, and anyone. That is the bottom line of what philosophers have dubbed the "institutional theory." But the ordinary person senses there is more to art than simply inserting oneself into a documentary photograph. Unlike the artworld, John and Jane Q. Public have continued to doubt the legitimacy of conceptual art--the category to which most of the "controversial art" of recent years belongs.

Conceptual art has been defined as "various forms of art in which the idea for a work is considered more important than the finished product, if any." If Michelangelo were a conceptual artist working today, he wouldn't have to labor for years to paint the Sistine ceiling, he could simply enlarge photographs of other artists' work or of scenes from biblical films and make a grand collage. Indeed, we now have a whole generation of "visual artists" who can neither paint nor sculpt.

Consider Damien Hirst--one of the controversial "young British artists" whose work was featured in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition "Sensation" two years ago. Hirst recently confided in an interview with Charlie Rose that, while he would really like to be a painter and represent the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface, he had "never really done that." As to why he hadn't done so, he frankly admitted: "I tried it and I couldn't do it." Faced with the void of a blank canvas, as he further explained: "I don't know what the hell to do."

So, like other conceptual "installation artists," Hirst has resorted to appropriating real objects and arranging them for display, rather than imaginatively re-creating reality through painted or sculptured forms. The result is controversial pieces such as his infamous dead shark preserved in a vat of formaldehyde, pretentiously entitled "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living."

"Conceptual art" in its various guises originated in the 1960s, as a reaction against Abstract Expressionist painting, and against critics who emphasized the formal qualities of visual art without regard to its content or meaning. Like the influential "readymades" of Marcel Duchamp, it began as a rejection of the contemporary artworld. It was, essentially, an anti-art movement. One of its earliest theorists even suggested that it might be better to refer to such work by some other term than "art" and to recognize it "as an independent, new activity, irrelevant to art."[*]

Today's practitioners of conceptual art have turned their attention to social and political concerns. But their installations are based on forms and methods derived from an anti-art impulse. Such works aren't art today anymore than they were at their origin. In treating them as art, museum professionals and the press endow them with unmerited value and prestige.

Running concurrently with the Mirroring Evil show at the Jewish Museum is another on the theme of the Holocaust: An Artist's Response to Evil: "We Are Not the Last," by Zoran Music--an exhibition of paintings by a Slovenian-born painter who is a Dachau survivor. Unlike the works of conceptual art on the floor below, Music's paintings do not trivialize the event by relying on simple-minded appropriations from commercial culture to convey their meaning.

Instead Music did what real artists have always done (for background, see the museum's press release). Through a visual transformation of what he had witnessed, he created images that express something important and deeply felt about the human condition--in this case, the unspeakable horror of the Nazi death camps and the testimony they bear to the barbaric cruelty some members of the human race are capable of inflicting on their fellow men.

Museum officials report that no one has publicly objected to these images. Clearly, the medium contributes largely to the message.

An “anti-art” movement, Neo-dada asked the question “What is art?”  It was influenced by the Dada movement in NYC, especially the ready-mades of Duchamp, who returned to the US and inspired younger artists in the 1960’s.	Soft Toilet, Oldenburg
Noted Neo-dadaists:  Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Johns

Debate sobre a arte contemporânea

Message de BEN VAUTIER reçu le 21/08/98

 

