ELIZABETH CROPPER:
Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Elizabeth Cropper, Dean
of the Center for Advanced Study
in the Visual Arts
at the National Gallery of Art.
And on behalf of the trustees
of the gallery,
I want to welcome you all here
this afternoon to the first
in the sixty-seventh series
of A. W. Mellon Lectures
in the Fine Arts.
This year's Mellon lecturer,
Hal Foster, Townsend Martin,
Class of 1917,
Professor of Art and Archeology
at Princeton University,
is no stranger to the National
Gallery.
Having held
residential fellowships here
at CASVA as both a Paul Mellon
Predoctoral Fellow, and a Paul
Mellon Senior Fellow,
and having served
on the Center's Board
of Advisors for several years.
Hal Foster's also no stranger
to very many of you
in this audience.
He began his career as a critic
with Art Forum and Art
in America, before becoming
Director
of the influential Critical
and Curatorial Studies
Independent Study Program
at the Whitney Museum.
After receiving his PhD
from City University in New
York, Hal Foster has combined
a dedicated academic career,
most notably at Princeton,
with commitments
to the publication of new work
in the field,
especially by emerging scholars,
through, for example,
his editorship of October
magazine
and
with his own critical writings
for both specialized and more
general audiences.
And this last audience,
especially,
through his contributions
to the London Review of Books.
For his body of critical work,
Hal Foster has been awarded both
the Clark Prize for Excellence
in Arts Writing by the Clark Art
Institute and the Frank Jewett
Mather Award for art criticism
by the College Art Association.
Among his many books on the work
of artists from Warhol to Serra,
Lichtenstein, and Hamilton,
perhaps best known
is the survey of Modernism,
Anti-modernism, Postmodernism,
coauthored with Rosalind Krauss,
Yve-Alain Bois,
and Benjamin Buchloh, published
in 2004.
Hal Foster has said that he
always seeks "to be driven
by contemporary concerns that
open up a historical project,
a new way to think
about the past, which can then
connect us to practices
in the present."
In this our present, the issues
of modernism
are less pressing than those
of what he calls
"positive barbarism," a concept
borrowed from Walter Benjamin,
but newly applied by Foster
to the period after the Second
World War.
In these six Mellon lectures,
he seeks to address
the brutal aesthetics
of the postwar period.
Looking at such figures
as Jean Dubuffet, Asger Jorn,
and Claes Oldenburg,
figures who found themselves
historically
stuck
amid unprecedented cultural
disasters.
Please welcome this year's
Mellon Lecturer, Professor Hal
Foster.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
HAL FOSTER: I am truly honored
to deliver the Mellon Lectures,
and let me say before anyone
else does, I'm not worthy.
This makes me all the more
grateful to Elizabeth Cropper
for her kind invitation,
and really to everyone
at CASVA for their warm welcome.
And thank you all for coming
too.
As a habitual lecture goer,
I often feel it's the audience
that should be paid, not
the speaker.
[LAUGHTER]
So I offer a special prize
to anyone who attends all six
talks.
[LAUGHTER]
My wife just informed me
that she's dropped out.
[LAUGHTER]
These lectures are born
of
my puzzling over a paradoxical
statement by the German critic
Walter Benjamin, "Modernism
teaches us how to survive
civilization if need be."
Although he varies the phrase
in a few texts
of the early 1930s, he never
explains it.
Apparently, it remained a riddle
for him, too.
Given the situation in Europe,
the referent of civilization
is clear enough.
It is the travesty
of civilization authored
by fascism and Nazism--
civilization turned
into its opposite.
It is this barbarism unleashed
by the dictators that rose
in the ruinous wake of World War
I
that Benjamin hopes
in a desperate dialectic
to revalue.
"Barbarism?
Yes indeed.
We say this in order
to introduce
a new, positive concept
of barbarism.
For what does poverty
of experience
do for the barbarian?
It forces him to start
from scratch; to make
a new start, to make a little go
a long way;
to begin with a little
and build up further,
looking neither left nor right.
Among the great creative
spirits, there have always been
the inexorable ones, who begin
by clearing a tabula rasa."
Yet what kind of modernism
teaches us to survive
a civilization turned barbaric?
And what sort of survival
could this be?
Benjamin posed the notion
of "positive barbarism"
in a short text titled
"Experience and Poverty,"
written in summer of 1933,
when he was in exile--
mostly in Paris,
but for the moment in Ibiza.
Hitler had come to power
in January.
It was the depth
of the depression, and Benjamin
was as poor
as the Spanish island was then.
Hence his title, which I read
as a chiasmus, both
the experience of poverty
and the poverty of experience.
Certainly the essay abounds
in dialectical twists
of this sort,
especially regarding
the question of value--
economic and other.
In fact, the entire text
is a parable that we are asked
to tease out.
Benjamin begins
with an actual fable about gold.
