Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

The Aesthetic, the Anti-Aesthetic, and Then What?: Why Answering this Question Involves Thinking About Art as Labor

I received and read with great interest the proceedings of the Seminars “Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic.” The title of my response, paraphrasing the title of Dan Karlholm’s recent article “Post-war, Postmodern, and then What?,” delivers in summary what, I think, is at stake here:1 an implicit need to address questions of periodization pertaining to, and connecting, art and theory. This should be far from a formalist exercise. Such a need arises in the concrete, if perplexing , conditions that art and theory find themselves in as the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, when we are confronted with a new twist of the plot “all that is solid melts into air,” first elaborated by Marx and Engels. I therefore concur with those voices in the Seminars that stress the intellectual and political obligation to place this enquiry within a historical context.2 There is no doubt in my mind that such a context can now be described as the crisis of contemporary capitalism—indeed, the identification of the current stage of capitalism, the one known as globalization, with crisis. The crisis of the Eurozone (from where I write these lines), the crisis of the markets, the crisis of feminism,3 the crisis of the humanities, and the crisis, I would dare say, of the anti-aesthetic (so associated with postmodernism) are part of this crisis in the hegemonic mode of production. It will, of course, be noted that I did not place art in terms of a crisis. In my view, the radical art of our times is exempted from this predicament, having managed to provide a new dialectics of the contemporary—creating a contemporary art history on a horizontal rather than vertical axis. And it does this in ways that both engage and reconfigure the debate on the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic. In discussing these developments, my main premise is the Seminars’ spectral question: did the discourse on the anti-aesthetic not go far enough in turning into social praxis, or is this a case where a radical thesis was outsmarted by a project of “structural adjustment” transforming the institution of art? Let us not forget that the discourse on the anti-aesthetic took place at the same time as capitalism led Fredric Jameson and others to speak about a generalized, dominant cultural logic.4 Without conflating the two terms, there was something the aesthetic, the anti-aesthetic, and then what? WHY ANSWERING THIS QUESTION INVOLVES THINKING ABOUT ART AS LABOR Angela dimitrakaki 1. Dan Karlholm, “Surveying Contemporary Art: Post-War, Postmodern, and Then What?,” Art History 32, no. 4 (2009): 712–33. 2. See Section 9 of the Seminars. 3. See Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review 56 (March/April 2009): 97–117. 4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) (see especially the introduction). Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 202 5. See chap. 6, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The AvantGarde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 6. Angela Dimitrakaki, “The Spectacle and Its Others: Labor, Art, and Conflict in the Age of Global Capital,” in Globalization and Contemporary Art, edited by Jonathan Harris (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 7. See Section 7 of the Seminars. 8. See Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference : Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (New York: Routledge, 1988). connecting postmodernism’s eminently cultural (as opposed, say, to economic) logic to the broader aestheticization of all areas of life. Hal Foster, who played a most important role in launching the anti-aesthetic as a strategy of resistance, also contrasted postmodernism’s cultural subject with the economic subject of modernity.5 I have argued elsewhere that globalization, far from simply privileging a politics of geography (as is commonly thought), introduces a new economic subject that cannot be uncritically identified with that of modernity.6 The implications of this shift are yet to be understood—at least by me—but are hardly irrelevant to an imagined move “beyond” the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, as they foreground new urgencies. Where indeed do we find the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic? In artistic practice, even if neither term can be collapsed into artistic intentions. And what is artistic practice? It is what the artist does when he works. This is a major implication of the rise of...