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Special Feature: Latin America: The Last Avant-Garde |
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Number 12: (In)efficacy |
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Specter Publics |
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To begin where I end: from November 15, 2005 to April 15, 2006, the Martha Rosler Library was exhibited at e-flux, one of the handful of neo-conceptualist galleries that has recently emerged in Chinatown. The artist’s personal book collection (more than 7,500 titles) was installed in the gallery space, and visitors were permitted to photocopy whatever they wanted (the books were not lent out).[3] The library was thus always all there, its sculptural-architectural presence preserved. For books can be “books” in the sense of their function (able to be opened and read), but also sculpture (when closed): mere things, rectilinear volumes. They are both receptacles and mute representations of a given set of possibilities for knowledge (depending on the capabilities of the reader). They are like tombstones; silent, perhaps about to speak. I wandered around Rosler’s books oscillating between self-congratulatory familiarity and discomfited awe. There were so many books I had never seen before, hadn’t read yet, needed to order via Internet that instant. Rosler had her share of hipster oddities—etiquette manuals for women, communist Chinese children’s books—but I was transfixed by the thick, imposing theory tomes: Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Marx’s Capital (all three volumes, no less). It was not that the books presented a picture of Rosler’s artistic sensibility, however, so much that “Rosler” seemed a synecdoche for the books, for all of that knowledge, or, more precisely, non-knowledge, the unknown; that which I have yet to read, let alone comprehend, and all possible action such knowledge might catalyze. This is the sort of “action”—art, activism, art activism—generated by “critical theory,” in all of its diversity, when Rosler was a young artist in the 1960s and 1970s: her renowned collage series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72), in which Pop technique was used to expose the nexus of American consumerism and militarism, or her many influential videos, among them Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), an early marriage of feminist critique with post-structuralist theory.[4] Her art, this “library” hail from a now-ubiquitous earlier moment (not the moment in which the books were written, but one in which they were read in a certain way, together), a double-decade invoked by a weighted yet unspecific phrase: “the 1960s and 1970s.” Not just an anxiety of influence, then, but something like an anxiety of era—a particular era’s action and ethicality. December 8, 2006: the Democrats have new life—dubious comfort. At Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo, in connection with an exhibition of architectural “little magazines” from, as the exhibition puts it, “196x-197x,” October editors Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Hal Foster improvise short talks about their participation in the journals October and (in Bois’ case) Macula. I was there with what seemed to be every single person involved in art in New York who had not journeyed down to Art Basel Miami Beach. We crowded into the miniscule space standing up, as though at a rock concert, the proverbial "choir" in all its glory, the latest incarnation of a public or set of publics that first emerged during the exhibition's ambiguous time frame. Krauss, clearly bemused by the turnout, spoke very briefly. She repeatedly noted that the editors at Artforum “all hated each other” prior to her and Annette Michelson’s departure from the glossy commercial magazine to form the iconoclastic October, and recalled the well-known fact that the warring was between the “social possibilities” of art criticism and history versus “formalism” (one which used poststructuralist theory to decipher aesthetic experience). Bois gave a very short history of his journal Macula as a site for translation of various texts, and offered the DIY encouragement that “if you’re going to start a journal, you don’t need money. You just need a printer who will agreed to be paid back after six months or so.”[5] Then it was Foster’s turn. He first admitted that, being younger, he had not really been part of the era in question. Indeed, it was obvious that the reasons he was speaking were that a) Princeton architectural history students had curated the show and b) he was a later, yet highly significant, addition to the October circle who is today indistinguishable from it. As every art historian knows, with Benjamin Buchloh these scholars comprise a Big Four. They are the public face of the journal and what is perceived as its consistent ethos, and have thus been dubbed “Octobrists” and “Octoberites”—nicknames that exaggerate the journal’s reference to the October Revolution.[6] Foster discussed the importance of Situationist International and Utopie, among others, as well as the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, for his generation of young scholars in the early 1980s. In closing, he offered a telling caveat that evinced his awareness of his mediating position between Krauss’s generation and that which the group was addressing:
