Baudrillard: Needs and Pleasure

In order to prove the untruth of the correspondence between need and object or pleasure and consumption, Baudrillard locates the objects of consumption outside of the sphere of need and pleasure. Instead, Baudrillard writes, they act in a system of signs; objects act as a language system. The consumption of objects acts as a differentiating social signifier that confer status on the consumer individual. In doing so they “play exactly the same role as the set of distinguishing values played in previous times: the foundation of group morality (16).”

Advertising and commercials incessantly seek to locate desire onto consumer objects. Consumption rests on the scheme of broken and renewed promises, where desire is alternatively gratified and frustrated. The dislocation produced by ceaseless advertising creates the liminal space of desire. Here objects “serve as a fluid and unconscious field of signification (44).”

Dispelling the assumed connection between pleasure and consumption Baudrillard writes:

“Consumer behavior, which appears to be focused and directed at the object and at pleasure, in fact responds to quite different objectives: the metaphoric or displaced expression of desire and the production of a code of social values through the use of differentiating signs (46).”

In fact consumption is “group morality” which is imposed on the individual. It is a social function and a “system of communication.” It is therefore a system of constraint on the individual’s pleasure.

Pleasure in Consumption vs. Pleasure in Art

It seems as though the whole edifice of consumption rests on the individual’s free search for pleasure. Advertising and marketing would have the consumer believe in the possibility of fulfilling every need and desire, assembly lined designed to the individual. Business gurus tout the values of diversity and the broad range of options available to satisfy every need. Choices created by the detailed study of consumer psychology. Studies capable of identifying and creating those choices not even the consumers new they had. We choose between extra chunky, extra smooth, extra thin, and extra thick. Statistcs are compiled to discover the consumers pleasure and then, in a slight of hand, markets the profitable general as if to the singular.

This type of diversity is in reality misdirection. It is in fact a starkly limiting range of objects that are available through a starkly limiting amount of venues and distributors. The variety of colors, frames, and increasingly more and better accessories, wider and better interiors do not constitute a real choice when a truly different car is not allowed into the market. Electric cars, diesel cars, hydrogen cars. The reoccurrence of new models is a diversion from the possibilities of alternative cars or alternative forms of transportation. Less profitable alternatives are either unimagined or ignored.

When a value system is derived from the economy, business turns itself into metaphysics. It justifies its technique and its production by deriving its morals from the necessity of profit. No longer taking a transcendent system of values from religion, which has the ability to self justify life without recourse to a system of numerical gain, morals take their cue from business, which is very bad morality. Murray Bookchin would characterize it as grow or die.

The economic metaphor infiltrates every thing. Money, the base equalizer between unequal things, penetrates all thought. And as a result it is the basis of language. What we hold true is converted into the logic of capital.

Business values have in part been determined and influenced by the avante garde. Diversity, pluralism, schizophrenia, permanent revolution, rebellion, radicality, counterculture, self empowerment, the elemination of struture, senuality, these are the catch words of postmodernity. The decadence of counterculter that once constituted its rebellion from the status quo and its independence from the given facts is now a simple extravagance to the gargantuous excess and waste of the cooperate monstrosities who control every aspect of what we otherwise see, hear, buy, and eat. Art is incapable of battling its integration. By its thingness, its very objecthood, its sensuality, it appears to be more of the same voice of teachnologically mass marketed images. It tries to rupture the images of mass media but is incapabale of doing so with a media so comfortable with the technique of dislocation and fragmentation.

Any recourse to an image that is polished, fully rendered does not constitute an alternative either (the New Master championed by Donald Kuspit). The consumer society’s images are a balance between fragmentation, the montage, the unfinished and dislocated, while simultaneously the pure focus and full rendering of the photograph. Fragmentation and car body finish.
What constitutes difference is the small negotiations between the hand and finish. The way individuals peaks through objects. Yet such interpretations lend an alternative to art simply by location an alternative there. By finding them and co-creating difference with the artist.

Advertising fives the promise of pleasure while only making good in the act of purchase. Arts promise is change and liberation from the given world. Both promises are illusions and both pleasures are fictional. Both are only partially sensorial, only optical.

