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27 JUL – 2 AUg
Notes on the Old
Leire Vergara
Speaking of the old is not an easy task, since it evidences everything still to be resolved in the new. Indeed, the new as a term entails inconclusiveness; a certain innovation is always an indispensable part of what it formulates. But can we do without the old in attempting to understand the new? What sort of perspectives must we employ today to read the old? Is the new useful to understanding the old?
My interest in the old comes from a certain anxiety before the culture of the new, understood here not as a dynamic rupture with past forms (in the utopian sense or in terms of a change in paradigm), but rather as an unconscious response tied to the notion of unnecessary, continuous renovation. Our life is imbued with that feeling, and it exerts a major impact on how we endow the world around us with meaning. Indeed, the very term “contemporary” is what renders the new suspicious. This is evident in how the notion of the contemporary imposes on us, now more than ever, a certain ideological subjection in relation to the present. This sort of inevitable contract leads us to constantly forget the past, to do away with the old and to confine our identity to contemporary reality.
The framework for Boris Groys’s discussion in “On the New” is the way that our culture is conditioned by its aspiration to the new. Although for Groys the tendency towards innovation in Western culture is intrinsic, he proposes the possible radical gesture of “giving primacy to the old” to “break with the cultural rules that demand the continual production of the new.”(1) To this end, the author locates the new between the past and the future, and even within the archive, as a way of evidencing its dynamic quality and relation with the past. On the old he writes: […] What exactly the old is must be explained. Because each era must invent the old again; that’s why all renaissances have always been, at the same time, great restorations.(2)
In this text, I would like to approach the old in a different way. My interest does not lie in the exercise of comparing the new and the old, but rather in the fluid relationship between them since the very beginning of modernity. This text will center on the space of the fluctuating relationship between the old and the new. It will attempt to focus on the processes of exchange through which the new casts away the old or the old becomes new again. I will focus on the various divestments effected within those exchanges and the vestiges that they leave. The point of reference for this sort of reading is the traces produced by the new as it brushes up against the old, as well as those it has left in its own projection onto the future. On the basis of this vision of the vestige, I will propose several urgent needs: heeding the different typologies of the new and the old; analyzing the evolution of their different meanings, especially in relation to the socio-economic contexts on which they have acted; and evaluating the political effects of these processes on collective identity throughout modern history.
Starting with the old rather than the new formulates new questions when it comes to understanding our culture’s dependence on innovation, questions like: By means of what processes is the new rendered old? Are there different interpretations of the new? That is, does the new always and necessarily entail a transformative rupture that moves us ahead? Or, on the contrary, is the new sometimes a mere reflex of our innovation-producing culture, a characteristic that Groys deems inevitable, intrinsic? Does the old also have varied attributes? And if so, what are their functions in our society? Is the old just a tool for restoring and regulating the new so that it can continue to move forward? Or does the old perhaps possess specific knowledge inherent to the process of being discarded? Is it, perhaps, that possibility – that is, the fact of being dismissed – that carries the new cultural gesture that Groys sees in the old?
We cannot be satisfied with the idea that the old, simply by virtue of having been dismissed, is confined to another regime, one isolated from the entire capitalist dynamic. Just the opposite. The old changes for the sake of the advance of global capitalism. In his “The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique,” Brian Holmes warns us of the tendency of contemporary capitalism to absorb all critical reactions, thus fortifying its influence. For Holmes, the capitalist dynamic not only assimilates criticism but also builds new power structures on the basis of the arguments of past criticism and its forms.(3)
When speaking of contemporary art, this sort of reflection on the correspondences between the old and the new has specific connotations. As with other types of cultural productions, the connections established between these two terms fluctuate between restoration and change. And as in culture at large, in art the old and the new also generate residue and waste. In the form of examples taken from a variety of contexts in the recent past, below I enumerate a series of questions relevant to current cultural practice. I have included them because I believe that they evidence the processes of exchange between the old and the new. The divestitures of that exchange are what concern us here.