In the question and answer session that followed, Foster was asked to clarify this seemingly contradictory position (future scholars, make sure to write about these magazines—but not too much!). “The book is not yet written on some of these magazines,” he cautioned, “even ones that are long dead... I just don’t want them to be turned into doctoral projects one by one, and murdered in that way.” What would it mean to “murder” a little magazine, or a journal such as October? Could it be that there are right and wrong ways of coming to terms with this recent, intimidating history of artistic and intellectual production? Or can Foster be taken more literally—is he perhaps inadvertently speaking of the “murder”—via consignment to a history, however vaunted—of Krauss, Bois, even himself? In his book Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Derrida argues that Marxism has persisted since its origins (and in a way fully anticipated by Marx himself) as a “specter,” a ghostly presence from the past, that exerts pressure on the present. Why a specter, a ghost? Because Marxism is always already dead, always already finished as a politics of any worth, and was from its inception. It lingers as a delusory ideal with virtually no practical possibility, but also, simultaneously, as an unfinished project, a desire unfulfilled, a duty that has now fallen to us (the ever-shifting “us” of whoever is alive at present). As such, this specter is all the more powerful, for it is not only past but future—it is orderly time collapsed—it comes from the past, dead, to invoke what must be done. As a figure for this phenomenon, Derrida uses the Ghost from Hamlet, who arrives from the past to foretell, or more specifically to demand, the future. Hamlet’s father is dead, he is in the past, yet he returns to compel Hamlet to avenge his death. His impossible projection—from the past into the present to determine the future—sets up the protagonist’s legendary bind. Likewise, the incomplete revolutions of the past haunt the present; we are charged with “avenging their deaths” by fulfilling their legacies of commitment and sacrifice.
It is the texts of Marx himself, these traces of his voice(s), which make up the substance of the specter, its affective matter:
The specter is thereby susceptible to Derrida’s edict that language always produces effects of deconstruction: the haunting that Marx’s specter achieves is to have Marx’s own discourse be mutated into various interpretations, various “voices,” all of which might aspire to fulfill their spectral historical destiny. “A masterpiece always moves,” writes Derrida, “by definition, in the manner of a ghost.”[9] How curiously close he is here to Harold Bloom, whose Anxiety of Influence, of 1973, makes for both hilarious and maddening reading today. This flamboyantly outmoded work of literary theory is filled to the brim with romantic, sexist, absolutely traditional notions of poetic “greatness.” As opposed to a critique of authorship, this is an attempt to explicate and legitimize authorship, as myth, once and for all. Yet it is also the source (if Bloom would not cede this to Freud) of a theory quite close to Derrida’s: a poet’s great struggle is with his (or her—I am cleaning up Bloom’s own anachrony here) most profound influence, his/her artistic “father.” This father lays down the “law” that is his great oeuvre, with its particular rules and innovations, and the younger artist must surpass this earlier work, must “kill the father” (even if he is already dead) by doing something new. Bracketing Bloom’s patriarchal economy for the moment, is not this artistic fore-parent in fact Derrida’s specter, that ghost from the past who demands vengeance, even if upon him- or herself? “The ephebe who fears his precursors as he might fear a flood is taking a vital part for a whole, the whole being everything that constitutes his creative anxiety, the spectral blocking agent in every poet.”[10] The various strategies—“poetic misprision,” “completion,” “repetition and discontinuity,” and so on—that Bloom outlines for getting through, around, or away from the spectral text/author parallel Derrida’s description of Marx’s dissemination:
For both Derrida and Bloom, movement into the future
is conditioned by an anxious eye toward the past, necessitating
painful, seemingly impossible divergence from the earlier work or