La culture sert de miroir au pouvoir narcissique dominant.
Parfois je suis optimiste et je pense l'art est un cri de vérité.
l'art est une rencontre inoubliable l'art nous prend à la gorge l'art nous
fait rire aux larmes
l'art nous apporte ce qui nous manquait.
le. l'art nous fait nous découvrir nous-mêmes l'art rend à chacun
l'art c'est la découverte de l'autre l'art nous coupe le souf
f ses racines
Mais si, comme Duchamp l'a dit, « c'est le regardeur qui fait le tableau »
re et peut aussi, comme le train qu'on ne vo
la balle est dans votre camp à vous de jouer
Attention une culture peut en cacher une au
tit pas arriver, en tuer une autre.
ma position sur la culture 
et je pense : 
Parfois je suis pessimiste
 à la télé la culture sert de prétexte à envahi
la culture c'est pour impressionner les pauvres
la culture sert à avoir l'air intelligent quand on pass
er les autres peuples (pour leur
apporter la culture) 
ne histoire de « tour operator » pour vous faire acheter des cartes p
la culture n'est qu'
uostales 
u et du vrai la culture vous élève au rang d'oies qu'on gave de cultu
la culture permet d'avoir bonne conscience et justifie l'impérialisme la culture c'est l'ethnocentrisme des peuples qui croient avoir le monopole du be
are la culture culpabilise (dans un musée vous faites le silence, pas dans un bar) la culture est un exercice d'égoïstes jaloux les uns des autres 
culture c'est le cadeau bonux de la société de consommation la culture doit
la culture permet à ceux qui savent de faire honte à ceux qui ne savent pas la culture c'est la boursouflure qui accompagne le bruit des bottes la
 vous faire croire que l'artiste est un être supérieur la culture des uns sert à étouffer la culture des autres.  A. ART (AVANT GARDE DES ETHNIES MINORITAIRES) Trois remarques : 
ue certains sont artistiquement en retard sur d'autres est faux tou
1. tous les peuples et cultures du monde, qu'ils soient Aborigènes, Bantous, Anglo-Saxons, Français ou autres, ayant tous, derrière eux, le même nombre d'années passées décréter
qs sont contemporains 2. c'est la réalité des rapports de forces entre ethnies qui établit une différence hiérarchique entre elles, cherchant à réduire la modernité à la production de 5 ou 6 d'entre elles, désirant leur faire croire qu'elles 
 évitent de chercher à imposer
sont en avance sur les autres. 3. chaque culture représente à travers sa langue une vision différente d'un monde artistiquement non hiérarchisable. Il est important que tous les peuples, toutes les cultures, soient maîtres de leur destinée e
t leur culture à d'autres (ce qui n'exclut pas l'échange) ceci étant, il faut éviter que l'artiste devienne une vache à lait culturelle manipulée par une propagande institutionnelle et ethnocentrique. 
e force de l'art mondial actuel n'accepte pas la modernité des peuples mi
Ce droit heurte bien sûr le credo de l'intangibilité des frontières, cher aux impérialistes, entre autres à Mitterrand et à Philippo Gonzalès.  P. PEINTURE ET ETHNISME (1985) La situation de rapports
dnoritaires, la notion de modernité a été structurée de telle façon qu'elle élimine toute modernité des peuples dominés en dévalorisant leurs *uvres qu'elle classe dans la catégorie de l'art dit primitif ou folklorique. Ce qui est injuste car je ne vois pas pourquoi un 
 la situation mondiale de l'art moderne est le reflet des rapports de forc
Français travaillant en 1985 ferait de l'avant-garde alors qu'un Meo ou un Kurde travaillant en 1985 ferait de l'art primitif. Bref, le domaine de l'art moderne reflète la situation mondiale des rapports de force entre ethnies.  A. ART ET RAPPORTS DE FORCE Actuellement
,e entre nations et ethnies. Quatre ou cinq ethnies se partagent le marché artistique dit d'avant-garde, obligeant les créateurs des autres ethnies ou bien à être considérés comme des produits folkloriques inintéressants ou bien à s'intégrer dans le champ unidirectionnel Matisse-Duchamp-Malévitch. Un exemple frappant : le Canada, 
nt » envers les artistes d'avant-garde des cultures du tiers monde consis
d'où le marché de l'art refuse de reconnaître les sculpteurs inuits comme d'avant-garde, bien que les recherches formelles de ces artistes soient particulièrement novatrices. D'autres exemples : la peinture africaine, l'art aborigène, etc.  A. ART DU TIERS MONDE ET DES PEUPLES PRIMITIFS (1979) Le comble de l'attitude de « l'Occid
ete, d'une part, à leur refuser le statut de modernité, reléguant leur art contemporain dans les musées anthropologiques et, d'autre part, à piller cette même contemporanéité (80 % de l'art africain se trouve en Europe et aux Etats-Unis). Quelles que soient les circonstances, c'est du vol ! Il faudrait que des accords internationaux réglementent le retour des 
u XVIIIe siècle.  A. ART : CREATION ET AVANT-GARDE (1986) J'ai écrit derniè
*uvres d'art que les Occidentaux ont prises aux cultures du tiers monde. On stipulerait le retour pur et simple de ces *uvres d'art dans le cadre d'un accord mutuel avec la possibilité d'échanges. Par exemple, si le Louvre désire garder une salle d'art égyptien, il faudra que le musée du Caire puisse recevoir, en échange, une salle équivalente d'art français
drement que la prochaine révolution en art serait l'ethnisme. C'est-à-dire que, dans les dix prochaines années, les artistes ne se battront plus pour pénétrer dans une histoire de l'art unidirectionnelle dans laquelle Duchamp triomphe de Matisse et Matisse de Kandinsky, mais une histoire de l'art multidirectionnelle. La créativité de l'artiste sera non seulement l'affirmation de sa singularité mais aussi la 
'agira d'un festival des différences, et non de l'uniformisation. Il en
