Can contemporary art be anything but imperial? Žižek, Girard, Badiou and the (In)exorability of ‘Cultural Capitalism’
Artistic Decalogue, Modernism & Empire as campteris of the Girard-Freudian Model-Equation
I got tremendously excited last month to see Žižek mention Alain Badiou in his Substack (I also get excited about things like vacuum cleaners and duty-free La Mer, expecting a mercy-call from Dignitas any day now). The two fell out early this year ago due to “political disagreements” and one can only guess what the straw that broke the camel’s back was (my money is on Israel-Palestine); I’m pleased to see that some sort of olive branch is being extended. Žižek specifically referred to Badiou’s Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art, created in 2003 in an attempt to answer the following question: how can contemporary art avoid being formalist-romantic? It’s the sort of question that means very little until it’s been asked and one I’m keen to answer differently in this Substack by suggesting it can avoid neither.
Badiou, frenemy of Deleuze during the late 70s, continues to be a titan in the world of art thinking. He pumped out Que Pense le Poem? as recently as 2016; it’s a marvellous little text that attempts to remedy the philosopher’s place in the Calliopean Art (spoiler, it’s nestled quite comfortably between Pasolini’s Le ceneri di Gramsci and Phillipe Beck’s enjambments, probably smoking a cigarette and thinking about young Moroccan boys). To Badiou, the artist is a subject of fidelity, a conduit for infinite autonomous, axiomatic and objective truths. He squarely rejects art that seeks consensus and embraces artworks as societal semiotics as opposed to object-representations of Kantian noumena. The vast majority of contemporary art is, in his eyes, a result of Empire’s unrestrained attitude towards possibility and rejects art that embraces that which is recognised as possible under Empire: that is to say, both the Romantic notion that art exists solely to translate the divine to the mundane as well as the Capitalist-Formalist idea that formal novelty is the only way of generating novel art. Most importantly, Fifteen Thesis explicitly engages with art as a site for the creation, rather than the reflection, of truth.
In this substack I’ll be taking at Badiou’s theses and discussing where some of them go wrong, both in terms of the widely-circulated English translation and of argument via the lens of Zizek’s ‘plea for ethical violence’. I’ll then use their ideas to mount an image of contemporary art as the result of a nostalgic desire for order under empire with he use of the Freudian trigonum overlaid with Girard’s theory of memetic desire to tease out some broader points about how, where and why contemporary art constantly and inevitably seeks reassurance from its Renaissance-Romantic past while aspiring to a Formal future as predicted by Jeremy Rifkin’s theory of of cultural hypercapitalism.
Badiou’s manifesto functions (as all manifestos do) under the presupposition of the radical capability of its own success, so there is for the first part of this article little point in engaging with it differently. A collection of responses called 15 Ways to Leave Badiou was published in 2011 by an extremely fine selection of Arab artists (including Mona Marzouk and Hamdi Attia) and deals more succinctly with the potential untenability of his proposals from a political lens. 15 Theses continues to make the rounds online to this day, although (almost as if to prove Žižek’s point) often gets thrown out for having an author guilty of the quadra-sin of being old, white, male and European. I’ll admit that being French is a little unsavoury, but I have no qualms with the other three qualities and so I give myself permission to enjoy his work, just as I do Žižek’s.
First, a quick note on translation. Badiou’s work does not translate well. The treatise that Žižek makes mention of in the opener of his ‘plea for ethical violence’ is the fourteenth of the Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art, and is quoted as follows:
“Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censors anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, communicate, and enjoy. We should become pitiless censors of ourselves.”
I would like to make it clear that I do not think this is a bad or even an inaccurate translation (provided kindly by Peter Hallward). There are, however, a few notes I feel I should make to justify the use of my own translations. In the original French, the thesis reads as follows:
“Convaincu de contrôler l’étendue entière du visible et de l’audible par les lois commerciales de la circulation et les lois démocratiques de la communication, l’Empire ne censure plus rien. S’abandonner à cette autorisation de jouir est ruine de tout art, comme de toute pensée. Nous devons être, impitoyablement, nos propres censeurs.”