act. The 1960s/1970s operate on different levels, the first and broadest being the political. In 1968, the pivotal year of the spectral “1960s/1970s,” the failed “revolution” which took place on university campuses and in streets across much of the West—a momentary uprising against various formations of power—set a standard that seems impossible today. The very extremes of political action at that moment, particularly the progression from peaceful protest in the 1960s to the more militant groups of the 1970s, account for contemporary skepticism towards activism. What can we try that they didn’t? Is there any value in rehashing the strategies of the past? As noted by many, the nonviolent antiwar protests of recent years, even the very well attended ones, have provided such a meager sense of accomplishment, the melancholy of obligation without the hope of supersession (even the seemingly novel turn of certain antiglobalists to violence, beginning in 1999 during the WTO protests in Seattle [13] and later elsewhere, was by no means novel, and in fact precisely echoed the futility of violent leftist groups in the 1970s such as the Weather Underground and Baader-Meinhof). The key is that these efforts end in failure, in the dismal 1970s, with states having largely succeeded in containing revolutionary zeal and leftist movements having been rent apart. That is what is conveyed by the “and” of the phrase “1960s and 1970s”: not just an era but a narrative, a progression, a story of failed ambitions that is the strangest and most greedy of legitimations. That is, the era retains an aura of purity because of naïveté about its own futility, whilst we in the present are not allowed such a luxury—our efforts seem doomed from the start. Another, closely interrelated, level on which the specter operates is of course culture—for my purposes here, art and “art writing” (curatorial, critical, historical). The rhetoric of failure is just as evident here, exemplified in Ian Burn’s contention that “perhaps the most significant thing that can be said to the credit of Conceptual Art is that it failed.”[14] Yet it is just as important to isolate and recognize the multiplicity of approaches that 1960s optimism produced. As Frederic Jameson argues in his article “Periodizing the 60s,” the dialectic of power in the Vietnam War between East and West, “developed” and “developing” countries, exploiters and exploited, became an analogy for power relations in cultural spheres.[15] Artists in the United States, for example, saw themselves as acting politically when they protested (or devised art that interrogated) powerful art institutions such as museums, which were fit into the empowered side of the equation against the powerless artist or viewer. Collaboration in artistic practice was seen to parallel or contribute to its political variant, organized action, as were the myriad attempts to undo, in conceptual art and elsewhere, the commodification of the artwork (which include the conceptualist expansion of the artwork beyond the discrete object, the development of alternative exhibition spaces, the publication of little magazines, the insertion of art into magazines, and so on). Subsequent art criticism has, perhaps artificially, shaped this era into two general threads. On the one hand much art of the 1960s, for example Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Earthworks, and Body Art, was abstract and non-referential, even as concessions were made toward the experience of the viewer and an increasing awareness of the gallery context. On the other, many artists, including many of the same artists, engaged in explicit protest. Art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art became targets for, among other things, their lack of consideration for how artists wanted their work exhibited. Larger political issues, in particular the Vietnam War, were directly addressed in projects such as the San Francisco Peace Tower of 1966, which was recently recreated for Day for Night, the 2006 Whitney Biennial. In Latin America (not to mention myriad other contexts), activist projects such as Argentina’s Tucumán Arde, a collaboration with a leftist union, voiced opposition to local dictatorships, risking censorship and worse.[16] Although these two approaches might seem fundamentally opposed, there are numerous cases of artists quite simply doing both: in some cases separating their abstract art from their personal activism (Donald Judd), and in others gradually addressing the institutional-political register through conceptual strategies (most visibly Hans Haacke and Martha Rosler, but also many others). The manner in which art historians now come to learn of the 1960s, however, is through the turn in art criticism inaugurated by the founding of October in 1976.[17] Contra Artforum and other art magazines of the 1960s, it was October’s contention, as implied by its title, that politicality was not in fact to be found in propagandistic reference to existing political struggles but within the aesthetic field itself, in a revolution in formal analysis that was to perhaps mirror but never open onto revolution in the political sphere. As Bois explained at Storefront:
