Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

Ellipses and Détente

I have felt excluded throughout this week, on all the subjects we have discussed, because we have not touched on the social and economic conditions of theories of art. We have been living in the abstract. There is a precarious class of intellectual workers throughout the world: people who try to get jobs, find voices, continue to do what they want. And to do that, they have sometimes to censor themselves, to limit what they say, to choose topics that will be of current interest. . . . I think it would be interesting to talk about aesthetics and anti-aesthetics from the point of view of compromise. —sTéPhanie benzaqUen (seminar 9) By the time Hal Foster’s Anti-Aesthetic was published in 1983, the still-unnamed AIDS epidemic had prematurely taken the lives of many in New York’s art and intellectual circles. The crisis swiftly provoked forms of direct cultural militancy even amongst artists and critics previously indifferent to overt activism. One of the Anti-Aesthetic contributors who became interested in this shift was Craig Owens. Though I never met Owens, his writings were an important influence on me as a young artist and also later as I became a writer, just as he appears to have resurfaced as a key figure in this seminar. Six years after The Anti-Aesthetic appeared, AIDS claimed Owens’s life, though not before his turn towards “engaged” art placed him at odds with many of his October colleagues. The reality of Owens’s subsequent exile is not the focus of this commentary (that history has yet to be written). Instead, if you can conjure up an image of internal displacement and keep this disembodied figure in mind, I will attempt my own response to Stéphanie Benzaquen’s scarcely answered comment on exclusion and compromise. In the early 1980s, when Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic appeared, I was a recently graduated art student from the Cooper Union. I had studied with the artist Hans Haacke and was earnestly seeking to reconcile my newly acquired artistic vocabulary with a lower-middle-class worldview. Craig Owens’s theorizing of postmodernism as an interrogatory practice was singularly attractive. In texts such as “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism” the author posited an alternative to those contemporary art critics who championed the return of figurative painting, while opposing practices that Jameson described as postmodern pastiche, or “surrealism without the unconscious.” Most of all, to me and my youthful circle (including Tim Rollins and other members of Group Material), Owens was one of a handful of living critics ellipses and détente Gregory sholette Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 140 1. The list of contemporary critics investigating art and politics was a short one and included, along with Owens and Jameson, Lucy R. Lippard, some of Benjamin Buchloh’s early work, and Hal Foster’s Recodings: Art Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985). 2. “The Problem with Puerilism,” Craig Owens, Art in America 72, no. 6 (1983): 162–63. 3. For a discussion of the newsletters, street art, programs, and archiving of PAD/D see “The Grin of the Archive,” in Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2011). 4. “The Problem with Puerilism” appeared a few months before Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan published their landmark essay “The Fine Art of Gentrification” in October Magazine 31 (Winter 1984): 91–111, which is also available on the website of the alternative space ABC No Rio at http://www.abcnorio.org/about/ history/fine_art.html. overtly rejecting the cynical manufacturing of cultural goods for a sharply rising art market while simultaneously seeking to keep alive the idea of art as a form of social dissent. 1 The year after The Anti-Aesthetic appeared, Owens penned a brief commentary entitled “The Problem with Puerilism.”2 The two-page text roundly denounced the gentrifying effects of the East Village art scene, then in full bloom on New York’s Lower East Side. Originally published in Art in America magazine (with Foster serving as editor), “The Problem with Puerilism” concludes with an unambiguous endorsement of artwork made by a now defunct artists’ collective: Political Art Documentation/Distribution, or PAD/D. I had been involved with the group since its inception at Printed Matter Books in February of 1980, when Lucy R. Lippard asked for help organizing an archive of social and political art.3 By...