Monday, June 6, 2011

Some further reflections on 'globalization': and how the avant-garde's been hit particularly hard



Revolutionary creativity does not shock or entertain the bourgeoisie, it destroys them.(from above poster)
There is a kind of collusion between capital and the avant-garde. (Jean-François Lyotard)
But the most typical artworks of so-called postmodernism - installations, pastiche, "language" poetry - when stripped of their critical theory scaffolding aren't all that different from those produced a hundred years ago. They have merely shifted out of the various facets of Modernism - irony - into a dominant mode. (Eliot Weinberger)
Yes, artists are free: they are free to exchange and exchange whatever, but only there where exchange takes place, in the market. They are also free to do whatever, but the violence of this freedom is no longer that of revolution, it is merely that of economic competition. (Thierry de Duve)
I've said in a recent post that Silliman's praises of Christian Bök’s Xenotext project disclose an avant-garde in crisis mode. It's time to be more specific. Capitalism and fringe art cultures are no longer (as they used to be) mutually hostile ideologies since the materials, methodology & presentation of work have been assimilated to the complex networks of global capital. And if they're not, the avant-garde longer have a right to that title. In my view, the complete homogenization of global capital characterizes artistic newness as much as it does the fashion industry & social media. In fact, the latter have taken almost the same trajectories as the experimentalist poetries, and it's worth looking at the reasons why.

I wouldn't say exactly, as Lyotard has, that capital and art conspire to say (and do) the same thing. It's just that traditional cultures have now been underwritten by global capitalism. Barriers and identities that served once to keep arts separate from competing disciplines have collapsed but if they've done so it hasn't been due to the success of any strong-armed postmodernist theory.Time was when a John Cage could decry the selling of Duchamp's ready-mades as a gross concession to vulgar bourgeois taste. I suppose there was a sense in Cage's day that art and business were borders becoming increasingly porous. In the face of globalization significant differences like these, however, fade into nothingness: ironically, Derridean differánce has turned into radical sameness. Now writing class instructors can pretend to be biogeneticists and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E theorists, neon sign artists without really upsetting any established order of things.  
 
I can now safely equate the avant-garde with any successfully retailed market commodity, such as fashion and social media. Far from destroying the bourgeoisie, it works in their favour. Rob Horning's written an interesting blog article entitled "The Accidental Bricoleurs" that's brought home to me the saleability of avant-garde work in a particularly interesting way. In his N+1 piece he describes the  "protocols of new capitalism—flexibility, globalization, technology-enabled logistical micromanaging, consumer co-creation" as the standard-bearers of the retail world. Trendy clothing stores like Zara and Forever 2 offer fake outlets for personal creativity, & don't just sell newness but, as he says, allow congeries of buyers to "become involuntary bricoleurs", cultural memes of the day literally transformed into fashion accessories. 'Bricoleurs' and 'memes' are his own words.

The language of art & fashion are practically indistinguishable. The illusion of both individualism & choice don't try to disguise, as they used to, the real retail market forces that underlie their success: both buyer and store actually revel in them & have become one and the same "replicable" entity. Horning calls the new product lines 'post-brands' in probably the same spirit in which Silliman, wishing to get beyond a hopelessly outdated term like 'avant-garde', calls the newer experimentalists the 'post-avant''. In this "spectacle of pure novelty" fashion is like a L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E theory that's become handily manipulable. Horning:
If fashion functions like a language, then the fast-fashion firms are mainly interested controlling the underlying system and leave the meaning of the “words” to interchangeable designers and individual consumers. As long as customers are willing to speak fast fashion’s language, the companies aren’t particular about the specifics of the vocabulary. They are concerned only with the rate and volume of change.
As in fashion so in social media companies like Facebook. It's almost commonplace to decry the unscrupulous way they filch personal data and then repackage them as newer venues for personal expression, with users captured in what blog theorist Jodi Dean calls "circuits of desire". The free availability of "design ideology" (Facebook software itself) gives users a false sense of empowerment & creativity. An abject conformism to what Horning calls "well-worked surfaces" (interesting expression!) is mistaken for individualism. Like today's revolutionary artists social media designers bank on the illusoriness of originality &, of course, stand to profit greatly by it. "Social media," like contemporary avant-gardist productions," encourage us to appropriate whatever we want and claim it as our own without feeling derivative or slavishly imitative."

Art-makers have become enslaved to their 'brands' (flarf, conceptualist, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, mash-up, etc.) as much as users of social media and "fast fashion". Art's just one among a whole array of 'things' in a neoliberal world of global capitalism that exploits for profit "well-worked surfaces" of tradition, materials and technique. The very tradition of art's been turned into a sort of pastime by academics and writing class instructors. How things have changed over the past century! An avant-garde poster (such as the above) once dared to advertise the "revolutionary creativity" of art (and art-makers) bent on destroying the bourgeoisie "in the streets and everywhere". A nasty & generally disreputable bunch the first literary revolutionaries were, living on the fringes & giving the world art intended to maim. Radical Catalan artist Joan Miró sought to "assassinate paintings" of his rival Picasso while bad-mannered Rimbaud writing during the Russian Revolution— a thug, drug addict & scoundrel by most accounts—offended every aesthetic taste imaginable. And then there's William S. Burroughs who treated the world as so many cut ups, & even appeared in his own movies with "orgasm gun".

 Burroughs with gun
Now look at the contemporary avant-garde. Mostly cozy, well-heeled academics (like Charles Bernstein, Rae Armantrout ) who get top billing at poetry events and have become mainstream to the teeth: the successful venture capitalists of verse. Clamoring for top literary prizes and recognition is what drives them. The advertisement for the recent text art festival in Bury, England, for example, while boasting it's going to be one that "specialises in experiments, in new experiences, in performances and exhibitions that mix artforms in ground-breaking combinations", actually appeared more like a catalogue of the rehashed signifiers and techniques of old. The Bury festival was anything but "new". Silliman's own neon art display paid tribute (if anything in art could) to a universal & homogeneous global capitalist order now put to artistic uses. The radicals of old have become literary 'fat cats' emboldened enough to advertise their wares in big bright lights.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just looked around for "the contemporary avant-garde"
but
could not find them

or narrieaone anywhere around here
but I did
however
find some (of those)
Radical Sameness
folks

(are "they" the Knew Avantists marching time towards a retirement their (well earned) pensions/oblivions ?

sure do appreciate that Horning quote

K.

Anonymous said...

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/06/books/in-conversation-charles-bernstein-with-adam-fitzgerald


http://www.jstor.org/pss/1208749

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Thanks for the Bernstein link, Anon

I respect the man's views but lately Mr. Bernstein's become a part of the "official verse culture" he's made a career of reviling. The avant-garde is anything but forward-looking for the reasons I've given in my post.