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Sunday, December 17, 2006

T.J. Clark, an art critic...

...sounded pretty damn sure about this twenty years ago:


The bourgeoisie has an... interest in preserving a certain myth of the aesthetic consciousness, one where a transcendental ego is given something appropriate to contemplate in a situation essentially detached from the pressures and deformities of history. The interest is considerable because the class in question has few other areas (since the decline of the sacred) in which its account of consciousness and freedom can be at all compellingly phrased.



Very elegant way of saying that regressive people like you and me, aching for the certainty and exultation that a now-absconded God gave us, turn aesthetic experience into a personal religion. Our interactions with paintings and novels are a narcissistic escape from reality, a depraved indulgence in a false and reactionary pleasuring of our own sense of freedom and awareness ...

Many humanities professors remain so frightened about the possibility that they're doing this awful thing that they make sure to assign agitprop in their classes, so that no one could possibly accuse them of not caring.



Yet having surveyed the results of this relentlessly historical approach to art, Clark now, decades later, admits to second thoughts, as Michael J. Lewis, in a great essay in The New Criterion, notes:

'When lamenting the current state of art history, Clark can sound almost conservative. He ridicules “much of the Left academy” for what he calls its “constant, cursory hauling of visual (and verbal) images before the court of political judgment—with the politics deployed by the prosecution usually as undernourished and instrumentalized as the account given of what the image in question might have to ‘say.’” Here Clark recognizes that something has gone badly wrong. Under the reign of formalism, the art object was a kind of cloistered virgin, its aesthetic integrity guarded against any kind of political or social agenda that might taint it. But in an age of agenda art, the object had lost its purity, as it were, to become a plaything of any political agenda that might claim it. In a startling passage he acknowledges as much:

My art history has always been reactive. Its enemies have been the various ways in which visual imagining of the world has been robbed of its true humanity, and conceived of as something less than human, non-human, brilliantly (or dully) mechanical. In the beginning that meant that the argument was with certain modes of formalism, and the main effort in my writing went into making the painting fully part of a world of transactions, interests, disputes, beliefs, “politics.” But who now thinks it is not? The enemy now is not the old picture of visual imaging as pursued in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns, but the parody notion we have come to live with of its belonging to the world, its incorporation into it, its being “fully part” of a certain image regime. “Being fully part” means, it turns out in practice, being at any tawdry ideology’s service.'



You could say the same of universities, you know, and what has happened to them now that their traditional belief in the relative "apartness" of their intellectual activity has turned into a belief that there's no distinction at all between the university and the world outside of it -- that anything remotely like an 'ivory tower' has been a politically despicable idea. As Clark suggests, once you decide that there are no relatively constant values, ideas, and texts for which universities stand, once universities lose their intellectual autonomy and find their only measure of worth and meaning in the degree to which they respond to a larger political world, then you are "at any tawdry ideology's service."


***************

UPDATE:

Daniel Green, at The Valve, says another thing that needs to be said:


What formalist ever believed a work of art or literature was literally “brilliantly (or dully) mechanical,” or, at least, that a proper response to art was one that regarded it as “something less than human, non-human”? Has anyone ever really confronted a work of art “in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns”? The very fact the a human being experiences a work created by another human being, both of whom presumably draw on very human attributes--creativity, attentiveness, for that matter even the ability to self-induce a “trance-like” state--would seem to make the transformation of the puerile metaphor of the “mechanical” response to art into something real, something to be contrasted with “human,” manifestly preposterous. Yet this association of formalist criticism of all kinds with merely “mechanical” aesthetic appreciation and “engaged” political criticism with the fully “human” world of “transactions, interests, disputes, beliefs” has been an operational assumption of academic criticism for almost three decades now, producing such an endless stream of ideologically sodden “scholarship” that apparently even Clark has had enough.

It’s good that T. J. Clark wants now to challenge the pseudo-analyses of “belonging to the world” and “image regimes,” but maybe he should have realized that his own interpretation of formalism was itself a “parody notion,” that he was exchanging one “mechanical” approach for what was inevitably to become its equally distorted mirror image. It now seems a fixed law of academic criticism that one generation will dismiss the previous generation’s preferred critical method based on its least representative, most exaggerated characteristics, while going on to practice a new method that seems designed to provoke a similar reaction from the next (or in this case, from one of its own.)