The overt politicality of the 1960s was thus displaced, deferred onto the interpretive practice of formalism and those modes of art that best supported such interpretation. Some details are necessary here for a more accurate picture of October’s initial project. Annette Michelson, who initially interested Krauss in structuralist and poststructuralist theory, co-founded the journal with Krauss, and it was thus dedicated equally to art and film. Of far more importance for the early years of October than Bois (who first published in the Autumn 1979 issue) or Buchloh (Spring 1980 as a contributor, Spring 1981 with a full article) were Douglas Crimp, who was executive editor, and Craig Owens (whose death in 1990 has virtually expelled him from the historical record), both of whom began as formalists in the Krauss vein and later turned to queer theory (precipitating a nasty schism over the Crimp-supervised, overtly political Winter 1987 special issue on AIDS). It was thanks to these scholars that the journal gained its initial foothold in the academy, joining in the culture wars with other journals sympathetic to French theory such as Critical Inquiry in instituting a, well, more critical inquiry across disciplines. Foster did not publish in the journal until the Autumn 1985 issue, nearly a decade into its run. While the journal translated many usual suspects such as Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida, it also published many things we might not normally associate with it: Futurist poetry, for example, or film reviews from the Argentine literary journal Sur. The specter, however, is composed of precisely our present associations, which tie Krauss’s formalism to Buchloh’s rigid historical determinism: a telos of twentieth-century art that sees artists continually battling, via rigorous formal methods, the commodification of their work and competencies, leading up to the ascetic practices of orthodox conceptualism—the noble failure that diminishes our present, the call to action that is simultaneously a call to doubt. In trying to think around Buchloh’s dismal schema, Foster figures our present moment purely in terms of the specter: “[O]ur condition is largely one of aftermath—that we live in the wake not only of modernist painting and sculpture but of postmodernist deconstructions of these forms as well, in the wake not only of the prewar avant-gardes but of the postwar neo-avant-gardes as well.”[18] What, then, are artists, art critics, and art historians looking for appropriate objects of study to do? Like the historian, they must acknowledge this condition first and foremost, making “living-on” the foundation of their practice:
The problem here is that he who has staked an art historical project on the notion of the failure of 1960s upheaval would have us labor melancholically under this failure’s onus, forever confirming art’s (and perhaps even art history’s) “exhaustion.” I do not want to overstate the impact of October, nor its uniqueness. There are certainly many other specters from this period, even equally prescriptive ones, such as Art & Language, the Whitney Independent Study Program, T.J. Clark’s ongoing project of social art history, feminist criticism, and so on.[20] There are also certainly plenty of other accepted approaches to art history currently proliferating in the academy, from non-theoretical social history to Friedian close reading—although many of these, I would argue, are quite self-consciously not prescriptive.[21] October, however, makes for an excellent case study of the 1960s/1970s specter: the Big Four are prominently installed in the art history programs at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia (Krauss, now emerita, continues to teach and influence the program). In addition, their recent publication of the “undergraduate level” twentieth-century art history textbook Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005) constitutes the most visible effort to date to canonize their ideas and render them gospel for generations to come. Synopsizing key movements in Western art by addressing one year at a time (some years receive more than one section, and others are skipped entirely), the book gradually recapitulates the history of its four authors’ arguments about twentieth-century art in all of their difficulty. Dense introductory sections on theory (“Psychoanalysis,” “Poststructuralism,” etc.) and even a glossary constitute very optimistic attempts to make this material more accessible to undergraduates. Art Since 1900 is a quite deliberate self-spectralization (as is, of course, all writing—but there is nothing more didactic than a textbook). As many critics of the project have noted, the history that is sketched includes value judgments, which is logical, given that all of the Big Four began their careers as critics.[22] In short, Art Since 1900 not only provides a canon but is quite explicit about what might be called “kosher” and “unkosher” twentieth-century practices: Dada over rappel á l’ordre, Rauschenberg over Kienholz, conceptual art over feminism. It is clear that these value judgments are read back through the period of the 1960s and 1970s (through Minimalism and institution critique in particular), of which 1968 is the watershed. Pamela Lee notes the slight stature of the year 1969 in Art Since 1900. “1969,” she writes, “represents the moment at which artists begin to labor under the long shadow of 1968… one could argue, the year 1968 more and more acts like 1945 once did in the literature on twentieth-century art, the invisible line in the sand announcing the ‘then’ and ‘now’ of modernism’s larger project.”[23] In the roundtable that concludes Art Since 1900, this amusing exchange starts things off:
Bois and Foster’s disavowals cannot mask the truth that it does not contradict the widespread accusations of hegemony that the approaches of the Big Four are in fact varied and sometimes even contradictory. That is, representing a wider range of critical perspectives, all of which are thus “kosher,” means that the Octoberites in fact cover more ground, and are that much harder to dispute. Krauss and Bois’ formalism, for example, lionizes artists such as Barnett Newman or David Smith, who Buchloh might condemn as insufficiently political—thereby coopting this critique in advance. It is thanks to Buchloh’s withering Adornian pessimism that the Octoberites have an reputation for an ascetic, closed-minded attitude towards new art and new practices. In the roundtable Buchloh repeatedly blasts contemporary artists such as Matthew Barney and Bill Viola as “spectacle”—clearly a catch-all for too much illusion, obscuring of technique, and/or pop-cultural reference. While snap dismissals of new practices mark certain of Krauss’s writings (such as “Video and the Aesthetics of Narcissism” and the “No To…” chapters in the Informe book), she has been just as likely to produce models for the “expansion” of practices—here I am thinking of “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” and A Voyage on the North Sea. Using what she calls her “poststructuralist view,” Krauss has provided models for comprehending practices that quite literally extend beyond medium specificity and are thus still quite relevant for today’s most cutting-edge art. Her recent proposal for a “postmedium condition,” in which “medium” is redefined as a “‘recursive structure’—a structure, that is, some of the elements of which will produce the rules that generate the structure itself… Further, that this recursive structure is something made, rather than something given, is what is latent in the traditional connection of ‘medium’ to matters of technique…”[25] In the concluding Art Since 1900 roundtable, the other Octoberites reject this model as a regression to modernist medium-specificity, but it may yet prove one of the best tools for understanding the move to multimedia circa 1960 that today is taken for granted as our (non-)paradigm. Krauss’s writing might thus be said to “differ from itself,” as one founding poststructuralist might have put it. “The poet in every reader,” argues Bloom, “does not experience the same disjunction from what he reads that the critic in every reader necessarily feels. What gives pleasure to the critic in a reader may give anxiety to the poet in him, an anxiety we have learned, as readers, to neglect, to our own loss and peril.”[26] Derrida concurs, “There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality.”[27] Yet I contend that art historians are by no means exempt from this poetic negotiation, in writing, with the specter. This accords with the art historical lineage of what Krauss termed “the paraliterary” (works of earlier critics such as Michael Fried and T.J. Clark can also be included here): “instead of a work’s being ‘about’ the July Monarchy or death and money, it is ‘about’ its own strategies of construction, its own linguistic operations, its own revelation of convention, its own surface.”[28] In a Krauss class that I audited, she described her impulse in writing her least accessible book, The Optical Unconscious, as that of “wanting to write a novel.” This more poetic or literary form of academic discourse, however, can be extended to the less opaque offerings from Octoberites and non-Octoberites alike. There is no doubt that Krauss struggled with Greenberg as a specter hanging over her formalism; in the very application of “theory” to art there is a creative move that is more apiece with literature than reportage (indeed, it is this practice that is the most consistent aspect of the October legacy, allowing, á la the Martha Rosler Library for a plethora of sometimes oppositional source texts to congeal into an imposing, self-legitimating base). It is those scholars who successfully take up this challenge who are the most prominent art historians today. For there is a rarely uttered suspicion, true or not, fair or not, that anyone can spend months in archives digging up minutiae and crafting history but only certain scholars can assimilate and work with theory in a convincing manner. A key characteristic of the specter is that even an attempt to deny it, or to structure a model in opposition to it, reaffirms its original/ating power as the starting point, the law or command. Think of a banker’s son who rebels by fashioning himself a stoner spiritualist. This son is still made in his father’s image; he has merely achieved an opposite that perpetually invokes its source, its productive obverse. In opposition (of sorts) to Foster’s “living-on,” then, I will consider several contemporary strategies of “moving forward”: responses to the art historical specter of the 1960s and 1970s. These methods are not exclusive of one another; they can and have been combined. I will sully this moving-forward with a simultaneous moving-backward, juxtaposing, with deliberate irony, Bloom’s outmoded lexicon with such new attempts to broaden our field. While I primarily will be addressing art historians, it will be evident that many of these ideas have also entered art practice (a symptom of the lasting influence of October even in that arena, thanks to the ubiquity of theoretically oriented MFA programs). Again, this is not to posit Art Since 1900 as the lone spectral pressure out there; it merely makes for a convenient center around which to group responses because of its clear prescriptions and established position within the field. 