‘A lot of smug, half-assed conceptual gestures'
Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class: And Other Writings
Haymarket, 224pp, £11.99, ISBN 9781608462681
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Ben Davis is a New York art critic who has written for Village Voice and Slate, and is currently executive editor of artinfo.com. His most striking contribution to the debate about the role of the visual arts in the age of neoliberalism has been a pamphlet of 2010 that forms the title piece of this debut publication. Written in tabular form, like Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it sets out a series of back-to-basics propositions about the social role of art and artists from a broadly Marxist perspective, not the easiest trick to pull off in an art world almost entirely given over to post-ideological immersion in filthy lucre.
The 'Theses' are a model of unarguable clarity. They proceed from the opening contention that 'Class is an issue of fundamental importance for art', via class definitions of labour, reflections on the fate of Marxian categories of economic and cultural class in a globalised era, and the democratic deficit in art's institutional structures, to a call for the 'material basis of society' to be changed, envisioning a more just and equitable social whole in which art would play its full liberating potential in human affairs.
There is sufficient acuity and nuance in these observations to recognise the all-important contradictions that are indispensable to any Marxist analysis worthy of the name. At 2.8, Davis points out that the present role of an alternative art scene that prides itself on its critical force is to act as a safely delimited area where opposition to the dominant ideology may be released and contained. Paragraph 7.2, however, refuses any purely programmatic approach to political art, the mistake of engaged artists between the wars, since mere content won't suffice to help a work towards the reflexive stance with which it might scrutinise its own role in the socio-cultural complex. Likewise, critical theory, states thesis 7.8, should go further than the weedy subjectivism of 'I liked this'. Artists should find ways of working collectively, both to guarantee an intelligently aware audience through education, and to bring about enlightened consciousness by means of the organic political practice that art can be.
The last point is not a call for collectives as such, the inherent radicalism of which is dismissed as a chimera in a later essay. '[A]rt functions best,' Davis suggests, 'when it serves politics rather than when it tries to become politics.' He decries the stance of permanent experimentalism that characterises a gigantic proportion of contemporary art, and rightly skewers the sterile debate between traditionalism and conceptualism in art practice as being essentially a matter of the art market having a conversation with itself. Art critics have by and large only contributed to alienating obfuscation with the self-serving faux-academicism of their discourse, and most of today's big hitters in critical theory are wafted aside in a condensed A to Z, from Giorgio Agamben's 'dilettantish political mysticism' and the 'Maoist mathematics' of Alain Badiou to the 'erratic musings' of you-know-who.
By which point, it has begun to feel as though the author has drifted a little too far towards the deep end. Apart from the title work, these pieces are not contributions to aesthetic theory, as opposed to items of mostly sloppily written journalese. The style recalls the music press at its more self-righteously engaged: 'No-one, least of all me, is going to dispute the fact that there are a lot of smug, half-assed conceptual gestures out there.' If you find that sort of flat, mildly rambunctious bantering congenial, the pages will fly by, and they do produce some agreeably acid reflections on the annual carousel of art-fair receptions and PR drivel from one who implicitly half-disgusts himself for continuing to accept the invitations.
Davis was impressed by a lot of graffiti art, while somewhat self-defeatingly acknowledging its adolescent nature, and not rigorously addressing its teeming antinomies. Street artists are all for public self-expression until their own work is obliterated by other street artists, whereupon the unbridled bourgeois concept of intellectual property suddenly manifests itself. Pseudo-political hipsters probably deserve their roasting here, but participants in the Occupy movement are still given doubt's benefit for reaching inchoately towards some form of articulation against capitalism in crisis, inchoateness of course being a formidable weapon against investment banking.
There is genuine insight in Davis's critical appraisal of the post-political vapidities of Jacques Rancière ('an artistic intervention can be political by modifying the visible'). There is also a true sectarian's contempt both for those artists who have persuaded themselves that their work is rattling enough of the cage-bars of cultural orthodoxy, and those who, like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, have done little more than repeat the gesture of 1960s Pop in its reactionary phase, in their wholesale accommodation with a market that need not trouble itself as to whether diamond skulls are radical irony, but is only grateful for the much-needed liquidity they have brought back to what was once a more fastidious conceptualism.