It is no wonder that so many artists found (and find) it necessary to interrupt pleaure and beauty and withhold them from the viewer. Where advertising offers a world of pleasure already available, art recognizes the illusion and seeks to render the impossibility of pleasure under the current condition.

Inertia

This is a world of pleasant eachoes that dny the presence of the originating sounds.

Courbet, Realism, and Vulgarity

 

In considering the connection between disgust and reality Courbet came to mind. Courbet was the creator of the realist movement in art. Though the movement is called Realism it is initially a misleading term. Courbet did not paint with anymore visual accuracy than a great many of his predecessors or many of his successors. (Consequently there is a great retrospective of Courbet’s at the Met going on right now that I got to see. However they do not have the Burial of Ornans or the big studio self portrait)

 

Indeed after Courbet the Impressionists thought of themselves as seeing reality freshly, realistically, without the artificial fetters of the past. All that to say an objective view of “reality” is always in question. Yet Courbet is father of the term. So what conditions did Courbet’s art fulfill in order to merit the term “reality?”

 

Perhaps some these are obvious: Courbet refused the sentiment or metaphysical representational motifs popular in his day. Instead Courbet painted his own local populace intending to show them without fetters in all their rags, poverty, and quiet dignity.

 

Through out art history reality (and sometimes revolution) is paired with dirt. Caravaggio hundreds of years before Courbet’s Stone Breakers or Burial at Ornans would paint his Madonna with dirty feet and a bloated body outraging the viewers of his day, Death of the Virgin. Similar complaints were laid against Courbet and his representation of nude women. I’m sure that I am missing a lot of history in between but I’m just trying to make a quick case, Joseph Beuys would materials like dirt and rust and fat. Beuy’s work would smell breaking down common sensory limitations of an artwork and making it confront the audience (an experience of disgust?) More recently Anselm Keifer’s paintings have dirt in them, as well as being representations of  earth.

 

The representation of dirt and the confluence of disgust and reality reveals an interesting tie in the notion of reality as something base, mute, and well, dirty. Might dirt also be a veiled reference to feces too. Think Chris Offeli’s Madonna? Might Offeli be aware of the connection between Caravaggio’s dirty virgin and his own black elphant dung Madonna, the Holy Virgin Mary? 

 

 

Courbet has a famous quip, “Show me an Angel and I’ll paint one.” In his desire for fidelity to reality Courbet refused to paint an angel. (I can’t think of a religious scene Courbet did paint). Courbet is the father of Realism because of his turn to the common, the vulgar, the ugly.

 

Disgust

The gooey and sticky need no names; the foul smelling needs no analysis and defies analysis. The disgusting allows us no distance from reality. It is a threat that gets at ya with an intensity no pleasurable thing can.

         

Winfried Menninghaus, author of the book Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, traces the literary, as well as philosophical history of disgust and its connections to an aesthetic of ugly.

 

For Freud, Menninghaus writes, “disgust is the direct opposite of a simple natural given (2).”

  A cultures reaction to disgust is not conditioned only by biology but by a conceptual framework. For Freud disgust is a symptom of the repression of sexual desire. For one disgust sustains the family structure. Disgust is part of a system of libidinous checks. It works to limit sexual activity in exchange for labor and productivity. Because of this the sexual drive must overcome the disgust taboos placed on the body, and sex becomes perverse activity. Yet this only works to intensify the pleasure and relegates pleasure to a private experience.

 

 

Perversity, disgust, and pleasure all converge. Freud’s theory sets up the collusion of disgust and pleasure. And this becomes a central problem to an aesthetic of ugly. When a viewer takes pleasure in the representation of something ugly how can this be accounted for? And how is one to take its moral imperative seriously if one enjoys the work not for its moral rightness but for its physicality? It would mean either rethinking the divide between pleasure and morality, or rethinking the moral imperative in works of art that are tough and brutal like the ones we’ve been talking about Dubeffet and Goya.

           

For Nietzsche disgust is connected to the sexual as well. The Dionysian is the true bestial nature of the amoral human. One of Nietzsche aphorism was “We reevaluate disgust (9).”