1. The “Non-West,” or clinamen: Bloom’s famous “misprision” or “swerve” away from the precedent is here geographical, defined negatively by the very problematic power relation that designates such a non-place as “non-West” in the first place. Foster himself alludes to this as an insufficiently explored category in the concluding roundtable in Art Since 1900: “Other possibilities also opened up in other parts of the globe, especially in various encounters with different modernisms. … It’s a narrative of cultural differánce—of avant-garde practices in other place-times.”[29] Of course, the notion of the “non-West” is absurd, far too general, and immediately breaks down into unrelated subcategories; but this absurdity is also real insofar as there is still so much left to be said about these myriad peripheries. 2. The “wrong” artists, or tessera: wherein a project of “completion” of the Octoberite project in fact necessitates a gross violation of October’s prescriptions. This means the use of theory to take seriously the very folks that October never took seriously or used as straw men, among them artists who shamelessly engaged “myth” such as Josef Beuys, Yves Klein, Vito Acconci, Hannah Wilke, etc. An excellent example of this is David Joselit’s critique of Krauss’s position on video art in his article “The Video Public Sphere,” in which he argues that instead of merely pointing at himself on the video screen, Acconci and other video artists were reaching out to the viewer.[30] 3. Visual culture, or kenosis: this “break” with the specter can be linked to the present vogue for applying theoretical analysis to the wider field of visual content throughout culture, as in the work of someone such as W.J.T. Mitchell. In this shift of object of study there is a refusal of the question of quality altogether that opens art history onto the field of anthropology. In anthropology, everything is “interesting”—all of human activity is of equal relevance to the field. I would argue, however, that this is merely a momentary escape from the question of quality. For the scholar must still convince us, using superior interpretive skill, that a given visual object warrants attention over so many others; “quality” is in some sense shifted onto the writer contributing unique knowledge about the object. 4. The cooptation of new theory, or daemonization: Bloom cryptically indicates that “the later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper.”[31] For us this “power” is theory, the original texts that inspired the canonical October writings (consider Krauss’s eschewing of citation in her early texts). One strategy here is to unearth newer or less-utilized theoretical texts for our source of interpretive “power”; recent vogues for Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy come to mind. Two of the best new critical paradigms, which may someday soon displace the Octoberites as reigning models for contemporary art, have been advanced by Nicolas Bourriaud and Okwui Enwezor.[32] 5. Subject-positioning, or askesis: the “movement of self-purgation” before the spectral precedent is given to the already waning practice, in great vogue in the 1980s and early 1990s, of “self-positioning,” that is, writing art history from an admittedly partial perspective, which opens naturally onto art that privileges such perspectives in relation to race, sexual orientation, gender, etc. Amelia Jones rightly observes of Art Since 1900 that “the authors convey a general methodological suspicion of the subjective, accompanied by an erasure of the specificity of bodies and desires (including, most specifically, their own), while writing in a highly authoritative manner, stating opinions as fact.”[33] Of course, this comment compels me to ask whether we really want to know the desires of these scholars, but at the very least this stance is admirable for its commitment to non-authoritative knowledge, the utter obverse of the textbook’s aims. 6. The “right” artists, or aprophades: Bloom’s “return of the dead” is a very complicated notion, as it contends on the one hand that the specter “wins” and is easily recognizable in the later work, and on the other that the later author can somehow magically reverse the terms of spectrality and make the earlier work seem subservient, or contingent upon, the new. Those who focus on the October stable (particularly the postwar artists) undertake the daunting task of conversation with highly regarded arguments, and must solve the spectral dilemma of whether to simply esteem these earlier perspectives, diminishing the importance of one’s own