Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

The Elusive “Beyond” of Aesthetic and Anti-Aesthetic

In his introduction to this volume, James Elkins acknowledges an earlier, rather modest effort by James Meyer and myself to create a forum where the polarized categories of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic might be refigured.1 While I’m pleased that some of the issues we raised are substantially deepened and expanded in the transcribed seminars, I’m less delighted by Elkins’s account of our framing of the debate. He asserts that we privileged the anti-aesthetic side of the equation , assigning political significance only to art practices designated as such.2 Yet neither the content of our preface nor the theoretically variegated essays we commissioned for Art Journal support this reading. Back in 2004 we concluded the following: “Rather than call for a return to classical aesthetic theory unchanged or an anti-aesthetic suppression of aesthetics, we have sought a structural understanding of these discourses as historically intertwined and a possible cross-pollination of the terms of the debate.”3 With these remarks, we invited a reframing of the aesthetic and antiaesthetic as historically consubstantial, but not necessarily reconciled. We also hint that such a possibility was unlikely to issue from the revivalism of beauty that emerged in the U.S. art scene in the 1990s. This largely classically derived “return to beauty” not only privileged artistic and societal harmonization, but also simply inverted the polarity between aesthetics and politics established in anti-aesthetic frameworks. From the evidence of the Seminars, some consensus was reached regarding the necessity of revising the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic opposition in ways we had previously signalled. In seminar 1, Hal Foster frankly admits that ideas of the aesthetic developed by Kant and Schiller in particular were “reified” as the “bad object” in postmodernist criticism.4 He’s now inclined to agree with Jay Bernstein’s recommendation that the aesthetic and its negative twin be thought as mutually implicated rather than implacably opposed or historically distinct tendencies of modern art.5 Having been given the opportunity to respond to the illuminating, but also exasperating, conversations that make up the Seminars, I will direct most of the elusive “beyond” of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic toni ross 1. Meyer and Ross, “Aesthetic/AntiAesthetic : An Introduction,” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (2004): 20–23. 2. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 3. Meyer and Ross, “Aesthetic/AntiAesthetic ,” 23. 4. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 5. It should be noted that Foster, as he insists at various points in the Seminars, has long given up defending postmodernism or the anti-aesthetic. A salient example of this retreat appears in Foster’s book Design and Crime. In a symptomatic analysis of commodity fetishism in its recent technological manifestations, Foster calls for a pragmatic redeployment of the concept of aesthetic autonomy, a concept that had previously been anathema for postmodernist critics. Foster, “Antinomies in Art History,” in Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2002), 103. Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 160 my comments towards the writings of Jacques Rancière. Clearly, this thinker’s contributions to the issues that preoccupy the seminar participants receive harsh treatment.6 I want to suggest, however, that Rancière does offer a productive reconfiguration of the structural dynamic of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. And that he does this in a way that eschews endless, “zombie”-like demands in the contemporary art world to move “beyond” the past by predicting the next era of something or another. “Administered affect” perhaps? One of the central claims made by Foster and like-minded proponents of the anti-aesthetic was that the postmodern break with Modernism announced the demise of art’s autonomy. This overturning applied both to Greenberg’s “truth to medium” version of Modernism and to ideas of aesthetic experience as distinct from other spheres of modern life.7 Moreover, as Foster’s reference to the art of Barbara Kruger and Hans Haacke confirms, anti-aesthetic practices were commonly defined by an overt commitment to politicized subject matter.8 Conversely, the aesthetic was aligned with (Modernist) art invested in formal experiments that bracketed or obscured social content. Thus, in theory if not always in practice, those who privileged the anti-aesthetic supposed that aesthetics and politics occupied opposing camps. Rancière presents a different view, arguing that politics has been present in modern aesthetics from the beginning, even where we least expect to find it. Commentary in seminar 6 outlines Rancière’s more general account of the aesthetic dimension of political praxis...