The word jouir is particularly important here. Žižek himself used the Lacanian/psychoanalytic distinction between pleasure and enjoyment (jouissance) in his infamous Guardian article in which he noted how Capitalism, at the level of consumption, has integrated the legacy of ’68 (being the critique of alienated consumption) through the development of what Jeremy Rifkin calls “Cultural capitalism”. If we are to function within this framework at all, there is a very clear line in the sand to be drawn in regards to what both/either Badiou and Žižek mean by the act of “consuming” in regards to art. To consume something is not necessarily to enjoy it. Jouir literally contains joi (joy); it is in Badiou’s world the act of creating pleasure from the interaction of self and art (it’s a neat little word in its own right, also being the closest French has to an equivalent for the English verb “cumming” — linguistically adorable, certainly, but I would highly deconseille the experience of having a Frenchman ask where he can leave his enjoyment). To Žižek (or, at least, the translation from which he is working), this interaction is stretched to include the acts of enjoyment (rather than the creation of joy), consumption and, rather bogglingly, communication.
Nowhere in that third sentence is there a notion that might beget such a term. It is not an inappropriate function to include, especially considering how hard we fight and fall in the battle to get our unremarkable thoughts noticed in the vast no-man's lands of the attention economy - but it’s simply not there in the original thesis. The placement of the word pitiless also bothers me: Badiou is not calling for us to become pitiless censors, but rather to censor ourselves pitilessly. The difference between “becoming pitiless censors of ourselves” and “becoming censors, pitilessly, of ourselves” may appear minor, if not inconsequential, but it is neither; the former implies an external application of judgement whereas the latter conveys an introspective castigation. Badiou wants us to criticise our own taste; Žižek (or at the very least Hallward’s translation) wants us to be sure enough of our own taste that we are able to outwardly limit our external enjoyment of that created by the imperial Other. These are not peripheral distinctions. Similarly, to “accept” permission from oneself to enjoy something is not quite correlative to Badiou’s notion of “abandoning” oneself to imperial authority… we’ll be here all day if I keep this up.
This all may seem a revoltingly pedantic excuse to show off my French, but it’s important to define exactly what Badiou is asking of us, not just as arbiter elegantiae of culture but as citizens of Empire. Naturally these expectations and connotations shift from reader to reader, informed as we all are in our own ways, but these are the sorts of niggling little problems that recur throughout the commonly-circulated translation of his works. I will mostly be using my own translations, but I include the link to the most widely-available English translation here. This is also the translation that Žižek appears to be working from so it does nobody any good to discard it entirely, and I will add my own two cents only when and where I think it’s relevant to note how Žižek (or, more generally, English readers) will be interpreting Badiou’s disquisition differently than designed.
The framework of the Źiźek’s reference to Badiou was an illustration of a proposal to remedy the spinelessness of those who forgo what Brecht calls the ‘Platonic core of ethical violence’ – the supinely modern tendency to put our own necks upon the chopping block of the presupposed universality of cultural consensus, usually in an attempt to appease the primogenitor Other. We must, argue Brecht, Badiou and Žižek, be unfettered in our own discipline towards enjoyment, to trust in and ruthlessly apply our ethical and aesthetic taste, to reject the unconstrained permissiveness of Empire, to be a brutal exegete if it’s the last thing we do. If we must consume from the cultural manure-offerings of Empire, they argue, let us do so not with pinched noses and smelling salts: the criticism must come earlier, it must be inexorable to our attempts in landscaping the weed-ridden garden of delights offered by Empire’s reckless and untrammelled ‘licence to enjoy’. To consume may not be to enjoy, but it certainly is to condone. It is a weak and liberal mind, according to Žižek, that comforts itself with the emanation born of indulgence in corrupt works: “I may have eaten faeces, but at least I got to write a Yelp review about the little bits of corn” is a heinous attitude (please, no more ‘intellectual’ video essays on The Boys or Love Island). We shouldn’t be eating, or indeed making, the shit in the first place. It’s all very typical Žižek and I leave you with the link to the full paywalled Substack here should it be of interest.
However, Žižek’s original Substack is not particularly focused on art, yet alone contemporary art. He draws parallels between the pseudo-Freudian tendency of using narrative-deconstructionism as a way for modern audiences to ‘rewrite’ experiences. He goes on to bemoan how this regression has been formally expanded to affect history, religion, language, and more in order to restructure hard facts into a Lacanian Real imagined by the subject-survivor, be they victim of sexual abuse recasting the scene of their aggression or a minority rescripting their race or sexuality’s presence in a historical period. The New Age — the Age of contemporary art — he notes, ultimately “reduces my other/neighbour to my mirror-image or to the means in the path of my self-realisation (like Jungian psychology in which other persons around me are ultimately reduced to the externalisations/projections of the different disavowed aspects of my personality).” We commit, in Žižek’s eyes, the double sin of not only placing our peers within the Borromean knot but of also allowing them to slip too easily between its states. However, it is possible, he writes, “to break this vicious cycle precisely insofar as one escapes the hold of the superego injunction to enjoy.” (God, Žižek, are you sure you weren’t brought up Protestant?)