Interpretation
In 1964, Susan Sontag spoke of interpretation as the modern way of understanding the work of art.(4) Her essay “Against Interpretation” develops a series of aesthetic and political convictions through which art can be protected from the influence of interpretation. Sontag demands that criticism pay great er attention to “how art is what it is, even that it is what it is rather than to show what it means.”(5) It is strange to read Sontag’s reasoning in terms of the context of art in 1960s, a moment when artistic practices seemed to want to be rid of form. Yet, her argument is based on the idea that interpretation is precisely that which annuls artistic experience. Thus, her essay attempts to confront the dark zones that, both then and now, lurk around form. Sontag situates the problem as follows: One of the difficulties is that our idea of the form is spatial […] That is why we have a more elaborate vocabulary of forms for spatial arts than for temporal arts.(6)
Style
One year later, in 1965, the same author wrote the essay “On Style,” where she further develops her arguments on the relation between form and content, undermining the power dynamics in that binary. To that end, Sontag employs the poet Paul Valéry’s daring inversion: “What is ‘form’ for anyone else is ‘content’ for me.”(7)
In her text, Sontag suggests that the problems formulated by the concept of style overlap with those formulated by the concept of form, and hence their solutions will have a great deal in common. Once again, she finds the example of this in Valéry, who maintains that the function of form is to “to preserve the works of the mind against oblivion.” What the French poet means by this is that the resources of style in poetry are the means that words afford for creating a memory of themselves before material signs (writing, printing) are invented.
This notion of form as that which protects an idea from being immediately forgotten is what Sontag defends in her text, and it helps us to understand its relevance for contemporary art. In the current context, though, this question must be debated in relation to the tendency towards depoliticization that the concept of form has experienced in recent times. Form is like a mask that is always being changed. And for Sontag, discarded forms warn us of the speed with which styles succeed one another, not even allowing the work itself to be repeated.
The Modern
The dynamic of rupture is what defines the modern as opposed to the classic. In A Singular Modernity, Fredric Jameson defines it as follows: The “modern” […] signifies a fundamental dividing line between a henceforth classical culture and a present whose historic task lies in reinventing that culture.(8)
Nonetheless, the temporal definition of modernity is arbitrarily malleable. Raymond Williams introduces the notion of “conscious modernism” to the debate on the modern, that is, the tendency that offers a critical reading of modernity. In his text “When was Modernism?” (1987), Williams asks in what exact period to situate that tendency since, in his view, it soon ceased to be anti-bourgeois and became part of new international capitalism. Williams’s book The Politics of Modernism, a series of texts written right before his death in 1988, discusses the debate on the modern and modernism and William’s clear dissatisfaction with the new debates around the term “post-modernism.”
If for Williams modernism was soon assimilated by the capitalist system, what could we expect of post-modernism? At present, when the term post-modern is growing somewhat obsolete, the debate between the modern and the post-modern takes on different connotations. Now old, the post-modern informs us of how late capitalism advances, the rules according to which it does so, just as the modern, at the time that it was being replaced by the post-modern, instructed us on bourgeois values in the public sphere. At the same time, those modern terms (the masses, the working class) that post-modernism, in its day, set out to correct have become the rubble of that passing.
And, meanwhile, new tasks are at hand, like confronting Western production of knowledge with the production of knowledge from other places. Is that why we now speak of modernities? In his interest in finding an alternative to the confinement of modernism in the late capitalist system, Raymond Williams suggests heeding everything in disuse, everything at the margins of the modern period. According to Williams, that might be a way of, once again, imagining community.(9)
The White Cube
A spatial manifestation crucial to modernism is the art gallery, the white cube. And, as Brian O’Doherty(10) suggests, art history should, therefore, be correlated to the evolution and the changes that such spaces have experimented over time. The white cube – that space whose windows have been obliterated, walls whitened, floors polished and whose light source is on the ceiling – exemplifies the process of isolating art exhibition spaces from the outside world. This aseptic separation of the white cube from the vital context privileges the aesthetization of the formal qualities of reality as transferred onto the art object. Nonetheless, had it not been for such changes – that is, had the work of art not been confined to the gallery space – art would have become obsolete, would have lost the possibility of being rendered current. The defense of the work of art as an autonomous entity and the consecutive criticisms of that notion simply would not have taken place.(11) The debates and artistic practices that, in the 1960s, arose as a critical response to the white cube, debates and practices that continue into the present, wage a struggle that attempts to break with that supposed neutrality. These sorts of critical practices entail a rupture with the bourgeois ideology implicit in the neutral form that takes the original shape of the gallery space. Time and again, its qualities – whiteness and silence – attempt to erase the evolution of that struggle.