Before Nietzsche Kant would describe ekel (disgust) as a positive value meant to instruct. Disgust was useful in teaching a culture what was appropriate and what was not. However, this was also a way of insureing class division and racial seperation. If the poor and the foreign could be “proven”to be aesthetically disgusting then power could be stabilized.

 

Disgust was a means towards developing cultured, refined, tastes and high standards. Nietzsche came to see these refined moral standards, reinforced by notions of disgust, as false morals. Disgust needed to be reevaluated so that what was disgusting was no longer viewed as negative and marginal but as essential and truthful.

           

In much of the discourse that Menninghaus traces disgust acts as either positive or negative but always as an experience that transcends or contaminates the symbolic order for unmediated experience.

 

In Both Neitzsche and Freud disgust is antisocial and against the status quo. The disgusting is tied to the sexually liberating and therefore to pleasure.

 

The confluence of pleasure from the ugly becomes a problem for an aesthetic of ugly that chooses the ugly and despicable for reasons of moral outrage.

 

Menninghaus, Winfried Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation

State University of New York Press, Albany NY 2003.

Dubuffet’s Aesthetic

“The secret is to a thing badly. If you serve someone spinach that is cooked the way it should be, no one notices or remembers that they have eaten spinach. Whereas if you burn it, it shocks their taste buds and they become immediately aware that it is burned spinach and they gain new insights into the characteristics of spinach, etc (23).”
-Jean Dubuffet

Dubuffet’s intention was to shock the viewer out of normal visual experience or to extend his metaphor the normal palette. He saw his art as a reaction against both the good tastes of academic traditional art and also the refined, esoteric tastes of the avant-garde. Dubuffet saw himself as radically democratic. Through the appropriation of a common vernacular he avoided the elitism of the avant-garde, with its obscurity and complexity. But he also saw himself as radically individualistic. His willful raw, unfinished, “badly” made images were meant to offend good taste and the common preference for the sentimental and picturesque.

By over (or under) cooking his paintings Dubuffet hoped that the experience would cut through all pretense to an experience of raw, unmediated matter. This constitutes in large part his turn from academic finish to physical gritty surfaces and crude draftsmanship (see the blog entry about craft below).

Dubuffet sought subject matter that was both banal and crude. He thought of himself as a realist directly engaged with the world, devoid of artifice and the restraint that characterized western culture. “Painting operates, through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves (18).”

Dubuffet rejected the categorical, analytic thought that was integral to western thought. In his attempt to reject the obscurity and categories of Occidental culture Dubuffet turned to the art of the insane and “primitive” art.

In his attempts to reject western culture Dubuffet was unable to avoid adopting the rhetoric of irrationality and naiveté with which the west characterized primitive art. But Dubuffet did see primitivism as a healthy alternative to the artificiality and linguistic dependence that was a distinctive feature of western thought. He would, however, romanticize the “irrationality” and “madness” he found in art of the insane and “primitive”. He saw insanity as a way of getting closer to reality instead of the loss of reality and the escape into fiction and delusion that so often accompanies clinical forms of insanity.

Though much of Dubuffet’s thought came under critical suspicion and notions of the raw and the unmediated as well as notions of authenticity were called into question Dubuffet was also able to expand the cannon of art, calling previous forms of art to be reevaluated and reappreciated. It allowed a whole new supply of signifiers into the discourse, signifiers of innocence and humor and crudeness.

Rowell, Margit Jean Dubuffet.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York 1973.

Aesthetic or Inarticulate Form

Stephen James Newton, a painter and a writer, notes a stylistic inertia that characterizes psychotic art. In tandem a lack of development psychotic art also shows an obsession with intricate patterns and the decorative (like drawing a frame around an image). Both of these things he sees as evidence that psychotic artists use their aesthetic as a buffer against deep emotional substructures of the unconscious mind.

The intricate, decorative patterns characteristic of so much Outsider Art as well as its use of obscure religious symbolism constitute an obsession with surface style. Surface pattern is used as an “elaborate defensive network” designed to suppress unconscious inarticulate form, which he writes, is integral to true creative healing as it risks displaying unconscious fears and threats.

