2008 Fall: Theoretical Constructions in Contemporary Art

Some of Baudrillard’s rhetoric rings true about our culture, particularly about the disappearance of borders between politics, sex, and aesthetics. “When everything is political, nothing is political any more, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears.� Art hasn’t disappeared, but it’s interesting to think about how the meaning and classification of art has changed over the last century. The definition is certainly more muddled when you can put a urinal on a wall and call it art, or have ballerinas walk down a city street in a certain path (one of the Mark Beasley-curated events). Baudrillard says, “The crucial moment for art was undoubtedly that of Dada and Duchamp, that moment when art, by renouncing its own aesthetic rules of the game, debauched into the transaesthetic era of the banality of the image.� I found myself wondering whether or not this is lamentable. One could view this as having freed art from being so closely tied to aesthetics so it could enter the realm of ideas (much the way photography helped free up painting to be non-representational, to be abstract and expressive). We are now surrounded by images (aesthetics), to the point where they do become banal, but most of these images have very little valuable meaning or subtext. Perhaps art’s place and function can be redefined as being the not the source for aesthetics, but for images/objects/ideas with meaning?

Some of Baudrillard’s other arguments I found to be suspect. I reacted negatively to his attempt to link AIDS to the current state of sexuality in our culture as transsexual, as spread in to all areas of life, which “manifested in the viral explosion of AIDS.� I wonder how he would view the rampant spread of AIDS in cultures that are quite different than western culture, in Africa and South Asia-- in cultures that haven’t had a sexual revolution, where sexuality is not imbedded throughout the culture to the same extent? It’s true that the spread of a virus can have much to do with cultural habits, but AIDS is not a phenomena that could only have occured in our “transsexual� culture, and it’s a bit jarring for him to use it as a proof in his argument.

In fact, it seems like much of his argument is about only the western world, beginning with the third sentence listing the various liberations we’ve enjoyed (political, sexual, forces of production, women, children, art…) Now that I think about it, did these liberations even happen in the west? Obviously yes, to a certain degree, but he seems to be saying there is no more liberation for us to strive for, so we are aimlessly simulating reality. I fear this latter part is true, thinking about the ubiquity of television (which clearly both Baudrillard and Adorno and Horkheimer have an antipathy towards). But perhaps the reason for our fascination with hyperreality/simulated reality has less to do with us being all done liberatin’ ourselves, and more to do with not enough liberating.

I really wanted to like this essay, but over time its irritating and incessant abstraction, its lack of groundedness in any sort of specific physical or historical reality, its intellectual incompetence in defining key terms and phrases, and its constant arrogant declarativeness, gave me no footing whatsoever, and proved almost entirely useless to my life, except to refresh my sense of anger at writers like Baudrillard. I felt like a blind person who was deliberately blinded by someone, and then led around like a fool by the person who blinded me. Baudrillard strews his essay with all-too-general, impossible-to-define, and completely open terms, such as "liberation," "consciousness," "God," "nothing," "everything," "things," "value," "good," "evil," etc., and yet makes no move whatsoever to try to define these terms. Many of Baudrillard's statements are "all-encompassing," and therefore impossible to refute, impossible to falsify. So, one must sit back and dumbly accept everything Baudrillard says. Baudrillard has no empathy whatsoever for his reader, the reader he so vainly tries to impress with his abstract and cryptic prose.

Further, I found myself disagreeing with Baudrillard's basic premise in this essay, and thus disagreed with many of the conclusions with which Baudrillard follows that premise. First of all, I disagree with Baudrillard that "we have pursued every avenue in the production...of objects, signs, messages, ideologies, and satisfactions, " and that "all (scenarios) have taken place already," especially as these statements relate to the art world. Every year new artistic ideas are being born, every year new kinds of art are being made, new methods being discovered, new thoughts being unearthed. Perhaps creation by nature is always original, always dynamic, always new, and one can't help but be "original" when one creates anything at all. Baudrillard's view is a bleak, pessimistic one, and one which I can't relate to. Secondly, I disagree with Baudrillard's highly general assertions that "everything has been liberated" and that "all the goals of liberation are already behind us." Aren't women still not being paid as much as men in the workplace? Doesn't the top 1% still own 50% of the wealth? Isn't religion still finding its way into the political realm? Would Baudrillard call this state of things "liberation"? Has "the state of utopia, of all utopias," as Baudrillard puts it, really been "realized"? Of course not. I think Areca is right that, while we may be more and more interested in simulated reality, perhaps "there is more liberation to strive for." Perhaps many goals of artistic "liberation" have already been achieved, and are still being achieved -- I tend to think they are, as the definition of "art" seems to be getting broader and broader by the year -- but "artistic liberation" is different than "all the goals of liberation." Baudrillard bases his entire essay on the idea of "liberation," but backs away from defining the word, not even in his own (cryptic, encoded) terms.