On his deathbed, an old man
tells his sons of a treasure
buried in their vineyard.
They go out and dig for it
everywhere but find nothing.
And yet with the soil thus
turned, the vineyard soon bears
a great harvest of grapes.
And thus they learn the blessing
lies in hard work
and not in gold.
This is experience that produces
wisdom, Erfahrung in German.
It's distinct from experience
that supplies information,
Erlebnis.
And it can be passed on in tales
like this one.
Etymologically, tradition means
to pass on.
However, according to Benjamin,
such experience, such passing on
is now impoverished.
"Who still meets people who
really know how to tell
a story?" he asks.
This old kind of knowledge
is collective, a good thing
for Benjamin, but he fails
to acknowledge that it is also
conservative and patriarchal.
Moreover, as is often the case
in critical theory, Benjamin
projects a legendary past when
subjectivity and society were
intact in order to cast
modernity as a breakup.
And here, he keys this fall
to the trauma of World War I.
"Many people return
from the front in silence,"
he writes, "not richer,
but poorer
in communicable experience."
For Benjamin, the wise speech
of the old father
had become the stunned muteness
of the young soldier.
"A generation had gone to school
in horse-drawn streetcars now
stood in the open air."
That's a famous line
from the essay.
"And at its center,
in a force field
of destructive torrents
and explosions,
the tiny, fragile human body."
Benjamin describes this fall
in a litany of reversals:
moral experience is undermined
by corruption,
economic experience undercut
by inflation,
physical experience undone
by hunger.
And yet in a major turn--
the major turn-- in this text,
he then embraces this poverty
and so bids farewell
to the very tradition
of experience
that he had lamented only
a moment ago.
It is this transvaluation--
Nietzsche is on his mind as well
as Marx--
that enables Benjamin
to advocate
for modernist artists, writers,
and architects, who are able
"to start from scratch."
His list of such "constructors"
is unexpected.
He mentions artists
such as the Cubists in Paul
Klee, writers such as Bertolt
Brecht and Paul Sheerbart,
and architects such as Adolf
Loos and Le Corbusier--
odd couples all.
Even though Benjamin knew
of the Russian Constructivists
from his visit
to Moscow in winter 1926-27,
he does not invoke
exemplary "constructors"
like Alexander Rodchenko and El
Lissitzky.
Clearly his concern
is the situation in Western
Europe, one that was
shipwrecked, not
post-revolutionary.
Apart
from impoverished experience,
what unites
his different constructors?
For one thing, they all "reject
the traditional, solemn, noble
image of man."
For Benjamin, this image enfolds
a bourgeois subjectivity,
a deep psychology, which they
discard as outmoded.
For example, Klee designs
his figures schematically, as
though on a "drawing board."
"They have no inwardness,"
Benjamin comments, "and that is
what makes them barbaric."
At stake here, then, it's not
a new order to be engineered,
so much as a bare condition
to be endured.
And the new man of utopian
modernists
like the Constructivists, that's
not so much the stake
as the naked man
of the contemporary world,
who "lies screaming
like a newborn babe
in the dirty diapers
of the present."
That's a line from the essay
and it's an extraordinary line.
Benjamin does sneak in one
Constructivist note, however.
His constructors reject
"human likeness as a principle
of humanism."
And instead, stress
the "arbitrary constructed"
nature of representation
as revolutionary Russians did,
he notes, when they gave
their kids "de-humanized" names
like October.
Still a great name for a kid,
by the way.
[LAUGHTER]
Rather
than a "technical renovation
of language," Benjamin argues,
this is its "mobilization
in the service of struggle
or work.
At any rate, of changing reality
instead of describing it."
And he means the echo of Marx
here, to be clear.
For Benjamin,
modern architecture is most
forthright in its rejection
of interiority as inwardness.
Although he acknowledges
the utopian dimension of glass
architecture,
as advanced by Scheerbart, Bruno
Taut, and others, here
the material signifies
transparency, which he pits
against the opacity
of the bourgeois interior,
stuffed with private mementos.
"Objects made of glass
have no aura," Benjamin avers.
Glass is, in general, the enemy
of secrets.
It is also the enemy
of possession.
In short, modern architects
like Walter Gropius
"create rooms in which it is
hard to leave traces."
And yet, not everything
is coldly objective
in his account.
In fact, at this point Benjamin
offers a wildly dialectical
appraisal of technology.
Even as it has produced "a force
field of destructive torrents,"
it has also released a fantastic
array of creative possibilities.
A bit like the 19th century
caricaturist Grandville,
another Benjamin favorite,
fantastical writers
like Sheerbart
explore how our telescopes,
our airplanes, our rockets
can transform human beings
into completely new, lovable,
and interesting creatures.
This transformative imagination
is also at work in mass culture,
especially in early Disney
films.
The existence of Mickey Mouse
is such a dream
for contemporary man.