volonté d'approfondir son identité ethnique. Pour donner un exemple, un artiste noir ne cherchera pas à imposer une personnalité à l'occidentale, mais être original à partir de sa négritude, de son ethnie.  A. ART UNIVERSEL Il est dérisoire d'imaginer une fête universelle, la même pour tous. La fête corse n'est pas la fête catalane ou bantoue. Organisons un « festival de fêtes », et nous constaterons qu'il
s va de même pour tous les autres arts, peinture, cuisine, musique, etc., qui ne sont universels que par et dans leurs différences.  A. ASSIMILATION Il y a assimilation quand un peuple perd sa langue et sa culture au profit d'un autre. En réalité, l'assimilation d'un peuple par un autre s'accompagne toujours d'une oppression visant à liquider la culture de l'ethnie assujettie. Oppression qui prendra, selon les régimes, des visages 
éventuellement d'une troisième guerre mondiale. Combattre le nationalisme
différents. Par exemple, on ignorera sciemment son existence sur tous les plans (juridique, administratif). Quant à sa langue, elle sera considérée comme un patois. L'ethnie elle-même sera rebaptisée ; exemple : les Kurdes deviendront-ils des « Trucs montagnards ».  A. AUTODETERMINATION Nous assistons aujourd'hui à la remontée des nationalismes, cause principale des deux dernières guerres et cause de 99 % des conflits régionaux et
 en voulant gommer et nier l'existence des nations et des peuples est une erreur c'est comme si on cherchait à combattre les maladies sans reconnaître l'existence des organes : l'estomac, les reins, le foie. Pour combattre le nationalisme pervers, celui qui se transforme en impérialisme, il faut accepter le droit des peuples à l'autodétermination à partir de la définition qu'il y a peuple là où il y a communauté linguistique et culturelle. 
S AUTOUR DE L'ART  A. ART, CREATION ET ETHNIE L'artiste croit souvent êtr
Je suis pour l'art contemporain lorsqu'il cherche, d'une part, à dépasser Duchamp et, d'autre part, quand il veut s'ouvrir au monde et à toutes ses cultures. Pour dépasser Duchamp, il faut être prêt à remettre l'art en question, à devenir le lieu et l'espace de sa propre interrogation, c'est-à-dire à chercher les limites de l'art. L'avant-garde est aujourd'hui de remettre l'avant-garde en question en tant qu'avant-garde.  MES AUTRES POSITIO
Ne seul au monde. Seul à créer, seul face aux autres. Cela est faux. « L'artiste sert à donner un sens plus pur aux mots et aux images de sa tribu » (Albert Camus). L'art c'est l'acceptation des différences, c'est l'opéra italien, c'est Wagner, ce sont les chants Maoris, c'est une berceuse corse. Ce qui signifie que, si l'artiste n'existe pas avec ce qui compose son identité, c'est-à-dire la mémoire de son groupe, l'art n'existe pas non plus. Si Baudelaire n'avait pas été français ni Dante italien, il n'y 
nterdite par Franco, c'est son « style » qu'il défend. Quand Nîmes vibre d
aurait eu ni Dante ni Baudelaire car sans leur langue il n'y a nulle place pour leur génie créatif.  A. ART ET STYLE DES PEUPLES Aucune création n'est spontanée, on ne crée pas à partir de rien. Le style, c'est la manière d'un peuple de se répéter sur le plan formel. Cette répétition a pour but d'affirmer, de souligner et de garder en mémoire la différence. Elle passe par la langue, la musique, les formes (architecturales, etc.), la cuisine, ainsi que la peinture. Quand le peuple catalan danse la sardane
ians ses arènes pour l'art tauromachique, c'est également un peuple qui souligne sa différence. En musique, on admet très vite l'évidence : chaque peuple a ses rythmes et son tempo. En peinture, c'est plus difficile à appréhender car l'avant-garde (objet de consommation des riches) baigne dans le cosmopolitisme. Néanmoins, même dans une telle situation, les différences qu'on observe entre artistes portent la marque des identités culturelles. Ainsi, Tapiès et Miro, qui, pendant longtemps, ont fait figures de représentants d'une Ecole de Paris, revendiquent 
es valeurs n'apparaissent pas il y
aujourd'hui leur identité catalane.  L'AVANT GARDE POUR OU CONTRE A. Aujourd'hui, sur la scène culturelle, nous observons plusieurs critiques envers l'art contemporain et ces critiques ne sont pas toutes de même nature. Faire l'amalgame est une erreur. Il y a l'attaque poujadiste que l'on peut ramener à l'argumentation simple « mon fils peut faire ça, donc ce n'est pas de l'art, donc c'est laid » il récuse la valeur de création. Il y a l'attaque conservatrice élitiste : le beau existe, il est contenu dans certaines valeurs esthétiques et morales et là où
ca laideur qu'il faut combattre. Il y a enfin l'attaque de l'art contemporain envers lui-même, l'art contemporain ne remplit plus sa fonction d'étonnement et d'apport se cantonnant dans la variation de ce qui a déjà existé. L'art contemporain est devenu une question de connaissances plutôt qu'une question de création. Il faut connaître pour comprendre. Indiscutablement Art Press, en ne simplifiant pas le débat et en ne se mettant pas un peu plus à la portée de celui qui a envie de découvrir l'art contemporain, a aidé à donner l'image, peut-être fausse, que l'art contemporain était une 
l n'y a pas de peuple sans sa langue, pa
question de spécialistes et d'érudition. Entre ces trois critiques, ma propre position la voici : Je suis pour un art contemporain qui véhicule du nouveau car la recherche du nouveau est essentielle au changement et donc pour la survie de toute communauté Je suis contre l'art contemporain lorsque ce nouveau n'est plus novateur mais qu'il devient une variation du Ready Made de Marchel Duchamp. Je suis contre l'art contemporain quand il se réduit aux produits d'un club de quatre ou cinq cultures dominantes éliminant de la contemporanéité les 4 000 autres cultures qui habitent le monde.
Is de langue sans culture, pas de culture sans son avant-garde, c'est-à-dire son nouveau.  