Also, I don't understand what makes Baudrillard say that the "idea of progress has disappeared," or "the idea of politics has disappeared," or many other ideas have disappeared. I would argue that perhaps "progress" only continues because the "idea of progress" continues, and "politics" only continues because the "idea of politics" continues. In other words, perhaps once an idea is created, it cannot disappear: it only persists in time, and in unison with the "thing" to which it is attached. Perhaps the "idea" of the "thing" is dependent on the "thing" itself, and the two cannot be separated; perhaps "things" cannot possibly be "freed from their respective ideas, concepts, values, points of reference, origins and aims." How is it possible to strip a "thing" of its "idea"? I tend to think it's not possible, and that Baudrillard is wrong. And I think that people are more aware of the "ideas" behind the "things" than Baudrillard gives people credit for.

I can’t help but react to statement that although the idea of politics has disappeared, the “game of politics continues in secret indifference to its own stakes.� I knew I’d have trouble doing the reading tonight because current political events are so throughly and alarmingly distracting, and I’ll try not to relate everything to our severe situation. But yes, the game of politics continues in blatant, not secret, indifference to its own stakes. Although I have trouble understanding what Baudrillard means by “the idea of politics is disappeared,� I am interested in this representation of culture as an unthinking propulsion of excessive, prolific, and essentially imitative reactions, barreling out of control, with complete indifference to (or ignorance of) the stakes. And again, when the author starts talking about capital acting in this manner, in the sense that it has (by losing the idea of itself through insane replication), made itself “autonomous in a free-floating, ecstatic and haphazard form, and thus to totalize the world in its own image,� I have to just point out that we may finally be reaching the point of consequence. Maybe. If only we can wrap our mind around something that almost doesn’t exist anymore physically.

The most interesting part of the essay for me, though, actually comes at the end. At first, I was reacting negatively to the idea that art has been “dissolved within a general aesthetization of everyday life, giving way to pure circulation of images, a transaesthetics of banality.� At first, I understood that to be based on the assumption that an image, just for the sake of itself, is inherently banal. However, I prefer to interpret that what the general “culture� determines to be art is not necessarily dictated by artists, but rather by media, trend, and the mass production and distribution of images. But just because there is this saturation of imagery on one level, does that really warrant the conviction that there is no longer an avant-garde, or the possibility of any radical critique? I think that statement ignores a whole dimension of society, the small, but crucial part of it that does not respond so predictably to the media. Perhaps it is more about the fact that this profusion of imagery (or sexuality) that is supposedly diluting its own category is actually simply not leaving room for silence and thought. The daily deluge of image and message does not ever stop- it continues without interruption- and there is no representation in screen or other media imagery for silence.

Otherwise, I couldn’t find anything else to agree with or really relate to at all. This immediately makes me think that perhaps I didn’t understand the piece well enough, or that because I don’t have much background with this kind of reading, that I lack the perspective to interpret its meaning in context. However, I just read Rowan and Areca’s responses and realized that I’m not alone in this reaction. Although I don’t feel as violently misled as Rowan, I do feel that most of the statements were a bit grandiose.

Baudrillard’s essay came off to me as an extremely cynical and egotistical projection of the end of art, amongst other things. He suggests that our culture has fallen into such a state that there is no longer any determinate of value, good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Surly Baudrillard’s determinants of good, evil, ugly and beautiful are identical to mine, as they are to yours, and everyone else. I think not- rather I find this to be a terrible generalization. According to Baudrillard, there are no longer ideas, only proliferation and progress. We continue to reproduce, but we are asexual beings. We continue to make art, but we do no talk about art and ideas. “The idea of politics has disappeared, but the game continues.� Aesthetics, politics, sexuality and economics no longer have definitive boundaries thus resulting in simulation and human indifference.

Baudrillard has quite the nerve to boldly proclaim that this substitutability results in the disappearance of art. I won’t argue that today’s culture consists of a jumble of visual and aural stimulation, sex, politics, and the media. But this overlap of culture is what fosters the growth of new ideas. When different genres mingle together and remix, the most interesting and powerful moments can occur. People of different class, gender, race, education, political backgrounds, and interests join together to exchange dialogue and share interests. For example, rather than politics adhering to its own set of logic and values it can interact with art and the two can redefine each other.