Inarticulate form, so pivotal to the work of the abstract Expressionists and the modern abstract painters of Europe, bring to consciousness the accidental, indefinite, distorted properties commonly repressed in perception to insure a good gestalt and a relatively stabile world view. Abstraction in the mid 20th century collectively lent inarticulate form symbolic and emotional resonance.

“Aesthetics” Newton writes are a “bulwark against the chaotic disruption of surface consciousness and rationality…(48)” To see a form aesthetically is to mark the moment it looses unconscious potency and becomes mere surface decoration. The modern use of chance and chaos are a threat to notions of beauty, balance, and stability. However Newton goes on to suggest that the threat of inarticulate form only works to increase the experience of aesthetic catharsis by eliciting a stronger and stronger amount of repression on behalf of the beholder until such repression becomes impossible. “…any increase in the depth of horror and ugliness of the depressive content will evoke a corresponding increase in formal harmony and beauty to contain it (51).”

Newton’s interpretation is part of a general, modernist unease with beauty and pleasure. Dubufett’s constitutes a large part of this reaction against a notion of the beautiful primarily by creating a new aesthetics of ugly. Taking ugly as a significant and useful tool Dubufett would make muddy, gray crusty paintings. His intention was to use vulgarity in order to offer a total alternative to dominating trends in western painting, like perspective, and the illusion of volume, as well as pleasureable uses of color and line.

His figures are flattened and devoid of the soft volume that characterized the common depiction of the female. Dubufett painted legs splayed with an angular grotesquery of sharp lines drawn into thick muddy paint. Dubufett would interpret “outsider” artist’s rawness, their disproportionate figures, and their an inability to create illusionist, space as ugly. For in a skilled and cultured artist like Dubufett such disproportion was a reaction against European art culture, an element lacking from the outsider’s work that he was influenced by. His work adopted signifiers of ugly, ugly not being one of the intended meanings of the mentally ill.

Newton, Stephen James Painting, Psychoanalysis, and Spirituality.New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001

The Outsider Myth

 The rhetoric of Outsider is full of fiction and myth. It constitutes part of the outside, marginalized people and styles of the Philosophical and Social discourse called the Other. The discourse of the Other, like the Outsider, is made up of the marginalized and the socially disempowered. It consists of art made by non-western societies (unfairly labeled Primitive art), art made through out history by women, as well as childrens art, and art of the mentally ill.

This myth mirrors the myth of the modern artist as a heroic, nonconformist who asserts his autonomous individuality against a conformist and authoritative society. Structuralist and poststructuralist thought (an intellectual movement coming out of the 50 and 60’s and constituting a wide range of thinkers) with its emphasis on semiotics and the death of authenticity sought to discredit this myth. It was recognized that the originality of both the modern artist and the outsider is conditioned by the collective “text” of the culture. Postmodern thought would bring a damning critique over the category of the Other. It would suggest that to label an art form “Other”(or “Primitive,” or “Outsider”) tells us more about the labeler than the object itself. The terms Primitivism, Outsider Art, and the discourse surrounding female artists were all severely critiqued as male, Eurocentric extensions of chauvinism, imperialism, and colonialism.

 Yet this often ignored the process of absorption and appreciation that was saddled with the system of domination and control. This Other was not exclusively exploited but also recognized as a possible means of a critique on western culture. The critical position adopted by the modern artist was largely due in part to an appreciation and inspiration by this Other (notably Picasso’s appropriation of African art as well as Gauguin, also Paul Klee’s interest in children’s art, and the surrealists and, as mentioned, Dubufett’s interest in the art of the mentally ill). Appreciation happened together with the systematic pillaging of foreign objects (as well as people).