His life is "full of miracles,
miracles that not only surpassed
the wonders of technology,
but also make fun of them."
In his account, Mickey cartoons
are so popular, because they
offer tremendous relief
to Europeans buffeted
by catastrophic war,
intensive industrialization,
and economic depression.
Magically, in these animations,
"a car is no heavier
than a straw hat, and the fruit
on the tree becomes round as
quickly as a hot air balloon."
It is thus not only
modernist artists like Klee,
that teach us how to survive, so
too do cartoon characters
like Mickey.
There's far more to say
about this extraordinary
reflection
on "positive barbarism,"
but this is enough for me
to present my own thesis
for these lectures, which
is simply this: like everyone
else Benjamin thought
that the worst had come
with World War I.
The "tiny fragile human body"
caught in a force field
of destructive torrents.
But the worst had not come.
It did not arrive
until the mass deaths of World
War II, the Holocaust
and the Bomb.
Only then did
the "positive barbarism"
that Benjamin glimpsed
in modernist art, architecture,
and literature become
a necessity.
Only then were artists
and writers truly
forced to start from scratch,
to make a new start,
to make a little go a long way.
Yet
in these extreme circumstances,
what means could
they hope to find?
What ground could they claim
with any conviction?
What but the most basic
and the most brutal?
In these talks,
I am concerned with the turn
from the mid 1940s
through the mid 1960s,
to the brut and the brutalist,
the animal and the creaturely,
as manifests in the work
of the Frenchmen Jean Dubuffet
and George Bataille, the Dane
Asger Jorn, the Italian-Scot
Eduardo Paolozzi,
and the Swedish-American Claes
Oldenburg.
And there you see them, top
to bottom,
left to right: Benjamin,
Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn,
Paolozzi, Oldenburg.
Each of these figures
proposes a different version
of brutal aesthetics.
One that pares art down
or reveals it to be already
bare, so that they might begin
again
after the compound devastations
of the time.
But to what ends exactly?
Why does Dubuffet invent
the category of art brut?
What does Bataille seek
in the cave paintings
at Lascaux?
Why does Jorn populate his CoBra
canvases with denatured figures?
What does Paolozzi see
in his monstrous assemblages
of industrial debris?
And why does Oldenburg remake
cheap products from urban scrap?
To begin again is an oxymoron,
and the contradictions show
in these projects.
My figures aim
for a foundational approach
only to find an equivocal one.
They claim a clean slate only
to discover an overwritten one.
Like Robinson Crusoe, whom
Dubuffet and Oldenburg adopt
as a persona, each washes up
on an island of his own devising
only to find that it is less
safe terrain then treacherous
ground.
There they confront
tricky questions and so will we.
How could Dubuffet imagine
an art that
is "unscathed" by culture?
What did Bataille hope to unlock
in the enigma
of prehistoric representations
of animal and man?
Why did Jorn picture the crises
of his time
in the form of human beasts?
How did Paolozzi pick out a path
to survival in the destruction
all around him?
And why did Oldenburg stake
his desire for metamorphosis
in junk?
My group includes two
philosophers--
Benjamin and Bataille, two
painters--
Dubuffet and Jorn, and two
sculptors--
Paolozzi and Oldenburg.
Yet they range over
these disciplines in ways that
transform them significantly.
All the artists are also
innovative writers.
One object
of "positive barbarism"
is language, which they treat
as both a tool and a target.
Their texts are
full of mangled words,
invented terms,
and other linguistic barbarisms.
And some venture into philosophy
or suggest that art can qualify
as such.
Many of my figures are connected
personally as well.
If we take Dubuffet alone,
he was acquainted with Bataille,
whom he had read,
and friendly with Jorn
about whom he wrote--
Jorn returned the favor.
And he influenced Paolozzi who
studied his art brut collection
in Paris, as well as Oldenburg
who did the same in Chicago.
Dubuffet was a role model
for both artists.
Yet more important
is this commonality--
each figure proposes
a different ground
for brutal aesthetics.
In the first instance,
this ground is a positing
of a beyond
or a before to official culture.
Thus, for Dubuffet art brut
falls outside the history
of art, while for Bataille
cave painting precedes it.
Both thus claim a zero degree
of art
when free of basic conventions
of making and viewing.
For them, art brut
and cave painting even undercut
the primordial convention
that art is made to be beheld.
However, what appears
as an ur-beginning can quickly
become mise en abyme.
Perhaps this goes
with the territory.
Most of my figures
are riddled by questions
of origin.
The origin of art
and representation,
of humanity and sexuality,
of law and sovereignty, that are
contradictory or at least
enigmatic in nature.
And sometimes in the face
of these riddles they propose
extreme notions,
such as the brut in Dubuffet,
or the transgressive
in Bataille,
that qualify as limit concepts.
That is, as ideas that point
to a place where a thought
cannot go for reasons
ideological or historical,
or both.