Žižek here introduces the idea of a Law that is not sustained by a superego-injunction, and it is this that I will be attempting to bring back into Badiou’s realm of contemporary art with the help of René Girard. The rest of the Žižek piece contains some potshots at Levinas (“this is not how a survivor of the Shoah (…) thinks and writes. This is how those think who feel guilty for observing the catastrophe from a minimal safe distance.”) and concludes with a classic “Judaism is Logically Corrupt” spiel… It’s a dull, slightly murky declamation and one that I am relatively indifferent to the truth of, and so I will focus only on the parts of the essay leading up to Žižek’s proposal of a society “no longer grounded in shared common roots”.
He is referring, naturally, to the “externally and violently imposed, contingent and traumatic” Mosaic Laws, the ‘ethical violence’ of the Decalogue – rules, rituals and relations that justify their own existence, written quite literally in stone. In terms of the philosophy of art, the Commandments can be analogised to the quadrivium, specifically Morris Kline’s modern classification of the four elements as pure (arithmetic), stationary (geometry), moving (astronomy), and applied (music) number. This lends itself to a Renaissance-Romantic art ethos; the reproduction of the objective through mathematical truth, a “[static] copy of the sensible world” as Badiou would say. Perspective, anatomy, and optics are the three tenets of this goal: prior to the twelfth century, European painting broadly lacked structure or systematic rules, existing essentially in, as Huang, Ly and Gu put it, “a state of disorder”. The Renaissance brought about a structured approach, establishing methods to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane using scientific and rational techniques based in mathematics that was used up until the Romantics; a structure of universal tenets I refer to as the Artistic Decalogue.
They may not be externally imposed in the sense that a stoning awaits any artist who forgets the rule of thirds, but are certainly internally enforced by the natural human cognition of optic reality translated onto canvas (a state arguably even more contingent and imposed than Mosaic Law). These imperatives are not in and/or of themselves conducive to self-realisation or self-fulfilment, as the Nietzschean laissez-faire is: as Žižek notes, you cannot go back and amend the tablets (“adultery—yes, if it is sincere and serves the goal of your profound self-realisation”). Similarly, until the birth of Modernism you could not add to or ameliorate Alberti’s categorisations of perspective as outlined in Della Pictura (“linear perspective— yes, unless it gets in the way of painting Elizabeth Siddal’s bottom”). These are inexorable Laws conducive in their creation-discovery and adoption to their own social or artistic Good hic rhodus.
Contemporary art must follow no such Law, just as New Age religious types may indulge in heterodoxy. Pollock can only exist in the same world that lets women be priests, Imams be gay, and feminists be pornographers; that is to say, a world of permissibility. Badiou’s portrait of Empire as an unfettered playground of indulgence is not immediately flattering, but it is not entirely pictured as unconducive to good art. I turn here to his ninth thesis:
“The only maxim of contemporary art is to not be imperial. This also means that it must not be democratic, if democracy implies the following: to conform to the imperial idea of political liberty.”
This ninth thesis in particular suffers from its usual English translation, which posits that the the creator, rather than the art itself, must not be imperial or democratic. This is where I believe the major misunderstanding of Badiou stems from; nowhere does he argue that good art cannot be made by a subject-survivor of the imperial political system. That being said, I’m usually a little wary of any post-war art thinker that takes the approach that any art, yet alone good art, is capable of resisting commodification — not because I necessarily disagree with the ambition, but because it tends to forgo practical considerations of art production, distribution, and reception.
There is unresolved tension between Badiou’s rejection of the search for formal novelty and his desire for “infinite subjective series through the finite means of a material subtraction” – infinite ideas can be generated without melting the ice caps, but it’s not an easy feat in any sector of imperial society, yet alone the art industry. Even ecology-mad Guattari admits that despite “rather than remaining subject, in perpetuity, to the seductive efficiency of economic competition, we must reappropriate universes of value, so that processes of singularisation can rediscover their consistency,” that “new social and aesthetic practices, new practices of the self in relation to the other, to the foreign, the strange [is] a whole programme far removed from current concerns.” It’s not that Badiou is wrong in suggesting we reject the Capitalist ethos, it’s just that it relies on an untenable insistence that artistic truths are somehow impermanent and, in this, are distinct from Empire’s incessant formal novelty.