 Joanne Cubbs in her essay “Rebels, Mystics, and Outcastes: the Romantic Artist Outsider” takes a stance against the misuse and misinterpretation of outsider art. She writes, “the discourse of Outsider Art imposes a false intentionality upon some makers, obscures the original subversive meaning of others, and finally asserts it own hegemony of meaning over those it views as culturally disempowered in a way that is similar to the system it protests…the category of Outsider Art is itself the invention of an elite coterie…(Hall and Metcalf 86)”

 She notes that Dubufett’s work was devoted to extending the notion of avant-garde. Dubufett is creator of the term Art Brut (raw art); an artist who was integral in securing a discourse beyond a medical and psychoanalytic framework for Outsider Art. The untutored and untrained unknowingly became the newest inspiration for the modern artist and his/her attempt to undermine high art practices.   

 Outsider Art extends the false myth of romanticized individualism that plagued modernity. “Outsider Art is the most extreme example of the Romantic tendency to conflate social and artistic nonconformity, to re-encode social marginality as a willful act of creative individualism (85).”

 Though offering a sharp critique Cubb’s never explains how this should change the way we deal with the discourse of Outsider Art.

 Hall, Michael D. and Metcalf, Eugene W

The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture.

Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994

Skill in Modern Art

In James Elkin’s Master Narrative and Their Discontent he suggests the possibility of reincorporating skill into the art historical discourse (specifically the history of painting). He notes the common gap between art academics and the rest of the world who still insist, “my six year old could do that.” Outside the art world a common standard used to judge all art is a 17th century academic aesthetic, that primarily includes the ability to render as the eye sees. Modern art is judged against photographic standards of realism. Thus the discomfort with modern art that often snubs its nose at craft in the traditional sense.

Skill signifies the triumph of culture in the culture/nature division. Jeff Koons comes to mind as the artist who epitomizes an artist who totally accepts his industrialized commodity driven culture. Koons does not build anything but is a director who hires his objects and images out to be made by professional craftsmen. A Koons piece is icily finished, polished and perfect, as good as the finish on any new automobile or plastic toy. Koons makes craft a weapon of alienation and tension, where kitschy, banal, sentimental objects are made car size with laser-crafted precision. Hence, Koons brings to light one use of craft in art. The machine has long trumped man’s handmade ability.

If skill signifies this triumph of culture over nature then the modern art’s cultivation of naïve craft, taken from folk art, children’s art, and the art of the mentally ill, would come to signify the acceptance of organicity and the animal state of nature. It also assumes an antagonistic posture towards culture. The raw and unfinished signifies an emotional release, the expulsion of tension, out of sync with the restraints and repression implied by skill and craft. Craft, from this point of view, rings emotionally hollow.

Skill became an embarrassment to the modern artist who sought to avoid it if s\he had it or to intentionally oppose it. Yet however fashionable this turn away from skill became the wide spread abandonment constitutes part of the mournful tone of modernity. Despite its rhetoric of progress and utopia, the cultivation of naiveté was a form of rebellion against high European culture. Notables are Gauguin’s famous abandonment of his upper middle class life to live in Tahiti, Picasso who curbed some of his own skills as a draftsman to draw like the adept child, Klee as well, Nolde, Dubbeffett, and Guston.

Skill in the production of artists like Koons and Hirst (one might add Peter Halley and many others) signifies the triumph of the mechanistic commercial world and our alienation from a world of computerized images and assembly line things, from all those things the artist who adopt intentionally “poor” signifiers think of as integral to humanity and to their experience of the world.

Skill necessarily concludes in the loss of the artist’s hand/body- and by extension it’s individuality. Perhaps concluding in the mobility of the film, capable of photography’s cold and seamless mimesis and of perfecting time and the real movement of the eye and the chronology of an action. The machine of course beats the eye, the mind, and the hand.

In the history of modern art, craft is made into a conservative position that reinforces passé, artistic tradition. While an art that intentionally courts the improvisational and the aleatory believes itself to be outside of the any standardized aesthetic. A contradiction, it always succumbs to the expansion of the aesthetic and the canonization of the rawness of expression, thus its rebelliousness is weakened and the artist necessarily moves on to something new.

