Hot Kuspit on Kuspit Action!

Guest blogger: Dan of Iconoduel

Standard late-night blogging disclaimer: Written as this was well past what might ever be considered a reasonable hour, I have no way of knowing whether the following is an atrociously incoherent mess or an incredibly incisive piece of comentary... the majority will be buried below the fold for those bold enough to venture a read...

The Donald Kuspit lecture/essay JL's been reading and posting on is something of a tough slog. (Frankly I think it cries out for—interestingly enough considering its author's own critical predelictions—a psychological reading of its dynamics and motivations, but I'm certainly not prepared to offer such myself.)

I haven't read any of Kuspit's take on The End of Art, but I suspect we're getting bits and pieces of his argument here. The biggest point at issue in this piece, as JL has discussed, seems to be Kuspit's contention that "there can be no history of postmodern art, for the radically contemporary can never be delimited by any single historical reading."

Yet even as he stakes a claim for the exceptionality of postmodern art in this regard, there seems to be a corresponding recognition that the problem, at bottom, is hardly exceptional to our era at all (indeed, I'd say our inability to comprehensively account for the contemporary is what probably precipitates the need for a future history in the first place, but I digress... ). Kuspit:

There has always been more contemporary than historical art—or, to put it more broadly, there has always been more contemporaneity than historicity—but this fact only became emphatically explicit in modernity.

The key, it would seem, is in that final qualifier. He goes on to suggest that modernity represents a tipping point where an absolutist art history was finally "overwhelmed by the abundance of contemporary art evidence that proposed alternative and often radically contrary ideas of value."

But, while Kuspit concedes that this shift in our ability to rationally historicize the present is one of degree and not kind, it looks to me like he sees the change as irrevocable. (Perhaps the end of history, but seen less as eschaton than entropy?) More importantly, it is not a change Kuspit wishes to revoke. And it is with this sentiment that I think it starts to become clear that Kuspit's beef may in fact be with historicity in general.

First there's the suggestion that, because a single, all-encompassing historical narrative can't be had, the whole enterprise is all but totally suspect. JL covers this ground nicely:

Kuspit regards it as an indictment of his straw man that it can’t account for absolutely everything; but if one stops to think for even a moment, one realizes that this is always the case for any attempt at understanding. To write a history is to select; we always know that what results is, even at the level of a Gibbon, partial and to some degree caught within its own moment. But that in itself does not render it incapable of offering its own sort of knowledge.

I only wish to add that I see echoes here of a standard critical indictment of "closure of discourse," which is a patently reasonable caveat until marshaled against understanding. Wholeness, it goes, is only bought at the price of illusion; partiality enters behind the forces of bias and discursive violence. But, doesn't the enterprise of knowledge in some respect necessarily involve a certain will to closure, however Sisyphean? And can't even an illusory notion of wholeness be a constructive thing, however imperfect or imagined?

Beyond this claim, though, there's a more emotional conceit involved here. Historicization to Kuspit, as to others (cue the cute comparisons of museum and mausoleum), is nothing less than commensurate with creative death. Art loses its aura on the walls of the museum and in the pages of the history text. The "heterogeneous and fertile" present is reduced to a "sterile homogeneity" of the historicized past through rigidifying fetishization and idolization.

I don't necessarily wish to argue against this in any real sense (at least on these particular terms). I would like to point out, though, how such castration anxiety seems of a piece with a broader pathology of modernity Kuspit himself lays out for us in The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art—a pathology that leaves us grasping again and again for a perpetually vital contemporaneity, without recourse to the perspective of history or traditional models of wholeness, and without the ability to truly advance beyond a narcissistic concern with the present...

In Sections I and II of Dialectic of Decadence Kuspit attends to Donald Judd and the dynamics behind Judd's rejection of the art of Sandro Chia as "decadent," placing it in a broader modern context. In Section III, then, he expands on this, erecting a sort of shaky psychological metaphysics of art in the modern era as the endless cycle of a fractured dialectic that pits frustrated, unachievable desire against controlling, castrating semiosis, and he argues, ultimately, for the inevitability of decadence in modern art (insofar as it retains the avant-garde concern for its own modernity).