project, reject them (which, as explained above, does more or less the same), or somehow meet them on even ground. We do not, however, have to look at this notion solely in terms of trumping predecessors. It can be useful to acknowledge their presence in our work no matter what we write about, situating ourselves in a lineage of ethical scholarship. In this way, not being a poet—having footnotes at our disposal, for example—can come in handy. In this final sense, aprophades links all the approaches above, in that no matter how one “swerves” away from one’s predecessor, some trace will still persist of this earlier writer or paradigm, even if only the ethical trace—the specter’s command—which had motivated us to write (or make art, or act…) in the first place. Derrida characterizes this ethical call as a “debt” that we have accrued without knowing it, an unexpected burden. In terms of the specter of the 1960s/1970s that I have sketched above, debt functions within a continual project of re-visitation, revision, and expansion. Our debt to a writer such as Krauss, for example, entails a re-writing, or deviation, from her project(s) that is nonetheless true to her spectral edict for us. I have shown how such a split persists in Krauss’s own writings, between open-ended, ever-expanding interpretive models and at times quite rigid notions of good and bad. Perhaps our debt is to combine such oppositional tendencies, even if against themselves: to open art history beyond the dominant canon on the one hand while nevertheless taking stands on “quality,” whether in terms of form, politics, historical self-awareness (including that of media), or a combination thereof. An important caveat: however much any of these options has been celebrated as politically or academically salvific, however much a corrective to October or the larger art historical record in general any of them may be, they all remain compatible with the until-now obfuscated dimension of this spectral economy—the economy itself. Good critique and good scholarship mean good job security (if we’re lucky!). Negotiating the specter may entail the excavation of ideas from a radical past, but such work is also a quite practical dimension of our careers. The academic field thrives on the ever new, on repeated reconfigurations of fields, and on our ability to adapt and contribute to such real or perceived progress. To champion the cause of the obscure vernacular practices, neglected artists, or peripheral art scenes is to simultaneously expand competencies and job opportunities; it is to create new specializations. I do not believe that this state of affairs necessarily invalidates or cheapens what we do or dulls its exigency; but it must be conceded as a conditioning factor. It literalizes Bloom’s least tasteful, macho dimension—his taste for crass competition: we are all competing for jobs. To end where I begin: in April 2006, I attended a rather disorganized reading group in conjunction with the Martha Rosler Library project. The readings, several different texts by Walter Benjamin, had been chosen hastily and seemed to lack an overall focus. Once the group got underway, it was apparent that there was little direction to the discussion; to fill the void, Rosler held forth on a variety of subjects. She lambasted the 2006 Whitney Biennial for defanging Richard Serra’s Defeat Bush poster, which had originally appeared in Artforum as a work of pure agit-prop, by framing and hanging it among so many other artworks. She discussed the reproduction and sale of her own Bring the War Home collages in the 1980s, explaining why at a certain point she simply opted to convert them into commodities. A sense of despair hung over the proceedings. All current political strategies, in art or the larger political sphere, seemed ineffective. Rosler had no answers. At one point, with the group increasingly frustrated with the formlessness of the discussion, 1960s-style peaceful protest came under fire. The familiar lament surfaced that today’s protests accomplish nothing, that there is no point in even going to them anymore. Suddenly Rosler came angrily to life. “No, no, you don’t understand!” she exclaimed. “Protests are all we have. People going into the streets—that is our only way citizens can express dissatisfaction with what a government is doing. It is a mode of public embarrassment for that state. The value of that gesture is never going to go away.” A beat of shamed silence followed. The specter had us in its sights, once again.
Daniel R. Quiles is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center and is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on Argentine conceptualism of the 1960s and 1970s. He is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program, and is the co-editor of PART, the journal of the CUNY Art History program. His essay "Figuring the Unspeakable: León Ferrari's Drawn Language" will be published in Scorched Earth Magazine in 2007.
Endnotes [1] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State
of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International,
trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p 7. |