Everything has not been done. There are new things to do everyday. With every different collaboration or combination new ideas are born and projects are underway. I see this relate to Mark Beasley’s piece where he collaborated with the blind to understand their experience as they touched an elephant. This was not art about aesthetics; rather it was art about experience. After his lecture, I asked Rowan his thoughts of this kind of performance as art in comparison to highly rendered visual works. And I agree with Rowan when he stated that art, no matter its form, is art as long as the idea behind it is strong.

First of all, I think it is helpful to point out that the author was in his sixties writing this essay around 1990. I agree with Areca in that he is focusing on western culture, and even more specifically I think he is talking directly to the United States. So he witnessed in the beginning of his adult life the revolution of the late sixties (culture, music, art, political protest, etc.) So in his lifetime he arguably saw the peak reached, shall we say he lived through ‘the golden years’.

I would agree that most cultural liberations in the western world hit their peak in and around 1966 (if I had to pick an exact year). In music, Pet Sounds responded to Rubber Soul, then Sgt. Pepper responded to Pet Sounds, and Smile would have responded to Sgt. Pepper. Rock’n’Roll was hitting its peak, breaking down boundaries, making its own rules. Things were moving so fast that only in hindsight was the general public able to get a grasp of what the hell was happening. So the market quickly scrambled to package all that really hot new shit and sell it back to the masses. And since the sounds, colors, fashion, poetry, be-ins, freak-outs, festivals, and moments where people actually got together physically in large masses were for the most part the ‘real deal’, the bar was set and ever since then we as a nation have tried to re-create that ‘orgy’, but that time has passed and the next time the revolution comes it won’t be wearing a tie-dyed moustache waving an anti-vietnam war banner. It’s a different ballgame now. The modes of communication are different. Recently I was chatting with a neighbor of mine who is in her late sixties. I asked what it was like living in those golden years. She said the major difference is that back then it was much cheaper to live, so you could work part-time, pay to go to school, and still protest on the weekends while burning joints and bras. Nobody was being crushed by debt and having to work full-time just to pay rent and buy groceries. So she sees more of a financial condition keeping the younger generation quiet this time around. Nobody our age can afford to lose their jobs because they were breaking windows at Macy’s in downtown St. Paul. So this current economic situation fueled by American Super-Greed might need to implode to get the ball rolling on the next revolution. We need to lose the fire in order to go fighting for it again. We’ve gotten too fat on Costco and cheap oil. This ‘state of utopia’ that Baudrillard speaks of is hyper-realized in the form of the American Suburb. Big plastic boxes filled with machines to simulate. That’s what Baudrillard means when he speaks of the ‘anthropological reality of the twentieth century’ being ‘the image of a person sitting watching a television screen.’

I believe the evolution of the western mind is a flight from nature. I believe the next revolution will be a return to this natural world that bore us and sustains us. It is now a revolutionary act to rebuild communities and learn how to grow your own food again.
Baudrillard’s essay resonated with me up to a point. His idea that everything is liberated once, and the rest is just a second-hand simulation of that initial liberation, is a very linear way of thinking. I’m a believer that everything moves in circles, comes back around again, and never looks the same each time.

My initial impulse was to tear this essay apart. “We have pursued every avenue in the production and effective overproduction of objects, signs, messages, ideologies and satisfactions,� says Baudrillard. “…what can we do?�
“Well, for starters,� I respond, “we can expand our discussion to encompass the whole world’s population, not just the overconsuming beneficiaries of North American corporate overproduction and relative social liberalism.�
“Now everything has been liberated,� claims Baudrillard.
“Oh really,� I scoff. “I’ll inform the Georgians, the Kurds, the southern Sudanese, the LA sweatshop-slaves, etc. They’ll be so pleased.�

I could talk shit to Baudrillard until next Tuesday, especially for stating “[the bourgeousie], along with capital [has] generated a classless society.� However, it’s more challenging and more useful to try to glean some bits of relevant wisdom from his work. First of all, since so many people have commented on the stylistic flaws in Baudrillard’s writing, I have some words of defense. (I’m surprising myself here, because his unclear rants bother me too.) Nevertheless, I think it’s worthwhile to consider that Baudrillard and other writers of his generation were seeking to distance themselves from the colonialistic legacy of the Enlightenment by questioning its rationalistic conventions of rhetoric. So, in order to accept an essay like this on its own terms, we have to consider this form of cultural criticism to be something more akin to subjective prose instead of “objective� social science. On that level (and if one ignores Baudrillard’s failure to acknowledge his own position of privelege and the limited scope of cultural phenomena toward which he directs his broad generalizations), he presents some vivid and insightful depictions of 21st century mass-communication culture. I especially liked the idea that in the age of digital networks “…things disappear through proliferation or contamination, by becoming saturated or transparent, because of extenuation or extermination, or as a result of the epidemic of simulation.� Another unsupportable claim that I feel evokes a sort of metaphorical truth: “…everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end. So politics will never finish disappearing – nor will it allow anything else to emerge in its place.� What rational argument could better represent the baffling corruption of American civil liberties and democratic process, and their virtual replacement by hour upon hour of televised political theater that no one – not even the participants – seems to take at face value?

However, unlike Baudrillard, we don’t have to get caught up in an endless cycle of fascination with the ennui of our own first-world privelege. Furthermore, the banality of aesthetics-obsessed mass culture doesn’t have to extend to every aesthetic object. We can work to create meaning in the shadow of our confused and prolific media-machines, and if that meaning can be shared sincerely with just one other human soul, it’s a success.

Baudrillard's perspective on gender, politics and art in his writing, “After the Orgy� was quite interesting and mostly mirrored my own perspective. He repetitively mentioned; the “transeconomics�, “transaesthetics� and “transsexualitiy�, that everything is sexual, everything is political and everything is aesthetic, by explaining that “Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political any more, ...�
I think Baudrillard's “trans-everything� theory fits my ideology and the view of the modern world because everything do seem to exist in everything. There is nothing I can think of that has nothing to do with politics, sexuality, aesthetics or any category you want to name it. Regardless of the intention of the creators, things do get mixed up with everything and becomes “trans-you-name-what�. If a person don't see something political in a piece of art, some one else in the world would. No information you take-in or take-out, can be neutralized or maintain it's purity. As Baudrillard said, “...because communication results, precisely, from a society's inability to transcend itself as a function of new aims.�
Although I agree with most of his perspectives, I do not agree to his main metaphor of modernism as “the orgy�. It seems that this metaphor heavily relies on his idealism towards the modernism. Pleasure is not over while person like myself still find upcoming pleasures from after modernism. May be Baudrillard's orgy was over, but hell not mine is still going on. This is trans-modernism. Beginning or end of modernism is nothing special over the history of humanity. Ideologies, movements or whatever emerges, it gets absorbed by everything around it, loses it's “purity� and waits for something else to emerge. Modernism was only a little portion of this fractal flow of nature.

Baudrillard's After the Orgy, describes in detail the complications that arose after the Modernist thought tore down many of the social, economic and cultural walls that once existed. It's fascinating to think that modernity had such a wide reach. I never really connected modernism with the counter culture movement of the late 60s but after reading Baudrillard's essay it make sense. Along with the "liberation" from various constraints comes the problem of how to deal with the amount of choices and overabundance of information that are present in our culture today.

An example of the blurring of boundaries in various spheres of our culture can be found in the influence of entertainment, advertising, and marketing on the media and the political system it covers. Politics have become another form of entertainment. In general, people are less concerned with policy then they are with how well they relate to a certain persona. Basing a campaign off of the idea that a certain presidential candidate seems like some one you could have a beer with in a bar is far more effective than talking about specific issues. People are more concerned with how a candidate looks, how they talk and who they sleep with. The entertainment industry has conditioned the public to view most everything on television as entertainment. Because of this much of our citizenry has become passive. Along with the elimination of many of our cultural boundaries comes an overwhelming amount of freedom. In Terms of art this can be seen as both a positive and a negative. On one hand we are at a time when virtually anything goes. The art world is more inclusive and excepting than it has ever been. On the other hand the value of art has been diluted by the overabundance of imagery. Art has to compete with a visually saturated public space so it often gets lost. As Baudrillard said "When everything is esthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly anymore, and art itself disappears.

I find Baudrillards assessment of life in postmodern times intriguing. The idea that boundaries are continually being blurred and degraded is evident in the ease of information exchange and dispersal. Though I generally agree with what Baudrillard is saying, I wonder if he is being bit extreme and over critical of our current situation. Is it a bad thing that boundaries are coming down. Perhaps our civilization is in a period of adjustment. I liken it to the 21 year old going on a bender after gaining access to the new found joys of legal drinking. Perhaps our culture is in a coming of age phase or maybe we are just experiencing a hangover from the party that was modernism.