Useful insights about the role art might play in a transformed society, and in the obstinately untransformed one meanwhile, are gleaned here from Trotsky's aesthetic writings, but other currents are cheerfully traduced. The opening chapter reads out once again from the dog-eared charge-sheet against Theodor Adorno, that he displaced any concern with the class struggle on to the rarefied abstractions of aesthetic theory, as a result of having lived through fascism. In a curious non sequitur, Davis convicts Adorno's analysis of the monolithic nature of the culture of monopoly capitalism for its anachronism in today's circumstances, by saying that neoliberalism has blown away the social-contract consensus of postwar society, as though that fact wouldn't in itself tend to concentrate even further the sway of naked economic relations over the social and cultural lives of its subjects, as indeed it has done. Nothing about the impoverishment of culture under globalisation would have at all surprised Adorno, who arguably saw it coming.
Davis approvingly quotes art critic Jerry Saltz to the effect that what is lacking is a theory of the market, meaning the art market, only wincing at Saltz's proviso that it shouldn't just consist of yet more Marxism. The point that such a proviso clumsily tries to sidestep is that a theory of the art market would be indissociable from a theory of the market as such, and if that appears to be lacking, then perhaps Saltz hasn't been looking hard enough. Davis knows perfectly well that art is entangled up to its eyebrows in the market, even where it has, with fingers crossed, most persuaded itself that it isn't. Nothing escapes the tentacles of market society, increasingly not even the innermost impulses of unreconciled subjective experience, the constant ache of the intimation that things might have been otherwise, but it would ill become any contemporary art practice to behave as though the best it could offer were to be some momentary respite from the ache. Art has to be both more and less than a means of merely reconciling somebody to something.
Contemporary art is in a fascinating state of atomised flux. Its once axiomatic fidelity to movements, the -isms that multiplied at the rate of cell division in the early 20th century, and which at least guaranteed it a measure of self-reflexivity, has now dissolved into another department of celebrity culture, with an officer class of plutocratic superstars hogging the stage, while at the margins, the descendants of conceptualism and minimalism extemporise as best they can with the unpromising armoury of lethargic abstraction, continuously replayed video projections, and the superstitious hope that obsessional investigations of the body are still subversive. What is lacking is a theory of all this, but it won't emerge from student journalism.
The 'Theses' are a model of unarguable clarity. They proceed from the opening contention that 'Class is an issue of fundamental importance for art', via class definitions of labour, reflections on the fate of Marxian categories of economic and cultural class in a globalised era, and the democratic deficit in art's institutional structures, to a call for the 'material basis of society' to be changed, envisioning a more just and equitable social whole in which art would play its full liberating potential in human affairs.
There is sufficient acuity and nuance in these observations to recognise the all-important contradictions that are indispensable to any Marxist analysis worthy of the name. At 2.8, Davis points out that the present role of an alternative art scene that prides itself on its critical force is to act as a safely delimited area where opposition to the dominant ideology may be released and contained. Paragraph 7.2, however, refuses any purely programmatic approach to political art, the mistake of engaged artists between the wars, since mere content won't suffice to help a work towards the reflexive stance with which it might scrutinise its own role in the socio-cultural complex. Likewise, critical theory, states thesis 7.8, should go further than the weedy subjectivism of 'I liked this'. Artists should find ways of working collectively, both to guarantee an intelligently aware audience through education, and to bring about enlightened consciousness by means of the organic political practice that art can be.
The last point is not a call for collectives as such, the inherent radicalism of which is dismissed as a chimera in a later essay. '[A]rt functions best,' Davis suggests, 'when it serves politics rather than when it tries to become politics.' He decries the stance of permanent experimentalism that characterises a gigantic proportion of contemporary art, and rightly skewers the sterile debate between traditionalism and conceptualism in art practice as being essentially a matter of the art market having a conversation with itself. Art critics have by and large only contributed to alienating obfuscation with the self-serving faux-academicism of their discourse, and most of today's big hitters in critical theory are wafted aside in a condensed A to Z, from Giorgio Agamben's 'dilettantish political mysticism' and the 'Maoist mathematics' of Alain Badiou to the 'erratic musings' of you-know-who.