Sometimes too these limit
concepts deliver them
into double binds.
Dubuffet projects
various others,
such as the child
and the insane, as alien to
culture,
only then to acculturate them.
And Bataille thrills
to transgression, only then
to acknowledge that it serves
to reinscribe the law.
Often, to borrow a Bataillan
term, these projects
are impossible.
And they touch
on a contemporary problem
as you will see--
the problem
of cultural appropriation.
In the second instance, which
is the first in order
of practice, my artist seek
a ground in brut materiality.
For example, Dubuffet mixes
in dirt, pebbles, and asphalt
in his haute pâte paintings,
while Oldenburg stuffs muslin
and vinyl with kapok in his soft
sculptures.
In doing so, Dubuffet erodes
the basic distinction of figure
in field in painting,
while Oldenburg counters
the fundamental expectation that
sculpture be
vertical and stable.
Often this partial undoing
of the object induces, or is
meant to induce,
a partial undoing
of the subject, both viewer
and artist.
And sometimes this operation
is cast in terms of regression.
Thus was Dubuffet greeted
as a "cacaiste."
Thus did Oldenburg describe
his early sculpture
as "shit art."
And thus to offer
a third instance,
did Paolozzi see his object
making as a "mud language."
Yet this regression is not
necessarily a reduction.
According to Freud, the infant
does not distinguish much
between a turd, a penis, a baby,
and a gift.
That is, in psychoanalysis
the anal zone is an open site
of symbolic transformation.
And so it is often
in brutal aesthetics as well.
This is to suggest
that sheer materiality and
semiotic metamorphosis are not
opposed in this art,
in fact, just
the opposite obtains.
Dubuffet, Jorn, Paolozzi,
and Oldenburg all show us
how a substance can motivate
a sign and how a sign can
transform a substance.
Thus do my artists experiment
with language, too.
Some like Dubuffet brutalize it,
others like Oldenburg eroticize
it, all play with it.
Yet they find no secure ground
here either.
In every instance, they render
language more ambiguous, not
less.
Sometimes this linguistic
entanglement prompts
a strong counter impulse
to sweep language away,
or at least to clear art
of names.
If Duchamp proposed that a work
of art can consist in nomination
alone, a urinal becomes
a Fountain because the artist
declares it so.
Dubuffet and Oldenburg work
to ex-nominate art.
art brut, Dubuffet insists,
is art that does not know
its name.
In fact, they can be seen
as anti-Duchamps who militate
for an aesthetic that is more
motivated, not more arbitrary.
Certainly my group as a whole
counts
as a neo-avant-garde distinct
from the dominant Duchampian
lineages.
Language is one stake
of "positive barbarism" then.
Originally, a barbarian
was a person who could not
speak, at least in a way
that a Greek could understand.
The word evokes the stammering
onomatopoeiacally--
ba ba.
And most of my artists
would embrace the association,
which is also active in "brute"
from the Latin brutus,
dull or stupid.
Bataille self-identifies
as an antique classical
iconoclast,
Jorn as a Nordic vandal,
and the others
as urban primitives.
So how do they differ
from the barbarians picked out
by Benjamin two decades before?
To be sure, some attributes
of his "positive barbarism"
carry over to my figures.
They too are opposed
to interiority understood
as inwardness.
And they also reject
human likeness as a principle
of humanism.
Other characteristics
in the Benjamin account
simply do not last or are
transformed utterly.
For example,
the fantastical merging
of nature and technology
glimpsed by Benjamin
and Sheerbert becomes monstrous
in Paolozzi.
While the presence
of the creaturely
is even more pronounced,
but as an avatar of damaged
life, a la Theodor Adorno,
not of playful adaptation,
a la Mickey Mouse.
Finally, my figures are more
scavengers than constructors.
But then that is true of some
of the Benjamin barbarians
as well.
They too "begin with a little"
and make it "go a long way."
I would be remiss not to mention
two renowned uses of the term
barbarism
in the critical field that
concerns us, especially as both
should be differentiated
from "positive barbarism."
The first use also comes
from Benjamin who in "Theses
on the Philosophy
of History" of 1940,
his final essay
before his suicide,
wrote famously, "there is
no document of civilization,
which is not at the same time
a document of barbarism."
This resosant formula
is fundamental Marx.
The luxury of culture
depends on the expropriation
of labor.
Great art rests
on oppressive inequality.
Benjamin expresses this truth
pertinent to all times
and places.
Not to spite what we love,
but to remind us of its cost
and I imagine that all
of my figures
would agree with him.
Even though I am the beneficiary
a few times over of the Mellon
family, I too agree.
The second use of barbarism,
also familiar, comes from Adorno
in "Cultural Criticism
and Society" of 1949.
And it is equally chastening.
"To write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric."
