the anti-aesthetic & pastiche...

The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture. Have you read it? You should. Contributors include Baudrillard, Jameson, Owens, and Said.

Jameson's essay relates his ideas on postmodernism and consumer society. Back in 1982, when this essay was originally part of a talk at the Whitney Museum, postmodernism - he claims - was not even widely accepted, or understood. I shudder to think, postmodernism which now provides us with such fluidity and allows us to resist rigid formulaic confines. But to postmodernism, Jameson attributes two significant features: pastiche and schizophrenia. I'll bypass Jameson's explanation of the breakdown of signifiers in schizophrenia and focus on pastiche.

Now pastiche should not be confused with parody, as parody intends to mock the original and pastiche intends to mimic. Pastiche, we are told, is blank parody. And is utterly destructive. If we follow this logic, artists in a postmodern society are only creating imitations of dead styles. Jameson writes:

"as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. but if this is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself - or at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history."

Jameson's theory triggers reflections on photography. The digital camera, we thought, killed film. But film is nostalgic and the desire for 35mm or 120mm is still strong - except now it is only for those who can afford to pay, just as it was during the advent of photography. We see the increased popularity of Lomography, or Lo-fi photography, that often results in eerie and nostalgic photographs (see Liad Cohen photography, below)...


We regard the work of Sally Mann with appreciation and awe. We admire her wet plate collodion process, though done today reflects the aura of the past.

But it does not end with photography, we are reminded of our past through nostalgia film, through artistic recreations, through manipulations in photoshop. Has our past been commodified, a socialization mediated by images of a previous existence as our present existence is meaningless? If this is true, then the Situationists foreshadowed our demise in the 1960's. We exist in a Society of the Spectacle. The Spectacle, that is, reconstructs itself through pastiche and our world/present, as Guy DeBord wrote, can no longer be grasped directly.

art and fear.

I originally picked up Art and Fear because of the cover art, an x-ray of the back of a skull with tiny, splotches of red paint. I never figured out who was the artist responsible for the cover art, but I did end up engrossed in Paul Virilio's short critique of aesthetics and politics. I was more attracted to his first essay, "A Pitiless Art," which explores the nature of contemporary art after Auschwitz, than "Silence on Trial," which focuses more on multimedia performances. I have mixed feelings about multimedia performances. Virilio's exploration of multimedia art focuses on hyperviolence and hypersexuality that lead to the eventual dismantling of human feeling. However, it is not my desire to critique multimedia art at length here.

What I am more interested in is Virilio's examination of the artist as the terrorist in "A Pitiless Art." He begins this essay with a direct reference to the aesthetics of Auschwitz by recounting the experiences of Jacqueline Lichenstein, a French art historian, who compares her experience at the Museum of Auschwitz to a contemporary art museum where "looking at exhibits of suitcases, prosthetics, children's toys...[she] suddenly had the impression [she] was in a museum of contemporary art." From the Situationists to abstract art, Virilio expounds that contemporary art has become the executioner. History has ushered us along a path toward dehumanization where the artist dissects humanity and is rewarded for it through recognition. The audience becomes thirsty for tragedy and identifies tragedy as beautiful. This is the same tragedy created by terror, the terror created by the artists/terrorists.

To pick up where Virlio left off, fast forward a few years...

During an interview with author Tom McCarthy, in the recent issue of Bidoun, he speaks of "a terror that is beautiful." He recalls a conversation with David Cerny who exclaims that the planes should not have exploded but dumped their fuel and just been stuck in the tower. Cerny "had a purely aesthetic take on it, and the political dimension was utterly irrelevant to him." This would be the same Cerny that painted the tank pink in Prague and replicated an image of Saddam Hussein and submerged the image in a formaldehyde tank. (Granted he did this as a parody of Damien Hirst's work, but nonetheless still political.)


Contemporary artists work in a Post-Auschwitz and Post-9/11 (un)reality. Art as influenced by post-modern society has undoubtedly added elements of terror and shock to it's repertoire. Yet, even terror and shock fade and we are not so alarmed to see contemporary art museums and galleries that remind us of holocaust museums. We are not disturbed to see artists like Zachary Drucker lie on a table and direct "viewers...through a series of breathing exercises, visions, and traumas, while participants pluck hair from the androgynous, stripped body of the artist."

The audience has been desensitized. The audience thinks we live in a society that has long been dissecting human bodies.