BEN VAUTIER

Polémicas sobre a arte moderna e arte contemporânea

Les polémiques à propos de l'art moderne et de l'art contemporain, en France, ne sont pas nouvelles. Elles opposent, le plus souvent, les tenants de la tradition esthétique aux partisans de l'innovation artistique. Elles remontent, pour le moins, au XIXe siécle, où l'académisation de la peinture néo-classique, art officiel, fut combattue par Gustave COURBET, Edouard MANET, les peintres impressionnistes, etc. Elles se sont poursuivies pendant tout le 20e siécle, où se sont bousculés mouvements, écoles et doctrines artistiques: fauvisme, cubisme, surréalisme, expressionnisme, abstractions, figurations et réalismes divers, hyperréalisme, art brut, cinétique, optique, conceptuel, minimal, sociologique, etc. La phase actuelle de ces polémiques a débuté, on peut le penser, avec la publication dans la revue Le Débat, en mars 1981, d'un article de Claude LEVI-STRAUSS, Le métier perdu, dans lequel le célébre anthropologue se lamentait de l'état de déviation dans lequel, selon lui, se trouvait alors la peinture et le métier du peintre. En octobre de la même année la revue Critique publiait un article de Jürgen HABERMAS, La modernité, un projet inachevé. Le Débat, encore, consacrait un dossier àModernes et Post- modernes, en septembre 1982. En 1983, paraissaient le livre de Jean CLAIR,Considération sur l'état des beaux-arts. Critique de la modernité, autre jalon important, et celui de Gilles LIPOVETSKY, L'ére du vide, essais sur l'individualisme contemporain. La controverse fut relancée et prit une nouvelle tournure en 1991 lorsque la revue Esprit publia un premier dossier attaquant violement l'art contemporain et quelques unes de ses figures emblématiques, Marcel DUCHAMP, Andy WARHOL, Daniel BUREN, etc. Par ailleurs, vers le milieu de la décennie 1980, le débat à commencé a se déployer dans ses véritables dimensions, débordant le terrain de l'esthétique et des goûts artistiques pour s'inscrire dans celui, plus essentiel, de l'anthropologie, du culturel, du politique. En ont témoigné, notamment, la publication, en 1984, du livre de Jean-Paul ARON,Les Modernes, de celui d'Alain FINKIELKRAUT, La défaite de la pensée (1987), et, quelques années plus tard, de L'Etat culturel, essai sur une religion moderne de Marc FUMAROLI, (1991). A cette turbulence éditoriale, il faut joindre, à partir de l'ouverture du Centre Georges Pompidou, en 1977, le fort accroissement des expositions organisées par les institutions muséales et les structures mises en place et soutenues financiérement par le ministére de la Culture et/ou les collectivités locales, en particulier, à partir de 1982, les FRAC (Fonds régionaux d'art contemporain) et les Centres d'art contemporain. Le commerce de l'art pendant ces quelques années fut florissant et les galeries privées se multipliérent. Jusqu'à la sévére crise du marché de l'art au tournant des années 1980-1990. Crise non encore résorbée en 1998.

Dans les méandres et les excés de la polémique, on a oublié qu'elle était constituée d'une (déjà longue) histoire et qu'elle dépassait (toujours) son objet et ses propos apparents, précisément. Il nous a semblé que ces dimensions devaient être rappelées et réintroduites dans la discussion qui, sans elles, devient opaque, incompréhensible, élitaire. C'est ce qui nous a conduit à créer la base de données qu'on trouvera dans ces pages Web et qui ont pour ambition de contextualiser la polémique, de lui restituer ses références. Cette base de données a été conçue comme un instrument d'information à destination d'un large public intéressé par l'art contemporain et les questions soulevées dans le cours de la polémique. Aux "professionnels", cet outil devrait apporter des éléments documentaires qui, à notre connaissance, n'existent pas sur l'Internet.

Nous avons choisi de structurer cette base de données sous la forme d'une chronologie commentée, forme qui s'adapte bien à l'outil Internet et aux ressources multimédia et hypertextuelles du Web. Cette chronologie est construite sur 3 classes d'orientation et de documentation : une liste bibliographique (dans laquelle on comprend le matériel écrit paraissant dans la presse, les magazines, les revues), une liste d'expositions, une liste d'événements rattachés, directement ou non, à l'art contemporain. Cette base de données, dans l'état actuel (mars 1998) est incompléte et restera longtemps en travaux, à la fois pour des raisons matérielles de mise en ligne et de collecte des informations. Certaines années de la chronologie sont largement documentées, d'autres le sont sensiblement moins : ce déficit sera progressivement comblé dans les mois...et les années à venir.

A Crise da arte contemporânea

Yves MICHAUD, La Crise de l'art contemporain. 1997 PUF coll. Intervention philosophique

Notes : [Depuis 1991, une polémique fait rage sur l'art contemporain. Les accusateurs s'en prennent aux impostures ou aux hermétismes des héritiers de Duchamp et de Warhol. Leurs adversaires défendent les valeurs d'une avant-garde vieille de 150 ans. Cette crise est l'indice d'un malaise irrémédiable touchant le rôle de l'art dans nos sociétés. Nous vivons la fin de l'utopie de l'art, c'est-à-dire la fin d'une croyance dans les pouvoirs de critique, de transfiguration et surtout de commmunication de l'art. Quand la culture devient un monde séparé destiné au loisir, quand les valeurs de la démocratie remettent en cause la déférence forcée du public pour les goûts de l'élite, quand il ne peut plus y avoir ni prophètes ni mages, il reste la comédie de l'avant-gardisme d'Etat s'efforçant en vain de produire administrativement du sens. Cela n'empêchera pas les artistes, ceux qui sont "bons-qu'à ça" (Beckett) de faire ce qu'ils ne peuvent s'empêcher de faire. L'art est en crise? Adieu les gestionnaires des avant-gardes! Place, de nouveau, aux artistes! Yves MICHAUD. 4e de couverture]

