How I learned to stop worrying and do art history
New ways to be an academic
As my previous missive will have alerted you, I’ve been steeling myself for a return to the classroom, my day job. This semester I am teaching a grad methods seminar in art history. I’ve done this before rather traditionally, i.e., by marching through supposedly discrete methodologies—formalism, iconography, etc.; actually, are those the only two?—that we supposedly adopt or apply, though nobody in fact does that. (No art historian ever wakes up and says “Today I will be a formalist.”) For whatever reason I have completely lost patience with that approach and am instead inflicting on my students two whole books (by T.J. Clark and Wu Hung) supplemented by extras: part of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art,” Wittgenstein, fun airport bestsellers like that. Plus a lot of Darby English, including stuff that drives me nuts. This seems the only adequate response to the shittiness of the moment. Anyway, it’s the only response I can come up with.
I am also teaching a course on contemporary art that I’m revamping drastically, namely by devoting each week of the semester to a single artist (all living with the exception of Mike Kelley, who ought to be alive). Some of these artists are young and not yet much written about, forcing me to… assign myself. But most are far enough along to have accumulated literature, meaning that I’ve been trolling through what other people have to say about the likes of David Hammons or Cady Noland.
Teaching contemporary art is frequently an exercise in feigning enthusiasm. Most of it is just not very good. I have tried to learn from undergrads to be less cynical. Many of them like Basquiat and want to talk about that (Basquiat is fine, I just have nothing useful to say about him); some of them like Yayoi Kusama, or people I’ve never heard of, and I make an effort to figure out what’s interesting about these artists. There are patterns of a strange timelessness. I will never not have undergrads writing the exact same paper about Cindy Sherman. I will also never have to spend huge amounts of time to explain Guy Debord’s idea of the spectacle, as it’s something they get immediately and intuitively, at least on a basic level. I have become less uptight about expressing visceral hatred of bosses and cops because it turns out students are mostly on the same page. I think the trick is to talk naturally and not build it into the grading structure too much. We have arrived at an interesting moment when saying that you want to kill the rich and burn down their houses is less politically dangerous for academics than saying that maybe slavery was bad.
But I digress. It’s the process of revamping a syllabus that’s my real concern today, because there is nothing quite like it for registering what is living and what is dead in one’s discipline. In the case of the methods seminar, for example, it is hard to imagine ever wanting to read, much less assign, Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson’s “Semiotics and Art History,” an essay that for years everybody seems to have agreed was important. However, I’d say that what’s even more doornail dead is, ironically—given the extreme relevance and comprehensibility of the notion of spectacle itself—the whole canonized lineage of spectacle’s critique in art criticism since about the 1980s. It’s charming to see how seriously it was all taken not that long ago: Is Pierre Huyghe trying to get one over on us? Those videos look a little too expensive for art! Watch out for retardataire humanism! I don’t think we’re even allowed to use the word “retardataire” anymore.
This kind of commentary—the kind that filled the pages of October, and Artforum in certain of its phases (I wonder what Tim Griffin is up to these days?)—just seems like a way to avoid the crushing obviousness of class warfare. I’m making a simple point. There was a time when we evidently had to be informed that we were being seduced into ideology. Hypnotized into buying white supremacist jeans. (Actually, is that mode of critique coming back? How retro.) It makes one nostalgic for a time when culture felt influential enough to be worth fighting over, a further irony being that our current supposed culture war is really just the nakedest of power struggles and thus not particularly “cultural” at all. It isn’t particularly “cultural” when the government takes away your healthcare or, for that matter, when it puts Confederate statues back up. The statue is a gun.
On the positive side, this situation has a certain liberating effect. It allows a longer view on what art really does. One might, for example—as I have been trying to do, as it happens—trace the longue durée of the migration of semblance out of art and into capitalist social relations, premised as they are on a kind of representational function (a coat equals twenty yards of linen and so on); this allows another perspective (still political, still materialist) on abstraction, fictionality, illusion, and so forth than does the imperative that art do critique (that it de-metaphorize, de-art itself; that it do our job for us). I also suspect that the “critical” phase of contemporary art discourse (roughly 1976 to 2008 or so) coincides precisely with a kind of academic power that has gone the way of the dodo and which was self-consciously obsolescing from pretty near the start of its run anyway. To quote: “These days, the notion that any academic in the humanities might exert real power, except in the specific, sad form of power over other academics (or academics-to-be), feels obviously absurd.” The signatures of the academic power position are marxisant tics that make absolutely no sense. Take for instance the claim (which I borrow, without rancor, from an article by Tom McDonough that I’m assigning my students) that what returned in the trope of the modernist mannequin “was indeed a premonition of the use value that capitalist production had been in the process of systematically destroying in favor of the commodity as pure value, as mere token of exchange.” If we take this to be true what the hell would it mean? That we don’t eat anymore? Critique that persists in the left mandarin mold is a spell meant to conjure vanished social capital. Nobody so persisting today is going to get those jobs, because those jobs no longer exist. Under these circumstances we are better off figuring out, by day, how art works as art, followed by burning stuff down at night; it may be that these two activities have no relation at all. A lifestyle to which I at least aspire.