Here again my figures would
agree, but they would also take
this aphorism as a mandate
to continue to make poetry,
painting, and sculpture,
only to make them more barbaric.
And this is how Adorno came
to understand his statement,
too.
For him, a "mimesis
of the hardened"
was a central aspect
of modernist art.
Let me anticipate
a few questions that will arise
along the way.
First, what relation
do my artists have
to the figurative tradition?
Of course, prewar modernists--
fauves, expressionists, cubists,
constructivists, Dadaists,
surrealists-- they all distorted
the figure in diverse ways.
In doing so however,
they retained it as a foil.
For the most part,
this connection in opposition
to the figurative tradition
was swept aside by the Holocaust
and the Bomb, which obliterated
the "tiny, fragile human body"
en masse.
Yet for my group, abstraction
was not an option either.
Compromised as it was by prewar
associations with spirituality,
utopianism, and idealism.
For these reasons, my artists
stick with figuration,
but they remake it
as disfiguration.
An art of denatured bodies
and stunted gestures.
Such disfiguration
is central to the brut
in Dubuffet,
the informe in Bataille,
the "creaturely" in Jorn--
who titled a series of works
"Disfigurations"--
the "monstrous" in Paolozzi,
and the "scatological"
in Oldenburg.
Extreme though it is,
this disfiguration could still
be presented as a realism
as Oldenburg did
with his first major project The
Street.
A realism true to a society
in which the capitalists
processes of reification
and fragmentation had moved out
of the factory into the world.
Importantly, most of my artists
look for artistic materials
in this second nature
of industrial glut
and commercial waste.
"Car wrecking yards as hunting
grounds," Paolozzi said of one
of his sources.
"Junkyard is beach is street,"
Oldenburg said of three
of his sites.
Some of my figures go so far as
to see representation as an act
of violence.
Art proceeds
"by successive destructions,"
Bataille argued with graffiti
in mind.
"Insofar as it liberates
libidinal instincts,
these instincts are sadistic."
Dubuffet would agree, and so
would Jorn if we replace
sadistic with erotic.
And even the benevolent
Oldenburg took the phrase
"Annihilate-Illuminate"
as a central motto.
"The original inspiration
of the Store," he once remarked,
"was a butcher shop."
Also paradoxically, my figures
conceive mimesis as more
performative
than representational.
Bataille longed for a return
to the ritualistic basis of art
that he detected in the caves.
And Dubuffet insisted
on presence and participation
in his work.
"The painting will not be looked
at passively," he insisted,
"but relived in its elaboration,
dare I say, re-enacted."
In line
with
a contemporary phenomenology
of Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Dubuffet moved to bracket
pictorial conventions
in an attempt to freshen
perceptual capabilities,
and most of the others did too.
Certainly they all stressed
process in a way that constitute
a process art,
well before process art emerged
as such.
All with the ambition
to reanimate subject object
relations, or at least to resist
a society more and more
dominated by the commodification
of things and the administration
of people.
The second question, how
do my artists relate to given
models of avant-garde
in modernist practice?
Stylistically, they are closer
to expressionism and surrealism,
but for the most part
they regard both as exhausted.
And to some degree,
they shift
from the subversive impulses
of such movements
toward the foundational
imperatives of most modernist
painting.
At the same time,
they have little interest
in the formalists concerns
with medium specificity.
On the contrary, they might be
said to advance a program
of medium impurity.
Of course, some preoccupations
of brutal aesthetics
do run back to prewar
precedence,
above all the fascination
with the primitive, whether this
is associated with the art
of the tribal, the child,
or the insane.
All of which the Nazis had
declared degenerate only
a decade or so before.
Yet the primitives taken up
by my group are not quite
the modernist ones.
After the intervention of Claude
Lévi-Strauss and others,
the savage mind could no longer
be simply opposed to modern
sophistication, which also meant
that it could no longer be
easily projected as pristine.
So too my figures complicate
the modernist primitives
with related avatars
such as the destitute outsider,
whom Dubuffet calls
the "common man" and Oldenburg
the "rag man."
That's Oldenburg
in a performance connected
to The Street.
An issue in brutal aesthetics
is less primitive life
than bare life.
Less life unscathed by culture
a la Dubuffet
than life at the mercy of power
a la Giorgio Agamben.
The Benjaminian trope,
a naked man in the dirty diapers
of the present becomes actual
here.
In a sense,
modernist primitivism was not
primitive enough
for my postwar figures.
As a result, some like Jorn
turned
to mythology and archeology,
and others like Bataille
to anthropology in pre-history.
The discovery of Lascaux in 1940
triggered a resurgence
in that field.
Certainly for Bataille
the prehistoric displaces not
only the primitive,
but also the ancient
as the originary site of art
and representation.
Although prehistory had
interested prewar modernists
like Amédéé Ozenfant, there are
telling differences.