Marcel Duchamp: the artist stripped bare (1)

Marcel Duchamp: the artist stripped bare

 

Syllabus: 

This seminar will introduce the art and ideas of Marcel Duchamp, focusing in particular on the reception of the artist’s work, along with its theoretical implications and historical consequences. The course will be broken down into four core components: 

 

1. “From Impressionism to the Readymade, 1902-1913” – Weeks 1-3

 

This section will focus on Duchamp’s transit through Monet, Cézanne, Symbolism, and Cubism in his early paintings, leading up to the scandal of the Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2, at the Armory Show of 1913. It will examine Duchamp’s artistic development, beginning with his newspaper caricatures, the first exhibition of his paintings in the Salon des Independents in 1909, and his working relationship with his brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon at Puteaux around 1910. We will also look at Duchamp’s friendships with such luminaries of the Parisian art world as Apollinaire and Picabia, with whom he attended a performance of Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique in 1912. This was a seminal year in the artist’s life, in which he would come to grips with the structural and spatial implications of Cubism. The rejection of the Nude Descending by the Salon Cubists Gleizes and Metzinger in that year would lead to the artist’s break with the Puteaux Circle and his abandonment of painting in favor of the readymade. 

 

2. “Through the Large Glass, 1913-1926” – Weeks 4-8

 

This section will introduce the The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) through Duchamp’s notes and related paintings. It will explore the critical reception and hermeneutics of the work, including the impact of Jarry and Roussel, the erotic implications of the human-machine analogy, the role of Science and the Fourth Dimension, and the “readymade talk” of the Glass. Duchamp’s move to the United States in 1915 and his subsequent friendships with Louise and Walter Arensberg, Katherine Dreier, Man Ray, Joseph Stella, the Stettheimer sisters, and other artists, writers, and musicians associated with New York Dada will also be addressed here. Another aspect will be the artist’s adoption of a female alter-ego, Rrose Selavy. Finally, the reception of the artist’s readymades, theFountain scandal, and the artist’s abandonment of painting in 1923 will be examined – notion of “retinal” painting, before ending with the first public exhibition of the Large Glass at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, after which the work was smashed in transit to Katherine Dreier’s house.

 

 

 

3. “Duchamp and Surrealism, 1927-1945” – Weeks 9-10

 

This section will look at Duchamp’s complicated relationship with the Surrealist movement, especially his role as an installation designer and “generator-arbitrator” of group exhibitions in both Europe and the United States. The artist’s friendships with Breton, Ernst, Matta, Donati, and other members of the group will be discussed, especially during the Second World War years, when many Surrealist artists and writers found themselves in New York. Another aspect will be Duchamp’s refusal to condemn former Surrealists and close friends Dali and De Chirico, who he publicly defended against Breton’s wishes. Important works from this period include the Boite-en-valise, which will be scrutinized in minute detail, along with the artist’s increasing interest in chess. Other topics will include Duchamp’s experiments with film and optics. 

4. “Etant Donnes and the Reception of Marcel Duchamp, 1946-1968” – Weeks 11-12

 

The irony of the last two decades, when the artist was discovered and revered by a generation of American and European artists, including Johns, Rauschenberg, Cage, Hamilton, Warhol, Broodthaers, Nauman, and Kaprow, while all the time working in secret on “the final piece.” This section will explore the critical and artistic reception of the artist’s work in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing in particular on the retrospective exhibitions in Pasadena (1963) and London (1966), as well as the publications of Robert Lebel’s monograph (1959) and the interviews with Pierre Cabanne (1967). Also up for discussion will be Duchamp’s installation of the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1954, which gave him the dimensions of the Etant donnes “room,” along with other important events in the artist’s life such as his relationship with the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, the first model for Etant donnes, and his marriage to Alexina “Teeny” Matisse in 1954.  The final session will explore the artist’s important role in the theoretical formulation of Postmodernism in the field of Art History.