Construct Destruct Construct Destruct

Low on a pedestal sits the burnt and bronze remains of a book. The act of casting, a traditional form of creating meant to stabilize and beautify, is also an act of destruction. The books are erased yet preserved, ash and bronze. Through the charcoal one can still see the remnants of thin paper pages where the heat from the bronze stopped burning. Left to chance the thin layers of bronze made a hard metal ephemeral and highlight the tenderness of the paper. The book is muffled, silenced, but its presence as an object is increased.

The book is a piece by Will ClenDening and is included in Watkins College of Art and Design last fall in 2006. It was a wonderful and grave reminder of why Will ClenDening is missed so deeply by the arts community. The show began along the outskirts of the gallery hall with his early experiments in painting and moved into the more recentconceptual work that included photo documentation of performance and impermanent installations.

The idea that creation is always coupled with destruction first crops up in the early paintings where layer after layer of paint is obsessively poured and smeared across previous layer, the two-face marriage between destruction and creation. From the playing cards, details from a larger piece called “Distillation of Chance”, where will placed a deck of cards under erasure and collected its remains to the sad, funny machines he made. In one a pen records the mindless chatter of an electric fan on an endless supply of ticker tape.

On the back wall of the gallery is a projected video of Will interviewing himself in the vein of a late night television show. In this self-investigation Will constantly questions the validity of his own wholly narcissistic work of art. He creates a space where the ego, fully unrepressed and able to unabashedly reference itself, can give voice to its dreams of grandeur as well as its self-accusations. In ‘I’m masturbating Right Now’ Will sardonically mentions ‘The Death of the Author,’ an essay by Roland Barthes that Will tells himself he needs to be aware of before he can understand his work. The space Will creates is similar to the way Roland Barthes describes the space of the text as an “oblique space,” a place “where all identity is lost (Barthes 142).” Through language a culture asserts itself and displaces the originating self. Personal identity gets subsumed, where the purely narcissistic self gives way to the coding of the ego. At the end of “I’m Masturbating Right Now” Will repeats the phrase “Everybody loves Raymond,” as if his thoughts had been totally subsumed and have given way to the nature of the medium and the culture, stuck like a skipping record or those brief, broadcast glitches when the same commercial will appear back to back.

Through his wonderful banter Will keeps an ironic stance towards himself. He knows his game to be, as he says, both “genius” and “bullshit,” of the most personal nature and the most distance and suprapersonal. Will as interviewer keeps slipping into Will as interviewed; he is his own special guest. In mirroring himself Will deals with his self-estrangement. Isolated on video and mirrored (as when editing and watching the author is again pluralized and mirrored) the self is seen as a other, objectified and projected from the subject. The estrangement is manifold for the author (and then for us) both intrinsic in the making of the piece and in the medium.

There are wonderful moments of speechlessness and hesitation where Will cuts between long open mouthed “ums” from one Will to the other. Here the “I” tries to locate itself as a platform from which it can ask and answer itself, but the “I” is a shifter. Like an empty glass it is up to context and content to give it meaning and definition. Will experiences the same trouble children have with “I” preferring the absolute of a proper noun. When one Will says “I” another Will says “I.” The self shifts and slides from itself. It references itself while locating itself only in its experiences, its memories, never in a proper noun, singular and stabile. The self plurals and falters even in its own conversations, where it is capable of high profundity and low vulgarity. Will captures the way the mind wonders, meanders, refuses to stick to a topic.

At the end of ‘The Death of the Author’ Barthes writes“…[T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author (148 Barthes).” The death of the author opens the text up to a multiplicity of interpretations where meaning is constantly deferred and rediscovered. The reader is empowered, given both the burden and joy of finding meaning.

The ultra coded, clever nature of Will’s work also seeks to undermine the codes, to negate the over intellectualization of the art and of its irony. It tries to wrestle through the textual maze of the culture to
find our guts and our laughter. The videos and the machines are funny, sensually enjoyable as objects and as narrative. This negation is a process of putting the self under erasure, of denying singularity and stability. In the video Will is preserved and pluraled, simultaneously
frozen and yet ambiguously unresolved. He keeps circling around in our heads.

The Nashville critic David Maddex also has a piece about Will on his blog.

Also see some of Will’s work on the Secret Show Series website.

Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.