I love this essay. The language implies transcendence. The merging of ourselves into the whole of everything. The complete loss of ourselves which is determined by structure, thought, and our physicality. That we are unable to stop and unable to understand.

Having removed all limitation we no longer need limitations. Yet we are also unprepared for this eventuality. We dont know what to do. It is as if suddenly as a child you are an adult. As a mortal, you become God. As a planet dweller you orbit into mass consciousness with the entire universe. The effect is so overwhelming and disorienting that we begin to simulate that very state we moved from. I find it fascinating as it poses the question, What do we really want and immediately answers with, Be careful what you ask for.

“The state of utopia realized, of all utopias realized, wherein paradoxically we must continue to live as though they had not been.� Baudrillard’s statement is uncompromising and without resolve, which is obviously frustrating. He gives no proof for any of his sweeping generalizations. He says that we can only ‘hyper-realize’ utopia, but offers no explanation as to how we can invent a new utopia. How can people stop inventing, we have no historical example to explain the end of newness because it’s never happened. He only describes end as “[disappearance] through proliferation or contamination.� Is “contamination� an end, or a beginning, a bricolage.
Baudrillard, Horkheimer, and Adorno, shed light on similar topics; especially in response to consumer culture. Adorno and Horkheimer write, “the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality.� One could describe that thought as hyper-real as defined by Baudrillard. However, their similarities aren’t of primary interest to me. I think that their critiques of culture differ in their thoughts on utopia. Horkheimer and Adorno champion utopian Marxism as the resolve to a hyper-real consumer culture. Baudrillard states, “Communication is more social than the social itself: it is the hyper-relational, sociality overactivated by social techniques. The social, in its essence, is not this. Rather it was a dream, a myth, a utopia, a conflicted and contradictory form, a violent form…� Baudrillard writes in a time period where many communist societies have spiraled into violence. He offers no utopia of his own, though, to take us out of hyper-reality.

In Baudrillard’s comtemplation of Western Culture “After the Orgy� – or since the revolutions since the 1960’s – he claims that now we can only simulate. “We may pretend to carry on in the same direction, accelerating, but in reality we are accelerating in a void, because all the goals of liberation are already behind us…�
“This is the state of simulation, a state in which we are obliged to replay all scenarios precisely because they have all taken place already, whether actually or potentially.� As I read “After the Orgy�, I associated a timeline of world events from the past forty years as well as events of American culture and the drive of the media separating them into 1960’s to 1980’s – as a prequel to “After the Orgy� – and 1990’s to 2000’s wondering how and what in Baudrillard’s theory would differ twenty years later?
I have read that Baudrillard is the most misunderstood theorist of the last decade. While I questioned, disagreed and associated everything I read to the media, I did connect with the last thought: “One day the image of a person sitting watching a television screen voided by a technician’s strike will be seen as the perfect epitome of the anthropological reality of the twentieth century�

The idea of Modernism as the beginning and the end of social liberation, especially with aesthetic values in art plagues me, is there no room for new ideas and liberations to take place? According to Baudrillard liberation is behind us and all we can do now is realize that. We can only live a life of reiterating the past and play out a future that has already been written. “All we can do now is simulate liberation, pretend to accelerate in the same direction, but in reality we are accelerating into a void, because all goals of liberation are behind us.�
Baudrillard statements about the nature of social change and manipulation of the people echoes the earlier writings of Brecht in that he is aggravating the reader and making me agree that I am being suppressed by the powers of corporate control

The section when he talks about how nothing ends by dying but instead it slowly disappears through proliferation or contamination into a circular orbit of incessant commutation is a great way to show the power of over stimulation and where all this information goes. All this information that makes it impossible for the artist to make something new, something that hasn’t been done. Now we have to go back into ourselves to justify that if it has been done, I haven’t done it yet so it will be different if done by my hands.

Momentous changes happened in culture between 1910-1950. Liberation of the mind created new perceptions and gave way to a culture of needs desires and conveniences that could now be fulfilled. These writings have proven to me that the thinkers of that day were angered by this capitalistic devalued angle society is and was taking. I see the need to know this past but I’m tired of eating from that bowl. As I say this I feel the pressures of contradiction and that whatever I say can and will be suppressed by someone else’s worlds, so why try to say something faithful and positive about this society we live in.