Europa

identidade portuguesa

Identidade e Individualidade Nacional Portuguesa
“Sendo nos Portugueses convém saber o que é que somos”.Fernando PessoaQue se poderá então dizer dos portugueses? Comecemos por uma frase do Professor Jorge Dias em “Ensaios Etnológicos”: “é um povo paradoxal e difícil de governar, os seus defeitos podem ser as suas virtudes e as suas virtudes os seus defeitos, conforme a égide do momento”.O povo português é profundamente individualista, tem grande dificuldade em trabalhar em grupo e em se entender com os outros. É muito cioso das suas ideias, o que por vezes revela uma certa intolerância. É vaidoso, no sentido de gostar de ostentação, de riqueza e do luxo, e susceptível quanto aos seus preconceitos, formulas e ilusões. Possui temperamento amoroso e é humano e bondoso. Usa mais o coração que a cabeça.É desorganizado e imprevidente, mas possui um extraordinário poder de improvisação. A sua capacidade de adaptação a outras gentes, culturas, climas, línguas e profissões é tremenda, com a particularidade de não perder o seu carácter. Tudo isso, ligado ao sentido humanista, caracteriza e explica a colonização portuguesa. Possui espírito aventureiro e messiânico, que é bem demonstrado pela emigração. O português é independente e gosta da sua liberdade. Tem dificuldade em aceitar regras e autoridade. Só trabalha bem quando é bem dirigido. Leva as coisas pouco a sério. Não é persistente, o que de certo modo está ligado ao seu espírito aventureiro e ao ser sonhador. Apesar de possuir grande dose de solidariedade não deixa de ser invejoso em relação ao que outros alcançam. O português é idealista, emotivo e imaginativo, não é dado a reflexão, não quer discutir o mundo nem a vida, contenta‑se em viver exteriormente. O português possui pouca alegria e exuberância, mas um forte sentido do ridículo, tendo em conta as opiniões alheias. O seu sentido de humor traduz‑se mais em forte sentido de crítica, troça e ironia. O português não é fraco nem cobarde. É, de certo modo, derrotista ou fatalista, revela ainda um certo pendor para a imitação – tendendo até a pôr as coisas nacionais em segundo plano em relação ao estrangeiro – o que se traduz em falta de iniciativa e actividade criadora. Possui grande afectividade, não gosta de fins trágicos, não devendo ser por acaso que em Portugal não há pena de morte e nas touradas os touros vêm embolados e não são mortos. A sua religiosidade foi moldada ao longo dos tempos pelas suas características. Por fim, há a saudade, esse estado de espírito muito próprio do português, que tantas coisas podem querer significar, e que a tantas coisas pode conduzir.“Mouros em terra, moradores às armas!”Brado que existiu em Portugaldesde o tempo de D. Afonso IIPortugal é desde o início do século XII (1128), uma entidade autónoma no concerto das nações, por vontade própria e, a crer em alguns autores, por inspiração divina. Desde o século XIV constituiu‑se como estado‑nação, talvez o mais antigo e perfeito que há no mundo, com fronteiras definidas e estáveis sem fracturas étnicas ou rácicas; uma língua; uma religião; uma cultura e projectos comuns de futuro.Portugal tem desde há muito, um caminho próprio, uma pintura própria, uma literatura própria, música própria, escultura própria; teatro e cinema próprio; pensamento próprio; ciência própria e até paisagem e clima próprio. Somos nós e não outros, sem embargo de termos espalhado humanidade pelos quatro cantos do mundo. Talvez seja esse o maior legado que deixamos em herança.Tudo isto interage, resultando numa maneira portuguesa de estar no mundo, e reforçando o espírito de independência. Tudo isto deve ser projectado na política externa portuguesa que não se deve reduzir a um mero exercício de relações internacionais, antes a projecção dos nossos objectivos nacionais permanentes históricos e a defesa dos interesses conjunturais.Por isso, caros concidadãos, mantenhamo‑nos portugueses. É até um dever que temos para com as 50 gerações que nos precederam. Não sabemos o futuro que nos está reservado, nem podemos, sobre isso, fazer experiências em laboratório. O único laboratório do futuro é o conhecimento da História.O mundo está sempre em mudança, mas há coisas que permanecem. Os princípios são de sempre, o modo como se aplicam é que varia com a situação. E não devemos sacrificar mais valias consolidadas por aventuras de futuros incertos. Muito menos devemos cair em equívocos.O laboratório da História aconselha prudência.