The Popular
The term popular offers us an alternative when it comes to thinking about the old, one that goes beyond rummaging in that which has become obsolete. The popular speaks to us of the layers of meaning that a single term can take on and shed over time.
“There is not only such a thing as being popular, there is also the process of becoming popular.”(12) Those words of Bertolt Brecht’s aptly sum up this alternative. Their context goes back to the debate between Brecht and Georg Lukács in the 1930s on the most suitable aesthetic forms with which to reach the proletariat.(13)
Lukács defended realism as the formula with which to reach the audience. Brecht, on the other hand, proposed experimentation and the production of new languages of representation. The clash between the two revolved around the search for the socialist form that the work of art should adopt within political activism. While that debate was taking place in the East, in the West Adorno and Benjamin were discussing Baudelaire’s poetry and the relationship between art and capitalism.
Bertolt Brecht would write several essays opposing Lukács, but they would not be brought to light until 1968, presumably due to Lukács’s power and influence in the socialist block during the period when they should have been published.(14) Brecht’s old arguments would soon find a new ally in the film forms of the 1970s.
Changes
Law of Changes is an aesthetic-historical theory that Jorge Oteiza develops in two texts prepared as lectures: the first, “Ideology and Technique for a Law of Changes,” was a paper for the XIII International Conference of Art Criticism in Italy; and the second, “Art as a School of Political Awareness,” was delivered in 1965 to Basque university students in Barcelona. Both lectures were delivered after the final phase of his “propósito experimental” (experimental work).(15)
The discussion in Ley de los cambios revolves around assessing the dynamics by which aesthetic languages change and surpass one another. Oteiza describes this movement by means of two curves, one ascending and the other descending. The first begins in nature and evolves upward until it reaches a point of maximum expression. The second reduces that expression to nil, and begins again to end in life. Both phases are readjusted and corrected along the way: […] Certain moments at which expression is accentuated geometrically, becoming formalized, followed by a period of degeometricalization, a loss of formalization, a disordering of the previous regime of geometrical stabilization of the composition.(16)
Oteiza situates this moment of negative expression at the end of the constructivisms, when his work deformalized Malevich’s Black Square and White on White in the empty space of Oteiza’s own Metaphysical Boxes. After that conclusion in form, Oteiza’s work centered on life, on tasks hitherto considered beyond the realm of art. And at that point the new change took place, one based on the finishing off the earlier artistic languages, that is, a “political action for the transformation of life and society, fundamentally through the transformation of the structures of education.”(17)
Education
The 20th century offers many examples of tendencies concerned with politicizing education. The problem is how to render those tendencies current. The debate revolves around the possible influence of education on contemporary art practices and institutions, as well as curatorial practice. Since the beginning of the museum as a modern institution, though, it has been concerned with education. Indeed, the protection and communication of certain narratives of history have been among the museum’s chief tasks. The question of political currentness that many art, culture and education professionals grapple with today is not immune to the dangers faced by education in the context of its integration into the market economy. In the European Union, university students and professors have offered a variety of critical responses to the process currently taking place in Bologna. In the relevant legislation, the privatization of knowledge and its attendant homogenization is privileged. Still, the question of the current politicalization of education leads to new questions, such as: What sort of liberating transformation is education capable of producing in today’s society? How can we keep education from falling into the traps of the market? How can we put into effect its transformative potential?
Jorge Oteiza uses the comparison of aesthetic practices as a means to better grasp the changes that take place in the historical processes of art. Indeed, that is what his Law of Changes contributed to education and its potential in terms of political transformation. Oteiza’s formulation lays stake in a model of comparative analysis of aesthetic changes based on studying how other peripheral contexts and types of experiences can, in their difference, provide new knowledge about historical processes. In terms of this, among his educational projects was the never opened Laboratory of Comparative Aesthetics. The possibility of imagining a dynamic interrelation between aesthetic practices and their varied evolution in relation to the specific contexts in which they emerge is still relevant. Indeed, particularly relevant considering the process of homogenization in which contemporary culture is immersed, a tendency that revolves around discarding everything involving difference.