For example, in keeping
with the modernist emphasis
on pure vision, Ozenfant saw
the hand prints on cave walls
as direct traces
of the first man,
whereas Bataille saw them
as ambiguous signs
of a being conflicted
about its own humanness.
Then too in the postwar period
in general, the image
of the first man was shadowed
by the specter of the last man.
That is interest in prehistory
was haunted by anxiety
about post-history.
And sometimes my figures imagine
a strange synchrony
between an absolute before
and a no less absolute
other, or after.
Implicit in Jorn, Paolozzi,
and Oldenburg,
this is explicit in Bataille,
for whom the caves are
both the "cradle of humanity"
and its "tomb in waiting."
If the "topos of the primitive"
shifts
with this postwar figures,
so too does the image
of the animal.
The animal is also
present in modernist art
of course,
especially in expressionism,
where it is often another avatar
of pure vision.
"Is there a more mysterious idea
for an artist
than to imagine how nature is
reflected in the eyes
of an animal?"
Franz Marc wondered.
"How does a horse see the world,
how does an eagle, a dog,
or a deer?"
In brutal aesthetics however,
the animal mutates variously
into a beast, a god, a monster,
or a creature.
And in this last guise,
it registers not a natural state
to reclaim,
but a denatured condition
to confront.
In short, the animal
has no stable meaning here.
For Bataille, it marks
in its very difference,
the emergence of the human order
in the caves,
whereas for Jorn and Paolozzi,
it registers
a contemporary crisis
in that same order.
Like the "rough beast" of Yates,
the creature is a mythical being
that
slouches
on to the historical stage
precisely at a moment when what
counts as law and sovereignty
becomes murky.
There is another shift
in avatars to mention,
a key persona in prewar
avant-gardes is the artist
as engineer, who is presented
often in utopian guise,
as in constructivism,
and sometimes
in a debilitated state,
as in Dada.
In both cases however,
such constructors build
from the ground up.
As Benjamin says, with figures
designed on the drawing board.
This is less the way
with my postwar artists
who displace the engineer
as a central persona
with the bricoleur.
In his influential definition
of 1962, Lévi-Strauss opposed
the two types directly.
Whereas the engineer questions
the universe
with abstract logic,
the bricoleur makes do
with whatever is at hand
with the heterogeneous
collection of oddments
left over from human endeavors.
This account derives
from the very milieu
that concerns us.
Lévi-Strauss associated
the bricoleur explicitly with
art brut, about which he
corresponded with Dubuffet.
My artists proposed
other related avatars as well.
Dubuffet speaks
of his artistic role
as a sorcerer and alchemist,
and Oldenburg of his
as a magician and a clown.
Whatever the individual twists,
the artist as bricoleur
puts into focus a key paradox,
that these artists begin again
with the already given.
With found work,
as in the art brut collected
by Dubuffet, appropriated
images, as in the flea
market canvases painted over
by Jorn, industrial fragments,
as recast by Paolozzi,
and urban detritus,
as remade by Oldenburg.
In this respect, the practice
of bricolage
differs from the use
of the readymade.
Again, my group
is distinct from the Duchampian
neo-avant-garde.
At the same time bricolage
is not simply a repeat
of collage either.
Certainly the dialectics
of shock in Dada and surrealism
are not at work
in the same ways.
How could one out shock
the photos of Auschwitz
or Hiroshima?
And why would anyone attempt
to do so in any case?
Finally, bricolage also differs
from constructed sculpture.
Again, my positive barbarians
are more
interested in destruction
as both the means and an end.
Even so, brutal aesthetics
is not nihilistic.
As Oldenburg suggests,
to annihilate
is only the first step,
to illuminate, to connect,
to transform, to reanimate
is the important thing.
In fact, my positive barbarian
might be labeled, homo
connectus, and his password
might be given as metamorphosis.
However, my figures do not view
such transformation
as sublimation.
On the contrary, the drive
to desublimate, to undo
proper forms
and to loosen libidinal energies
is very strong in this group.
Again, most turn figuration
into a brutal disfiguration
and see representation
as a violent alteration.
How then are we to square this
disruptive
bricolage with a commitment
to painting on the part
of Dubuffet and Jorn,
and to sculpture
on the part of Paolozzi
and Oldenburg.
Most of my artists
operate
within these traditional
categories to be sure,
but they also work against them.
At the very least,
they transform them
substantially.
For example, Dubuffet not only
operated on the horizontal,
but also worked the ground
into his canvases.
He takes painting down
literally, humiliates it, humus
means ground.
And a similar thing can be said
of Jorn
with his deformed figures
and ugly colors,
or of Paolozzi and Oldenburg
with their different debasements
of sculpture.
All bring in materials, marks
and models, such as asphalt,
graffiti, and the urban wall
respectively, that we're mostly
foreign to art heretofore.
And they do so not only
for the sake of disruption,
but in a hope
of an alternative address, even
another audience,
beyond the given channels
of traditional painting
and sculpture.