Do Physicists Bullshit?
To be precise, my question is whether or not there are any written specimens of bullshit produced by physicists. I submit that there are such examples. Herewith, one example. Simple point of logic: To show that there are Fs, it suffices to adduce one F. And note: a person who produces a specimen of bullshit is not thereby a bullshitter. (A person who gets drunk a few times in his life is not a drunkard.)
(show)
The logically prior question of what bullshit is was treated in an earlier post. Briefly: a bullshitter is not a liar, although both are engaged in the enterprise of misrepresentation. The bullshitter's intention is not to misrepresent the way things are in the manner of the liar; his aim is to misrepresent himself as knowing what he does not know or more than he actually knows for some such purpose as impressing others, hearing himself talk, or turning a buck by scribbling.
Here is what John D. Barrow writes in Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation (Oxford 1991), p. 47:
. . . for centuries philosophers and theologians have attempted to settle by pure thought the issue of whether the Universe could or could not be infinitely old. That is, some have attempted to show that there is some logical contradiction inherent in the notion of a past infinity of time. And some still do. Such ideas have some association with cosmological arguments for the existence of God, which not only seek to demonstrate that there must have been an origin to the Universe in time but go further in showing (or, in practice, assuming) that this requires there to have been an originator.
Let's pause here. Barrow raises the question whether the universe's past is finite or infinite. He then "associates" this question with cosmological arguments for the existence of God. Then he explains what cosmological arguments purport to do, namely, (1) show that the universe had an origin in time, and (2) show that an origin in time requires an originator. As a bonus, he suggests quite tendentiously that all such arguments are circular.
The fundamental mistake here is to think that a cosmological argument, an argument from the existence of the universe to the existence of God, must either prove or assume that the universe had an origin in time. This is false since some comological arguments remain neutral on the question whether the universe has an infinite past or a finite past. I'll expand on this point in a moment.
Barrow continues:
This [the cosmological argument] is a slippery argument . . . . A common form of this argument points to the fact that everything that we see has a cause, and hence the Universe must have a cause. But this argument has a dangerous bend in the middle of it. The Universe is not a 'thing' in the sense of all the other examples that are being cited. It is a collection of things, or as Wiggenstein put it, 'the world is the totality of the facts.'
Now anyone who has studied the first page of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus knows that this is a misrepresenation of what Wittgenstein says. Wittgenstein, distinguishing facts (Tatsachen) from things (Dinge) says the opposite: The world is the totality of facts NOT of things. (Emphasis added) Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge. (TLP 1.1)
Barrow is not lying, but he is bullshitting: he is passing himself off as someone who knows what he is talking about when he does not. The fact that he does not give a reference to Wittgenstein shows that he is not particularly concerned about the truth of what he is saying, and that is a mark of a bullshitter. But wouldn't it be more charitable to say that Barrow made a mistake, rather than churlishly accuse him of bullshitting? Well, read on:
Our argument [the cosmological argument] is thus seen to be analogous to arguing that all members of clubs have mothers, and therefore all clubs have mothers.
What Barrow is saying in effect is that the cosmological argument commits the fallacy of composition. Suppose each member of a whole W has a property P. It does not follow that W has P. To think otherwise is to commit the fallacy of composition. So if it is true that each member of the universe has the property of being caused, it does not follow straightaway that the universe has the property of being caused. But no cosmological arguer worth his salt commits the fallacy in question.
Suppose the universe U always existed, and suppose that the universe is not something above and beyond its members, but is merely their collection. Suppose that every event in or state of the universe is explained by earlier states or events. Even on these three assumptions, a cosmological argument can be mounted. For one can still ask: Why does this universe, this particular collection of events, exist rather than some other collection, or no collection at all?
To say of X that it always existed is not to explain why it exists. (Compare: Why do you keep the hammer in the refrigerator? Because we have always kept it there.) And it is no better to say that the universe exists because each of its members is caused to exist by prior members, the universe just being the collection of these members. For this still leaves unexplained why there is anything at all, why there are any events to stand in causal relations.
Someone who seeks this ultimate explanation need not be arguing: each member of U is caused, so U is caused. There are much more sophisticated ways to argue. But they are too complicated to explain here. You will find one in Barry Miller, From Existence to God (Routledge, 1992) and there are others including mine.
My point for the nonce is that Barrow is bullshitting about the cosmological argument: blustering self-confidently about something he understands very imperfectly and in so doing misrepresenting himself as an authority.

conceptual

Conceptual

Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth nasceu em 1945, na cidade de Toledo (Ohio), Estados Unidos. É considerado um dos mais importantes artistas conceptuais do pós-guerra. O seu trabalho foi em grande parte influenciado pelos questionamentos de artistas ligados ao grupo Fluxus, que usavam a linguagem para investigar a função e natureza da arte, assim como a relação entre produtor e receptor do trabalho artístico. Artistas como George Brecht e Yoko Ono são precursores importantes. Obviamente, ao tratarmos tanto de Fluxus como da arte conceptual, temos que mencionar John Cage (um dos maiores catalisadores de transformação na arte, música e poesia do pós-guerra) e Marcel Duchamp.Joseph Kosuth trabalha primordialmente com questionamentos epistemológicos e estéticos, investigando a natureza da nossa percepção do mundo através da linguagem. Seu trabalho lingüístico tem grande interesse para os poetas contemporâneos, especialmente em um país como o Brasil, onde os poetas por tanto tempo estiveram apaixonados pelos conceitos como "objetividade". Este trabalho de Joseph Kosuth, considerado um dos inauguradores da Arte Conceitual do pós-guerra, acaba tendo implicações interessantíssimas para nossa avaliação do conceito de "objetividade" que guiou muito do discurso poético do pós-guerra. Este trabalho, chamado "One and Three Chairs", poderia até mesmo ser visto como uma paródia poética da noção tanto de "objetividade" como de "precisão", herdeiros do mot juste do século XIX.Enquanto tais parâmetros seguiram guiando uma grande ala da poesia modernista, outros poetas como Gertrude Stein, John Cage e Jack Spicer passaram a questionar tal ilusão de objetividade. Na década de 70, em grande parte influenciados pelos escritos de Ludwig Wittgenstein, surgem poetas como Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Rosmarie Waldrop, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein (ligados à revista L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) e poetas franceses como Emmanuel Hocquard, Michel Deguy ou Anne-Marie Albiach que expandem ainda mais o questionamento, levando adiante o que Marjorie Pertloff viria a chamar de poetics of indeterminacy.Assim, um trabalho (poesia, para mim) como "One and Three Chairs" tem vários interesses para o poeta contemporâneo, por questionar tais noções ingênuas de objetividade e precisão ou, ao quebrarmos a taxinomia de gêneros que separa poetas, artistas visuais e músicos em compartimentos estanques, podermos tomar exemplos como o do músico/poeta/performer John Cage ou do artista visual/poeta Joseph Kosuth para entendermos o trabalho do poeta como sendo a materialidade e funcionamento da linguagem, não importando qual o "suporte" para esta pesquisa, se papel, pedra, vídeo ou gravação sonora.Tudo isto nos ajudaria a compreender certas pesquisas atuais como:1- os livros de "poetas conceituais" como Kenneth Goldsmith e Christian Bök, cujas pesquisas os ligam a Cage e Kosuth. Penso aqui em um livro como The Weather, de Goldsmith, em que ele reproduz a previsão do tempo de uma rádio nova-iorquina por um ano, ou o tour-de-force de Christian Bök no livro Eunoia, em que cada um dos cinco capítulos contém palavras com apenas cada uma das cinco vogais, em um trabalho que tem sido considerado uma das mais inventivas obras poéticas dos últimos... como dizia Pound, deixemos o número com o leitor.2- as técnicas de composição "aleatória" de poetas flarfistas como K. Silem Mohammad, Michael Magee e Nada Gordon (ligados à Flarflist Collective) ou as googlagens de Angélica Freitas, que os ligam às técnicas de Jackson Mac Low e John Cage ou às colagens textuais de Tristan Tzara, mostrando que passamos mais uma vez por um momento de retomada das estratégias das vanguardas.3- as pesquisas poéticas em outros suportes, como a poesia sonora e em vídeo como de Jörg Piringer, Anne-James Chaton, Eduard Escoffet ou Maja Ratkje.Não estou a sugerir que todo e qualquer poeta deva retomar estas estratégias mas, se vivemos em um momento verdadeiramente sincrônico e de pluralidade estética, que o debate deveria ser feito em torno das implicações de cada uma destas práticas. Pois o trabalho de poetas como Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Joseph Kosuth ou Kenneth Goldsmith leva-nos justamente a isso: uma poética de implicações.

