The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (review)

The Aesthetics of Disengagement is an innovative and challenging, yet not totally unproblematic book that raises important questions on contemporary art and aesthetics as well as on the relationships between art and science. It claims, first, that contemporary art displays a specific regime of attention and perception and, thus, of the aesthetic interaction with the object and the world; and second, that it intervenes in a very active way in the ongoing scientific debate on the nature of depression. More specifically, the book argues that, in the field of aesthetics, contemporary art's fascination with depression introduces a dramatic modification of what happens between the audience and the world, bringing to the fore a characteristic lack or incapability of interacting with the other. In the scientific discussions on depression, Ross makes a plea against the currently prevailing dementalization of depression and the accompanying marginalization of psychoanalysis.

The relationships between art as a symbolic production and melancholia as a particular mental and physical state have always been a key issue in Western thought, and for most thinkers and practitioners these links have been kept in high esteem. Melancholia was considered not an obstacle but an opportunity. It was seen as a condition to artistic innovation, for it stimulated a critical distance that fostered the artist's imagination and creative powers. Yet one of the specific features of post-World War II art is the shift from melancholia to depression or, to put it more clearly, the loss of melancholia as a creative state of mind and the simultaneous rise of a new kind of depressive non-relationship, with the word defined by concepts of deficiency and the impossibility to "cope"—with the world, with others, with oneself. Depression, hence, means the impossibility to establish any traditional aesthetic relationship whatsoever, since such a relationship is characterized by exactly what is missing in depression: the orientation toward the outside and the building of oneself through perception of the other, dialogue with the other, critique of the other. Disengagement, it should be clear, is the opposite of absorption, i.e. the aesthetic state of mind imposed by modern art, to follow the famous analysis by Michael Fried.

In a series of well-documented close readings, Ross demonstrates how contemporary artists, such as Ugo Rondinone, Vanessa Beecroft, Douglas Gordon and Liza May Post, enact what is going on in depression. This enactment, moreover, is not just descriptive but performative (in the sense used by Judith Butler) and forces the audience to experience what resides in the heart of the depressive state of mind. Yet this is only half the story, for Ross argues that the aesthetic of disengagement is also critical, both of traditional aesthetics and of society. Disengagement is critical of aesthetics, for it denounces the latter's incapacity to deal with the contemporary social problem of depression (according to the most recent statistics, half of the world's population will suffer some depressive disorder at some point in their lifetimes). However, it is even more critical of contemporary medical science, which refuses to take into account the mental and psychological dimension of depression. For Ross, the contemporary medical doxa on depression is characterized by two axioms: (a) physicians apply a "summary semiology" (a term coined by French psychoanalyst Pierre Fédida), that is, a mere description of symptoms without any interpretation; (b) they defend a strictly biological and pharmaceutical treatment of the illness that refuses to make room for mental, psychological and psychoanalytical aspects of the patient's symptoms. In these debates, contemporary art's enactment of depression plays a key role, for it intervenes in each of the two questions (the aesthetic one and the medical one) put forward by Ross. The art of disengagement proposes "thick" images that cannot be reduced to mere symptoms but have to be experienced in a subjective and mental way, even if this experience emphasizes the very difficulties...