Art will continue to be made irregardless of ecological and ideological intention and it’s a bleak if noble prospect to disregard anything that is a product that reflects or embraces what Badiou considers imperialism — not only because this only works if we assume that artistic truths are generated in a vacuum independently and impermanently of their imperial creators, but also because in practical terms it usually involves a white thirty-five year-old living in a yurt in Malaysia for several months and isn’t a particularly serviceable view of how (or by whom) art is made (or sold) these days.
Badiou embodies this tension in his praise of Malevich. When describing the Suprematism White on White, he asks if this ”is that the creation of something?” before going on to praise Modernist arts ability to combat the Romantic-formalism of imperial/contemporary art. “[In] Malevich we have an ultimate purification of the story, of the problem, and also its creation, but it’s also the end, because after white square on white square there is, in one sense, nothing, we cannot continue. So we have a complete purification and after Malevich all correlation between shape and colour looks old, or impure, but it’s also the end of the question, and we have to begin with something else. We may say that with artistic creation, it’s not exactly the pure creation of new forms, something like the process of purification with beginnings and with ends too.”
Could Badiou have made the same claim in the fifteenth century, when the Artistic Decalogue first offered a challenge to the notion of art as merely a “translation of the divine into the mundane”? Almost certainly. His insistence in his tenth thesis, that “non-imperial are is by default abstract, in that in it abstracts itself of all particularity, and formalizes [sic] this gesture of abstraction” is only a result of his (and Žižek’s, who praised Malevich, Rothko and even Hopper in a very fun interview with critic Fernando Castro Flórez) perception of Modernism as a Deleuzian Event. What he praises in not, in fact, the purification of independent artistic truth (if there is such a thing), but its rupture. Badiou’s third thesis reads as follows:
“The truth of which art is the process is always the truth of the sensible, as the sensible. This is to say: the transformation of the sensible into the eventuality of the Idea.”
Badiou’s interpretation of the Event differs significantly from Deleuze’s but I believe Modernism fits the bill either way; and although he says he disagrees with Heidegger they are eigentlich pretty similar. Modernism as an Event (interruption as such, the appearance of a synthesised “supernumerary term”) allowed the Western world to approach art with an attitude that superseded the traditional axes of the sensible/sensual. The word “eventuality” is translated to “happening” in Hallward’s translation which is, I believe, a massive oversight. The Event is central to Badiou’s work in general and it is even more central to his view of contemporary art. Modernism is, in Badiou’s eyes, a rejection of artistic truth as a “copy of the sensible world, (…) a static sensible expression.” What Modernism offers — and what Badiou praises — is an articulation of artistic truth in the sensible realm with a “possibility of universality against the abstraction of money and power”. This art, he argues, creates infinite possibilities within itself, sans formal novelty. By comparison, contemporary art — which he refers to as “imperial art” — is an unholy combination of the “Romantic, expressive, violen[ce]” and “something extremely formalist, politically straight”. Here Badiou presents pre-Modernist structures as contained, and brutally so, by the Western canon of what is (and isn’t) correct, both by both its creators and its audience. Modernism is in his (and many others) eyes the precursory respite before Empire, the calm before the storm of post-Communist “forced universality of globalisation”.
Žižek is correct in invoking the superego when describing this world of uncurbed permissiveness; that is to say, the imperial command to Enjoy, to Consume. Ironically, however, in other works he attributes the creation and consumption of contemporary/imperial to the id, a postmodern expression as an embrace of primal wantoness. Žižek argues that contemporary art and its avoidance of beauty is at its core an ideological attempt at subversion. The solution to this, he suggests, is the implication of craftsmanship, that “the most subversive thing today is to be truly disciplined and do your hard work”.