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist (Suíça, 1962), uma das mais conceituadas artistas da vídeo arte internacional, apresentou em Serralves alguns dos seus mais recentes projectos, caracterizados pela exploração da experiência do quotidiano e das formas de expressão feminina.
Sobre Rist:Lotti para a família, mais tarde adopta o nome de Pipi das Meias Altas, uma personagem criada pela escritora de livros infantis, Astrid Lindgren.Rist estudou arte comercial, ilustração e fotografia, no Instituto de Artes Aplicadas de Viena (1982 – 1986).Regressou à Suíça para estudar comunicação áudio visual, na escola de Design em Basel (1986 – 1988).Actualmente vive e trabalha em Zurique.
Prémios1987 Film und Videotage Basel1988 Feminale Köln1989 Viper Luzern1991 Eidgenössisches Kunststipendium1992 Zürcher Filmpreis1993 Förderungspreis der Jubiläumstiftung der SBGEidgenössisches Kunststipendium1994 Manor-Kunstpreis, St. GallenVideo-Kunstpreis des Schweizerischen BankvereisPrix d’art contemporain de la Banque Cantonale de Genève1996 DAAD Stipendium, Berlin1997 Premio 2000 della Biennale di VeneziaRenta Preis der Kunsthalle NürnbergKwangju Biennale Award

As galerias acabam por ficar desertas e escolhem-se espaços alternativos, longe das grandes cidades e do alvoroço da civilização moderna. Na land art resurge o desejo de se operar para a lém dos limites tradicionais, desejo que, no século XIX, tinha levado por exemplo, Gauguin para o Taiti e Rimbaud para África. Redescobre-se também o mito do herói romântico, na figura do artista que parte em busca de algo indefinido, indiferente às distâncias, aos incómodos e aos eventuais perigos. Para alguns, a viagem assume mesmo o valor de um percurso iniciático ou catártico, que pode culminar na expressão de si mesmo, mas encobre o risco da perda de identidade. O que importa não é instalar na natureza virgem obras previamente executadas nos ateliers, mas executá-las no local, moldando-o até o transformar em obra de arte.

O narcisismo dos artistas parece então carregar-se de uma espécie de exaltação masoquista, que os leva por  vezes a ferirem-se a si próprios. Para provocarem o público, há alguns que chegam mesmo a retalhar a sua própria pele, como Gina Pane, a enrolar serpentes à volta do pescoço e do rosto, como Marina Abramovic, ou a contorcer-se em espasmos de dor como Gunter Brus. Outros, como os gays Gilbert & George, prolongam a sus identificação com a obra de arte para lá  do tempo de exibição: pretendendo viver como uma obra de arte todos os momentos dos seus dias, transformam cada gesto em acontecimento. Em muitos casos, a transgressão é particularmente ousada. Os serões futuristas parecem, em comparação récitas de escola. A polícia  intervém frequentemente para interromper performances consideradas ultrajantes, e vários artistas são julgados em processos judiciais. Na ânsia de omnipotência que parece animar alguns, o limite entre operação artística e obscenidade é bastante frágil, e Otto Muehl acaba por passar anos na cadeia devido aos excessos praticados no seio da comunidade que fundou. 

Neste contexto, a relação com o mercado da arte também muda. Como não é possível à venda o próprio corpo do artista, as galerias tem de se contentar com as fotografias ou os filmes das performances realizadas. Por seu lado, o público não só é obrigado a assistir a cenas desagradáveis ou repugnantes, como também se sente frustrado no seu desejo-aliás, legítimo-de comprar objectos de arte, tendo eventualmente de se contentar com documentos comparáveis ao material que existe nos arquivos e nas bibliotecas.