By which point, it has begun to feel as though the author has drifted a little too far towards the deep end. Apart from the title work, these pieces are not contributions to aesthetic theory, as opposed to items of mostly sloppily written journalese. The style recalls the music press at its more self-righteously engaged: 'No-one, least of all me, is going to dispute the fact that there are a lot of smug, half-assed conceptual gestures out there.' If you find that sort of flat, mildly rambunctious bantering congenial, the pages will fly by, and they do produce some agreeably acid reflections on the annual carousel of art-fair receptions and PR drivel from one who implicitly half-disgusts himself for continuing to accept the invitations.
Davis was impressed by a lot of graffiti art, while somewhat self-defeatingly acknowledging its adolescent nature, and not rigorously addressing its teeming antinomies. Street artists are all for public self-expression until their own work is obliterated by other street artists, whereupon the unbridled bourgeois concept of intellectual property suddenly manifests itself. Pseudo-political hipsters probably deserve their roasting here, but participants in the Occupy movement are still given doubt's benefit for reaching inchoately towards some form of articulation against capitalism in crisis, inchoateness of course being a formidable weapon against investment banking.
There is genuine insight in Davis's critical appraisal of the post-political vapidities of Jacques Rancière ('an artistic intervention can be political by modifying the visible'). There is also a true sectarian's contempt both for those artists who have persuaded themselves that their work is rattling enough of the cage-bars of cultural orthodoxy, and those who, like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, have done little more than repeat the gesture of 1960s Pop in its reactionary phase, in their wholesale accommodation with a market that need not trouble itself as to whether diamond skulls are radical irony, but is only grateful for the much-needed liquidity they have brought back to what was once a more fastidious conceptualism.
Useful insights about the role art might play in a transformed society, and in the obstinately untransformed one meanwhile, are gleaned here from Trotsky's aesthetic writings, but other currents are cheerfully traduced. The opening chapter reads out once again from the dog-eared charge-sheet against Theodor Adorno, that he displaced any concern with the class struggle on to the rarefied abstractions of aesthetic theory, as a result of having lived through fascism. In a curious non sequitur, Davis convicts Adorno's analysis of the monolithic nature of the culture of monopoly capitalism for its anachronism in today's circumstances, by saying that neoliberalism has blown away the social-contract consensus of postwar society, as though that fact wouldn't in itself tend to concentrate even further the sway of naked economic relations over the social and cultural lives of its subjects, as indeed it has done. Nothing about the impoverishment of culture under globalisation would have at all surprised Adorno, who arguably saw it coming.
Davis approvingly quotes art critic Jerry Saltz to the effect that what is lacking is a theory of the market, meaning the art market, only wincing at Saltz's proviso that it shouldn't just consist of yet more Marxism. The point that such a proviso clumsily tries to sidestep is that a theory of the art market would be indissociable from a theory of the market as such, and if that appears to be lacking, then perhaps Saltz hasn't been looking hard enough. Davis knows perfectly well that art is entangled up to its eyebrows in the market, even where it has, with fingers crossed, most persuaded itself that it isn't. Nothing escapes the tentacles of market society, increasingly not even the innermost impulses of unreconciled subjective experience, the constant ache of the intimation that things might have been otherwise, but it would ill become any contemporary art practice to behave as though the best it could offer were to be some momentary respite from the ache. Art has to be both more and less than a means of merely reconciling somebody to something.
Contemporary art is in a fascinating state of atomised flux. Its once axiomatic fidelity to movements, the -isms that multiplied at the rate of cell division in the early 20th century, and which at least guaranteed it a measure of self-reflexivity, has now dissolved into another department of celebrity culture, with an officer class of plutocratic superstars hogging the stage, while at the margins, the descendants of conceptualism and minimalism extemporise as best they can with the unpromising armoury of lethargic abstraction, continuously replayed video projections, and the superstitious hope that obsessional investigations of the body are still subversive. What is lacking is a theory of all this, but it won't emerge from student journalism.