This is an alarming tempting image: contemporary art as an escape from the looming shadow of the Renaissance-Romantic’s strict canon into the unbound sunlight of postmodernity, a child breaking free of his fathers oppressive but caring grasp, and that any hope of return to “good” art requires a renewal of ideological discipline, a lovingly paternal backhand to remind the kid who’s in charge. I do agree that a return to the artist-as-scientist is long overdue (like learn to mix your own paints and burn your own charcoal), but this still doesn’t beget the image of contemporary art as an unfettered scion of the Renaissance-Romantic: the id is an “instinctual demand as desire/menace in need of mediation”, and, as we have seen, contemporary art by design must (and does) reject mediation. After all, what menace does Renaissance-Romanticism offer either creator or audience today? Our understanding of art is built off the Artistic Decalogue; you cannot fear your own foundations, only deviate from them (a point that Źiźek is comfortable making in his discussions of religion, especially Judaism, but fails to carry over into his discussion of art). Furthermore, Zizek’s image relies on the same nonsensical idea that permeates Adorno’s works, the notion that beauty has only recently “become” ideological. To be clear, it always has been; the Artistic Decalogue may be enforced by natural means, but the appreciation of frameworks that herald it is an ideology in an of itself (Aristotle and Plato’s connection of goodness and beauty, anyone?).
It’s also a particularly rich insult from somebody whose own solution to the imagined problem is itself ideological: implementing craft into art does not save art, because good craft does not make good art and vice versa (a 60-hour ballpoint portrait of the latest Marvel super-hero is well-crafted, no?). Craftsmanship, as noted by Elliott Earls, is a critical component of the late capitalist art system. Bad contemporary art can be well-crafted - look at Kusama, at Koons, at Kapoor (in the eternally wise words of Dolly Parton, “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap”).
To assign contemporary art to the id is an inherently and inconsequentially Conservative equivalence (a belief shared by Žižek and, of all people, Peterson in his slightly bizarre chapter on domestic beauty in Beyond Order); but I mention it in order to introduce the Freudian analogy to the equation and place it firmly within the camp of the superego-injunction.
Žižek is not a philosopher of art and so it is forgivable for him to not have resolutely carried over his (entirely correct) plea for ‘ethical violence’ into the realm of contemporary art creation, and it is possible that I am taking his interview with Castro out of context (he dismisses Pollock as an alcoholic, which is also massively endearing). However, I think his stance is an excellent entry-point into the rebuttal of broader thinkers like Adorno or even Duchamp, who view contemporary art as a rejection of the superego-induction when it is in fact the opposite. Contemporary art, as we have seen through Badiou, embodies the embrace of societal expectation; it is at its heart an incarnation-embrace of the late capitalist ethos of creation, one that places the onus of understanding upon the audience-subjects interpretation of self through her Mosaic Neighbour.
If contemporary art was truly an account of the id, it would be an instinctual singularisation of primordial thought and I wouldn’t have to spend my evenings sieving through emails containing incomprehensible press release gibberish aka ‘artspeak’ for the sole propose of assuaging the egos of insecure West Coast academics and enriching corrupt East Coast gallery owners. In fact, if contemporary art was innate and disconnected from any kind of societal (or indeed imperial) superego-injuction, neither of us would be here.
Artistic Decalogue, Modernism & Empire as Campteris of the Girard-Freudian Model-Equation
Monthly rant about the state of the modern press release over, we arrive at my main thesis. If Empire’s postmodernist Law engages/is engaged by the superego, then how might we analogise the Laws of Artistic Decalogue and Modernism in regards to the consumption of contemporary art? I suggest that the nature of the remaining angles (campteris) of the Freudian trigonom, that is to say of the id and the ego, can be attributed to these Events respectively. If Contemporary Art is the sequela of Empire, then the Artistic Decalogue of the Renaissance-Romantic is the spontaneous and instinctive id and Modernism, as a transitory Event, is the reconciliatory ego.
To attribute these movements to equation of the Freudian ego lends itself, naturally, to a psychoanalytic reading of contemporary art and its societal developmental. This is where Girard enters the equation: more specifically, his theory of memetic desire. It’s a theory usually applied to literature and marketing: the idea that desire is an not autonomous experience composed of only two constituents, that is to say, the desiree (subject) and the desired (model). Rather, he invokes a third subject, a quality held by the former and sought by the latter: the object. “All desires,” he notes, “operate as a subconscious imitation of another’s.” When this model is applied directly to the “world” of both subject and object, it produces rivalry (say, Lysander and Demetrius, who originally both seek Hermia for her father’s status) but outside of this it merely produces emulation (say, Don Quixote and Amadis de Gaula, who the former considers a role model but may by design never meet).