Even though most are
suspicious of mass culture,
they do not hesitate to appeal
to the common man as
with Dubuffet,
the "banalities" of kitsch as
with Jorn,
or the pop iconography then
in emergence
as with Paolozzi and Oldenburg.
My group does not take
a mandarin position on these
matters, rather they see them
as postwar conditions to address
and to détourn.
A third question: given
the equivocal relation
of "positive barbarism"
to the human figure, what
is its view of humanism
at large?
For my group, this tradition
arrived with a few counts
against it.
First were its own attacks
on modernism, such as the charge
of "the dehumanization of art"
by Ortega y Gasset and others,
as well as the call
for "a return to order"
by Jean Cocteau and others.
Both from the interwar period,
but both still fresh enough.
More importantly, humanism had
proved to be
helpless before fascism
and Nazism, which had also
perverted
the classical tradition.
This was the civilization turned
barbaric that had to be survived
in the first instance.
For these reasons,
Dubuffet, Bataille, and Jorn all
railed against humanism.
Dubuffet went so far as to call
for a complete liquidation
of its ways of thinking.
Certainly all my figures
rejected classical norms
of beauty.
For his part, Bataille extolled
the paradoxical beauty
of the prehistoric Venuses
and Jorn
elevated the crude productions
of the Vandal north
over their canonical
masterpieces
of the classical south,
while the others sided
with vulgar expressions
like graffiti.
Most were also happy to be
deemed bad painters
or sculptors, which is to say
they rejected the normativity
of the good
as well as the beautiful.
"Those who try to combat
their production
of shoddy pictures
are enemies of the best art
today," Jorn wrote in one
anti-hierarchical challenge
typical of the group.
Yet to question
an "inhuman humanism," as Jorn
called it, is not necessarily
to be antihumanist.
After all, the critique
of humanism is still made
in the name of the human which
it hopes to redeem.
Moreover, the figures that recur
in this art,
such as the creaturely
and the monstrous
are also articulated in relation
to the human, which is thereby
kept front and center.
Already
an antiquity, homo barbarous was
structural to the definition
of homo humanus and so it was
again in the Renaissance.
By and large then, my artists
are equivocal about humanism
as Oldenburg is when he
declares,
"I am a humanist bastard."
Does he mean that he is
a bastard simply because he is
a humanist,
or because the degradation
of humanism degrades him too?
Either way, Oldenburg aims
to make hostile objects human,
to dereify the world,
to reanimate life--
an ambition shared
by the others.
This is not a reversal
of humanism so much
as a détournement, as defined
by Jorn.
"Détournement is a game born
of a capacity
for devalorization.
Only he who
is able to devalorize
can create new values."
A fourth question, a large one.
What conceptions of history
and philosophy
can be drawn
from brutal aesthetics?
In dire moments,
some of my figures
envision a history thrown
in reverse, with progress become
regression, somewhat in line
with the grim argument of Adorno
and Horkheimer
in the Dialectic
of Enlightenment of 1944.
While others project
a posthistorical condition,
with the modernist proposal
of the new man now farcical
and the Hegelian notion
of the end of man
no longer speculative.
At other times, my figures
simply feel stuck, as if history
had stalled and dialectics were
suspended.
To be sure, this stuckness
prompts some of my figures
to force quasi-dialectical ways
of working.
For example, stymied
by the bipolar stagnation
of the Cold War, Jorn develops
his prolix notion
of trialectics, while Paolozzi
proposes his obscure theory
of opposites,
and Oldenburg,
his volatile practice
of contraries,
whereby his deathly street is
followed by his erotic Store.
But these count as symptoms
of the problem rather than
solutions to it.
Certainly my figures remain
interested in negation
or at least in negativity.
In a postwar letter
to the philosopher Alexander
Kojeve who had presented the End
of Man thesis before the war,
Bataille describes
his "unemployed negativity."
And Dubuffet and Bataille
in particular
seize on negative remainders
such as the brut and the base
that appear to resist
any cultural assimilation.
Often however, this sense
of stuckness renders my figures
equivocal by default,
and sometimes it leads them
to force
artistic transformations in very
tendentious ways.
A fifth question, also large.
What are the politics
of brutal aesthetics?
Liberal democracy was in crisis
well before World War II,
and some of my figures
are equivocal on this subject
too.
To borrow the well-known phrase
of the historian Zeev Sternhell
they are neither
left, nor right.
The consequences
of this equivocation are still
debated with Dubuffet
and Bataille the most
controversial cases.
The others tended
toward Marxist positions, Jorn
most emphatically.
But for many artists and writers
in this generation, the link
between modernism and socialism,
as articulated by T.J. Clarke
was broken, perhaps it was never
so secure in the first place.
