Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

Introduction (James Elkins)

introduction James elkins The subject of this book is both concise and enormous. As a small subject, the anti-aesthetic is associated with Manhattan in the early 1980s, where it was crystallized by Hal Foster’s edited volume The AntiAesthetic . Practices later identified as anti-aesthetic had emerged in the 1970s, and were developed in the 1980s in various centers of the art world, including New York, Los Angeles, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Stockholm , and Berlin. By the late 1990s, it could be argued that theories of the antiaesthetic had given way to other conceptual formations, such as resistance and criticality, both of which are discussed in this book. The Anti-Aesthetic is still read in universities in North America and parts of Europe, where it is often proposed as a historical document, a moment in the history of reactions against Modernism . In those contexts it has become background reading in the way Heinrich Wölfflin or E. H. Gombrich has become in art-historical pedagogy. It is significant that in some parts of the world The Anti-Aesthetic is scarcely known, and the term “anti-aesthetic” has not passed through the sequence from a label for art practice, to a specific series of theoretical positions, to an element in the historiography of postmodernism. But the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic is also an enormous subject. Historically , the aesthetic has been used, problematically, as a near-synonym for Modernism itself, a way of signaling Modernism’s commitment to value. The anti-aesthetic has been expanded backward in time, to characterize the reaction of Modernism against academic art and against the political situation leading to the First World War: a context in which, as Arthur Danto has noted, beauty became anathema. From that perspective, anti-aesthetic practice has been a sine qua non of Modernism in its many forms up to the present. Currently the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic lurk largely unseen in the pedagogic structures of art schools, art departments, and art academies throughout the world. “Anti-aesthetic” has been a useful label for the activities of students and young artists engaging capitalism in its different forms, thinking about neoliberalism , working out how identities are constructed and represented, addressing the institutions that make art possible and give it value, trying to provide a voice that can be heard above the roar of multinational corporations and the militaryindustrial complex, addressing the assimilation of cultural differences, pondering the gradual degradation of the planet, and thinking about how art might contribute in disaster areas, in underprivileged neighborhoods, or in the everyday lives of IntroductIon 2 people who do not ordinarily use art. Politics, society, institutions, power, privilege , and identity are among the concerns of such practices, which do not always even call themselves “art.” On the other hand, “aesthetic” is still a useful term for practices involving work in the studio, using traditional media such as painting, printmaking, ceramics, and sculpture. Such work may not be aimed at changing or even addressing society and wider culture. Its purpose, at least initially, might just be to achieve value as art. The students and young artists who make such work care, among other things, about the object they produce, and its capacity to amaze, enthrall, absorb, give pleasure. They may not choose to say or think so, but their practices result in aesthetic objects, which hopefully possess one of the many qualities associated with art, from beauty to the sublime. Those two positions are hard to describe, both because they overlap so much and so often and because a formidable array of theoretical arguments rushes in to demonstrate that every aesthetic object is also a political object, and every political object has its aesthetics. Many authors discussed in this book, from Gilles Deleuze to Jacques Rancière, from Jean-Luc Nancy to Arthur Danto, have arguments along those lines. Most any contemporary artistic practice can be shown to be a mixture of aesthetic and nonaesthetic interests, and most any young artist trained in an art school or art department knows how to talk about her work as a mixed engagement of politics and aesthetics. Still, the division holds, and it divides art instruction around the world. Every department of art, every academy, every art school of sufficient size, from Chongqing to Bogotà, from Vancouver to Ljubljana, has some classes, studios, and departments that are mainly dedicated to political and identity issues, and others where students attend to techniques and media. The division runs deep, and...