If we overlay this trigonum onto the Freudian equation, an interesting pattern emerges. We are afforded here a picture of the id as the subject (the self, true and unfettered) the superego as the model (the modern aggregation of consumptive, imperial law) and the ego as the mediator/object (the synthesis of individual and societal desires).
It is possible to take this a step further and overlay the nuclear familial structure onto both Freud and Girard’s: the child who wishes to paint on the wall, the father who wants him to become an accountant (or maybe an art meme account owner, who knows these days), and the mother who gently suggests he scribbles on paper instead. I include this reading because I enjoy it immensely and does, to an extent, illustrate both Badiou and I’s points, but I won’t push the allegory too hard. It mainly introduces the Oedipal complex into the equation which I will indeed be pushing further. The question that concerns us now, however, is how to translate these relations of desire and emulation onto broader societal and intellectual interactions with art — and, of course, how they interact with each-other.
Girard suggests that the relation between subject and model is either rivalry or emulation depending on whether both inhabit the same space. Badiou, of course, suggests that all post-modern art is made under the watchful eye of Empire and therefore does exist in the same space, and we would be hard pressed to argue with him. Contemporary art is made mainly for (but not always by) the Western world, for (as Badiou puts it) the “capitalist universality of the market”. The desire of imperial art, he argues, is the “desire for infinity”, just as it is for capitalism. The real desire of imperial art, therefore, is emulation: not of then imperial quintessence for newness in formal quality, as this is an intrinsic quality of the campter, but of the recreation of Renaissance-Romantic’s translation of truth. Its relationship to the subject, then, is simultaneously interrupted and supported by the disruptive Event.
A rivalry is therefore imminent, between the ‘cruel’, formalist yet universally unmistakable and finite structure of the Artistic Decalogue and the laissez-faire acquiescence of contemporary art. Oepidus cannot become his father, but his desire to be like him (as contemporary art wishes to embody the same Real of the Rennaisance-Romantics) may still be expressed by a coveted aspiration to align itself with the quantities of their sole conciliatory force: the perceived formal disruptiveness of Jacosta qua Modernism. The implication of this relation is some sort of nostalgic jealousy, a categorical longing for Order without material friction, and it’s one I think should be addressed more carefully in view of reponses to the rapid rise of formal novelty that permeates contemporary art today.
An excellent example of this arose recently in an article for FAD, a London-based art journal I have a real soft spot for because everyone I’ve ever met that has written for them has been tremendously nice (yes, yes, I am again proving Tatol’s point that all art criticism is at its heart PR, but that’s a subject for another Substack). Last month, journalist James Marshall attempted to answer the titular question of “why is Alex Israel’s show at Gagosian annoying so many people?” as an add-on article to an interview he produced about the artist. The show Marshall discusses, REMEBR, sees visitors connect their photo galleries to a series of portrait-shaped screen and present them with a rapid slideshow of their lives. The AI part involves removing screenshots and nudes (a shame, their inclusion would make for a much better piece of art).
I use Alex Isreal as a jumping off point not because I’m particularly fond of or even interested by his art (his Bret Easton Ellis show in LA a few years ago was so insultingly listless that it put me off my third rereading of Zombies) but because any art that uses AI falls very neatly into Badiou’s definition of “rendering visible that which Empire already recognises as existent” presented in his fifteenth thesis. Badiou was writing in 2003 but his final point predicts (and criticises) its rise with startling accuracy:
“It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognises as existent.”
The very nature of generative adversarial networks is one of recognition of that which already exists under Empire: GANs seek, replicate and learn from networks of images and data created under imperial diction. AI’s artistic sequela is inherently an embrace of formal novelty, a continuation of Empire’s “complete obsession with new forms” both in its embrace of technology and the truly infinite subjectivities it can generate (literally, in the case of GAN-reliant works, and formally in the case of ID-reliant works likes Israels, which are literally produced by and for imperial subjects-participants).
Marshall’s article paints Israel — or, more specifically, this imperial adoption of formal novelty — as Event embodied, a perturbation qua persona. “It’s a somewhat known fact that revolutionary artists are despised for their disruption of traditional models,” he notes. “[T]hese new experiences within are undoubtedly allowing new appreciations and connections to art that have literally been impossible before.”
