Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

“This”

In the final seminar, a chance for participants to address what was left out during the week of discussions, Jay Bernstein said, “I think the anti-aesthetic is in the cards because there is a general crisis in the humanities. . . . What is our form of address? . . . I feel that the question of how any of this can matter, under these economic conditions, has become difficult.”1 The “this” in the last sentence covers a lot of ground, referring to the seminar’s conversations, critical theory, and art. Bernstein describes the sentiment I had reading these discussions, a belief that at the root of most sustained reflections on contemporary art and its discourse is doubt in the efficacy of these twinned means of expression. At stake is whether or not “this”—to invoke Bernstein—is intellectually, emotionally, even economically worth it; whether “this” has an impact on the world; whether “this” escapes mere professionalism. Little of the Seminars focused on specific works of art. Art floated in the margins , as reference points in analyses, as the unspecified glue to ideas and thoughts that hedged toward the abstract. Participants instead evaluated the legacy of the anti-aesthetic, a concept made famous by Hal Foster’s edited collection from 1983.2 As he says in reference to Craig Owens’s 1980 essay “The Allegorical Impulse,”3 but his remark also pertains to The Anti-Aesthetic, it “was just a musket shot in downtown Manhattan.”4 The polemics of Owens and Foster as well as those of others like Douglas Crimp were full of fervor, drunk with the possibilities of critical theory. They defined postmodernism in New York and emphasized notions of criticality and resistance. The Anti-Aesthetic helped usher in a transformation that was already taking place in art criticism: the eschewal of judgments of taste for judgments of politics. The conjunction of art and theoretically inflected criticism was intense, and has not, in the United States at least, been replicated since. The implications of this intellectual revolution were mostly felt in the academy, where a younger generation of scholars found a style of analysis that compellingly brought together art and politics, whatever this latter term might mean. Politics has tremendous currency in art-historical writing about contemporary art. It is related to the idea of criticality, and in my mind the two concepts are semantically the same. Criticality, as with politics, has been conceived broadly, since “no one,” Foster explains, “is exactly sure what that [criticality] is, but, like pornography, we know it when we see it, right?”5 The flexibility in meaning of “this” Alexander dumbadze 1. Section 9 of the Seminars. 2. Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). 3. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (Spring 1980): 67–80. 4. Section 2 of the Seminars. 5. Section 2 of the Seminars. Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 126 both terms always leads me to ask what kind of politics is being invoked when used in discussions of contemporary art. Obviously, the sentiments are clearly on the left, but it is not always apparent if the politics articulated is universal in orientation, or limited to case-by-case circumstances. The ambiguity has only intensified with the ever-expanding nature of the global art world, making the conception of politics as mutable as the subject matter it tries to understand. In recent years, the discourse of contemporary art has emphasized two major models of politics. The first is activist in bent, linked to a particular issue, interpreting art in the service of or the advocacy for a specific cause. The second is more abstract, often associated with claims of subverting dominant systems like late capitalism. The generality of this politics is due to the amorphous qualities of the opposition: globalization, the culture industry, things without a definable subjectivity. In a schematic sense it is possible to see the first model as a politics of action and the second as that of the mind, but never are these categories mutually exclusive. As a rule, they almost always bleed into one another, creating a kind of stasis that is difficult to alter. But why did criticality become such an important stance in the early 1980s? Why has politics been a central trope in art writing ever since? There are many reasons for the methodological shift, but the most significant is the art of Minimalism , Pop, Fluxus, Happenings...