In any case, brutal aesthetics
arises
from a different conjuncture,
one marked in some quarters
by a fatigue with politics,
especially after all
the accusations of collaboration
and amidst all the calls
for commitment.
As advocated by the young Roland
Barthes, who resisted
the Sartorian demand
for political engagement,
"writing degree zero"
was in part a search
for a literature blanched
of ideology.
And much the same can also
be said of "art degree zero"
of the period.
For this generation,
Denis Hollier has argued,
literature was an "art
of despiteness."
And some of my artists
exhibit a similar blank refusal.
However pallid it might appear,
this can count as a politics
of its own.
"Unemployed negativity" has
its own force.
Then again, several
of my figures
do broach a fundamental question
in political theory.
I did not expect the issue
of sovereignty
to be so persistent,
yet there it
is explicit in Bataille,
but active in most others
as well.
Perhaps this should not have
surprised me, after all,
they operate not only
in the ruins of a world war,
but also in the vise
between Soviet totalitarianism
to the east and American
triumphalism to the west.
This overdetermined situation
and old liberal order
destroyed
by Nazi and fascist regimes.
These regimes overcome
by the immense cost.
A treacherous Cold War locked
in place.
These conditions had to prompt
questions about the nature
of political authority, which
is to say,
a deep and uncertainty
about the ground of lawful rule
as well as
a concomitant interest
in figures that might count
as outsiders or outlaws to it.
The figure of the sovereign
calls up as its opposite number,
the beast.
And as we will see,
the creaturely does sometimes
appear as a sign of crisis
in the social order.
But then I was on the lookout
for such symptoms.
These lectures are part
of a larger project of mine,
to rethink the 20th century
avant-garde at times
of political emergency.
A final note on politics, most
of my artists posit a ground
that is largely individualistic.
Art as an arc of one.
And this limits
the political ramifications
of each project.
At the same time,
some of my own figures
do project an idea
of collectivity, a sketchy one,
non-utopian, but still.
Certainly they explore what
might count as a vernacular
culture
after the Nazi and fascist
perversion of the people,
or as a common culture
in the face of mass media
on the rise.
Here the phrase
"positive barbarism"
requires a little more
attention.
When Benjamin presented it,
he employed a particular term,
barberentum, which is not
the usual word for the opposite
of civilization, which
is barbari.
The choice is telling.
Although by the 19th century,
barbarentum signified
a primitive state of formation,
even earlier it indicated
the distribution of foreigners
in a given region.
Barberentum might thus
be translated as barbarianhood,
a collective that is in part
real and in part imagined.
If Benjamin saw
his modernist barberentum
as the proletarian alternative
to a more
of a bourgeois culture.
And it's not clear how
my figures viewed
their versions.
Not quite in default
of proletarian culture,
but hardly identical with it.
For Bataille, all society
was in need of barbarization,
that is in need
of a fundamental recovery
of sacred experience.
Dubuffet focused his appeal
on the common man, whom he
projected as an outsider.
In this respect,
his collective partook less
of the proletariat proper than
of the Lumpenproletariat,
the refuse of all classes
that according to Marx
is more likely to be a bribe
tool of reactionary intrigue
than an integral part
of socialist change.
For his part, Jorn pursued
actual forms
of collaborative practice,
such as murals, ceramics,
and publications,
which he regarded
as micro models
of a communal life to come.
In pre-capitalist modes,
he hoped to find
post-capitalist possibilities.
At the same time,
he took the banalities
of popular culture,
such as flea market paintings,
as a crucial resource.
Paolozzi and Oldenburg also
developed a double strategy.
For Paolozzi, this entailed
a search for archetypes that
were collective in nature
on the one hand
and for iconic images that might
compete with Hollywood
and Hammer Films on the other.
For Oldenburg, it meant
an attempt to reground art
in the shared experience
of everyday life on the one hand
and to match
the American deities of consumer
culture on the other.
In each case, the projected
collectivities were largely
impossible
and the artistic projects almost
desperate.
But then I come back
to the notion
of the "creaturely" as a sign
of crisis and weirdly I find
a modicum of hope there.
We call again the prewar
fascination with the primitive,
the child, and the insane.
For the most part, scholars like
me have charted
this modernist exploration
in terms of the unconscious
and the other,
that is in terms
of psychoanalysis
and anthropology.
This approach is not wrong
as far as it goes,
but to the extent
that such primitivisms appealed
to an absent alterity,
it assumed a centrality--
a stability
in Western subjectivity
and society.
The appearance
of the "creaturely"
in my figures
points in another direction,
not to an outside
or before to culture, which
is more or less fictive,
but to cracks
within the symbolic order.
Fissures in the space of meaning
created by exposure
to a traumatic dimension
of political power, which are
quite real.
Some of my artists
attempt to force these cracks
into new openings,
new possibilities
for artistic practice
and social relations alike,
or so I will argue in the weeks
ahead.
And I hope you will stick
around.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