Marshall’s notation of disruption is the embodiment of the nostalgic tension that exists between the contemporary and Modernist ethos: the effaced Western desire to simultaneously castigate and continue within the worlds of art that came before specifically in relation to its audience-adoption. As noted, I’m relatively indifferent to Isreal’s work, but I was particularly struck by Marshall’s use of the word “magical” to describe it, appearing several times during the article. It’s a good term to use when describing mainstream reaction to formal novelty in art: wealthy European Muslims fought a campaign to have lapis lazuli import embargoed when ultramarine started being imported from Afghanistan in the sixteenth century, claiming to believe the product to be made from the tears of djinn, and we are all familiar with the early twentieth century American fears that photography was actually capturing the sitters soul. Regardless of audience-adoption, these novel forms were to some extent or another, results of Empire, of trading routes and industry. The hubbub on both sides over AI has proved that we are no less superstitious as we were then, but Marshall’s descriptor is a marvellous illustration of the typical contemporary art enjoyer’s desire to reject the perceived obéissance to superego-induction by adjuring the optic puissance of the Romantic-Renaissance Decalogue.
To be clear, Isreal and his artistic ilk are neither revolutionary nor disruptive. The reaction to Isreal’s work that Marshall is describing elicits the muttered criticisms of Manet and Whistler filling the hallways of the Academie des Beaux-Arts, but Isreal is entirely lauded by comparative contemporary institutions (I saw REMEMBR at Basel Hong Kong in March, where it was being promoted by a very, uh, ‘revolutionary’ BMW sponsorship). What we actually seek is the cultural fire-coverage that the Artistic Decalogue provides its proponents: the perceived propriety of a ruleset that provided a solid framework from which to pass judgement on an artwork.
Modernism lost the Western world both in form and practicality the ability to say if any piece of art is good or bad: not only because Modernism allowed for the rejection of the Renaissance-Romantic’s optic mathematics and the objective ruleset that art adhered to in order to translate truth, but because the truth itself being translated shifted after the Industrial Revolution. The formal qualities of artistic material became inexorably connected to the metamessage being conveyed. Malevich’s delve into the divorce of shape and colour would not have appealed to Romantics for a number of reasons, but the primary reason is that paint, until empire, held no other quality than than of a translator of, as Badiou puts it, the “divine into the mundane”. Modernism was ultimately as disruption of the view of material as tool and it is this relationship that we seek to emulate in contemporary art: not as the divine into the mundane (Saints and Angels onto secular canvas) but the mundane into the divine (the domesticity of iPhone photography onto the deiformity of screen). The latter is not possible without the former: a God only exists if she is believed in.
What Badiou views as the conveyor of truth is not, in fact, the artist, it is the material and the Real qualities attribute to the form in which the Sensual material is presented. We return finally to Rifkin’s Hypercapitalism and the notion that more and more we are becoming consumers of our own lives: we have stopped buying products and started buying experiences. This, ultimately, is what contemporary art: a translation of truth as experience.
In this way, we see that there is no escaping the Romantic past or the Formalist future: they are in terms of Deleuze and the Event, the synthesised terms of art as it stands today, the trunk and the leaf of the arborial artistic truth. Contemporary art asks that we take the role, in Oedipal terms, of Jocasta: we should seek neither to consummate our desire as the id-Oedipus or reject them as the superego-Laius, but to become the reconciliatory force between them. If someone’s going to slap contemporary art around the head it to remind of where it came from, it should be the weary Modernist mother.
Audience-patron reception cannot and never will be be divorced from contemporary art. Serrano’s Piss Christ would never have been made (or, indeed, acclaimed) if the NEA had not been around, but it is perfectly possible to argue that The Creation of Adam might have been painted sans Julius II. Asking if contemporary art can be anything other than imperial is like asking if Laius can be excused from the Oedipal equation: a triangle must have three points, both Girard and Freud’s trigonum must have more than two campter. Contemporary art must, be default, be both Formalist and Romantic. It is a fault of modern contemporary art philosophers to dismiss this relation as nothing more than a result of imperialism and I feel that there is a major disconnect between how and why art is made “now” and how it was made “then”: we seek constantly to recreate that which both the conservative and liberal cultural mind considers to be of service to the Artistic Decalogue, wether it is rejection of emulation. Jacosta and Laius exist without Oedipus, but the same cannot be said of the prodigal son.
Thank you for this !! I’ve been on a Zizek and Girard hype these past 2 months. Trying to get to the bottom of “the role” of the artist now in the context of our contemporary relationship to sacrifice …
Pardon me if this sounds blithe, but I don't understand the main point of this essay.