The Aesthetic Experience
In Does Art Heal? Suely Rolnik analyzes two of Lygia Clark’s final proposals: Estructuração do self and Objetos relacionais, both from the moment of transformation that art experienced in the 1960s and 70s. Clark’s works allow Rolnik to introduce the concept of aesthetic experience as opposed to art object. She relates that concept to the idea that aesthetic experience is connected to the spectator, while aesthetic practice is solely the terrain of the artist. Hence, the type of aesthetic experience to which the spectator has access necessarily entails a negotiation with something spectral that latently resides in experience. The author puts it as follows: The work operates a kind of initiating of the spectator to that which Lygia calls the sensation of “empty/full”: current maps become emptied of sense because of the overflowing abundance of new sensations, which ask to become part of existence.(18)
For Rolnik, the phantasmagoric is related to “…the historical moment in which aesthetic practice ceased to be an integral part of collective life and became restricted to a specialized field.” She maintains that that moment coincided with the emergence of clinical practices deposited in subjectivity, practices characterized by “the reduction of subjectivity to the psychological dimension and the banishment of the aesthetic one.”(19)
Thus, aesthetic experience will always imply a process of rendering current all the qualities of the work of art discarded by the capitalist system.
Phantasms
For Jacques Derrida, the specter or the phantasm casts doubt on what we think we know. Hence, the phantasm is an agent that warns us of everything that we don’t know.(20)
Susan Sontag’s text “Notes on ‘Camp’”(21) helps us to understand the spectral aspect of camp. In 1964, Sontag, using a clearly analytic tone, wrote a series of notes that describe different camp manifestations, experiences and tastes. Initially, the text seems difficult to render current. Sontag’s operation of attempting to evidence “what camp is like” and even “what camp is” warns us that the implications of the term have changed. This is even clearer when we try to analyze the impact of that term on the collective in the contexts of gay liberation movements. Though contemporary processes of subjectivation make interpreting Sontag’s text with the same urgency problematic, its political dimension is intact. At the time it was written, Sontag’s text not only subverted hierarchical relationships between high and low culture, but also projected camp onto the future, that is, onto all readings and studies of post-war American culture.(22) Hence, the moment or the reasons that camp became old no longer matter.
This understanding of camp as a specter that calls our attention to the constitution and evolution of identity politics helps us to reflect on how our culture produces and reproduces knowledge, that is, how certain ideas prevail over others, how they are perpetuated by means of repetition. Yet, on occasion the ideas that are left on the margin, the ones that are not affirmed time and again, are the ones with the most to tell us about the specific context that, at a given time, produced said knowledge. At the same time, the new and its implacable tendency to erase the old keeps us from being aware of this in real time. Though maybe we should heed Derrida and stop insisting on the existence of a real time, since “the condition of possibility of the living, absolutely real present is already memory, anticipation, in other words, a play of traces.”(23)
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(1) Boris Groys, “On the New,” in Art Power, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008, pp. 23-42.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Brian Holmes, “The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique”, in Hieroglyphs of the Future, Zagreb: Arkzin/WHW, 2002, available at http://www.utangente. org.
(4) Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation” (1964), in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Dell, 1966, pp. 3-14.
(5) Ibid., p. 14.
(6) Ibid., p. 12 (note).
(7) Susan Sontag, “On Style” (1965), in Against Interpretation…, op. cit., pp. 15-38.
(8) Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, London: Verso, 2002, p. 17.
(9) Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, London: Verso, 2007, p. 35.
(10) Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space (1976), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999, p. 14.
(11) Ibid., p. 19.
(12) Bertolt Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács,” in Th. Adorno, W. Benjamin and others, Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, 2007, p. 85.
(13) Ibid., p. 66.
(14) Brecht’s difficulty in making his position on Lukács’s arguments known would soon find alternative means of expressions, for instance a number of essays by Walter Benjamin, who closely followed his friend’s frustrations.
(15) Jorge Oteiza, Ley de los Cambios (Law of Changes), Zarautz: Ediciones Tristan-Deche Arte Contemporáneo, 1990.
(16) Ibid., p. 30.
(17) Ibid., p. 36.
(18) Suely Rolnik, ¿El arte cura? (Does Art Heal?), Barcelona: MACBA (col. Quaderns portàtils), 2006, p. 8; available in Spanish at http://www.macba.es
(19) Ibid., p. 9.
(20) See, for example: Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1993), transl. by Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994.
(21) Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), in Against Interpretation…, op. cit., pp. 277-293.
(22) I would like to thank Xabier Arakistain (Arakis) for his comments on this idea.
(23) Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed interviews, London: Polity Press, 2002, p. 129.
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