In navigating fragmentary contemporaneity, Kuspit says, the modern "moment" finds itself in an eternal return to the quest for novel ways for irrepressible desire to overcome the oppressive constraints of language or for sterile language to overcome the inexpressibility of desire (or to reign it in)—either case an overcoming that, when actually achieved, really just proves the inadequacy of its own novelty and is thus immediately compromised and neutered. Novelty as stillborn.

Artistic wholeness is impossible in modern times, because the issue of art—the avant-garde issue—is to articulate the modern, without any preconceptions of it. (Art's traditional task was to "describe" the eternal, already known through preconceptions.) Indeed, the modern, by definition the immediate moment in all its purity and novelty—the immediate moment as the risk of time, affording a fresh opportunity to cut a path of history through the void of the unknown, always pressing close with its smell of death—cannot be preconceived. As moment, the modern embodies the incompleteness and precariousness of time. An art determined to articulate it must itself be incomplete and precarious. That is, it is necessarily improvised, lacking the deliberateness and decisiveness of the whole.

...

The modern is transient, and the artistic effort to articulate transience through the improvisation and thus capture the sense of modernity—to eternalize the sensation of the moment, the sensational character of the moment, as Boccioni said—is thus to miss its point. The immediate is artistically "impossible;" eternalizations of its novelty, such as improvisations, rapidly dissolve into semiotic triviality and wasted desire... Advanced art... is of no homeostatic use—seems biologically alien—because of its improvised eternality, which is not true artistic wholeness.

The sense of time is at the core of the dialectic of decadence—time as a duration which defeats any attempt to gain a perspective. That is, we are decadent and modern because we cannot see sub speciae aeternitatis, even a semblance of it. We are bound by the relativity of duration, responsible for the vitality—passion—of the moment... Time as perspective—as past, present, or future tense—brings duration under control, muting its painful intensity, but in the modern world it is impossible to gain a perspective on time, that is, to have an adequate sense of the past and future, and thus some sense of eternity.

In modernity one only knows one's presentness, which is not even understood as a tense of time, that is, one among its three perspectives, and one among the three perspectives on it. Past and future are vigorously denied because they imply a loss of presence. All that counts is the ebb and flow of presence, shaped by the tension between discontented desire, determined to be free but enslaved by the superego, and superegoistic expropriation of desire, hindered by desire's rebellious refusal to be domesticated into social meaningfulness. To be a modern presence is to be doubly decadent: by reason of one's discontented desire, and by reason of one's powerful superego, semioticizing one's passion, and ultimately existence, away.

In modern art decadent discontentment is the necessary condition of creativity. (In traditional art, creativity expresses divine contentment with creation.) Creative fragmentation becomes the rule of art, its ideal expression—the law of modern expression—because it expresses duration, with all its irresolution and discontent. To seem modern—of the present moment—art must ultimately look like a ruin, the ultimate improvised look. Nietzsche, who attacked Wagner for his decadence, thought Wagner had ruined art. What Nietzsche did not understand is that to become modern art had to be ruined. That is, it could no longer be allowed to present a perspective on life, but had to be subject to its duration. Art had to become thoroughly decadent, a complete ruin—a sum of momentary sensations that add up to no whole, and that even suggested no whole was possible, that the very idea of wholeness was inconceivable, obsolete. Art had to seem to be a ruin which had no past and no future...

Nietzsche is correct in his conception of "the formula for every decadent style," even if he could not stomach decadent style—and even though his own aphoristic style is decadent, that is, fragmentary, momentary. (He seems not to have been aware of the irony, that is, of his own decadence.) "There is always anarchy among the atoms, disaggregation of the will—in moral terms: freedom of the individual—extended into a political theory: equal rights for all. Life, equal vitality, all the vibration and exuberance of life, driven back into the smallest structure, and the remainder left almost lifeless. Everywhere paralysis, distress and numbness, or hostility and chaos: both striking one with ever increasing force the higher forms of organization are into which one ascends. The whole no longer lives at all: it is composed, reckoned up, artificial, a fictitious thing."* Such disintegration and artificial wholeness—the sum of decadence—is the only way of being modern, which always means never to be whole, never to be more than an eccentrically individual, vital fragment which can never fit into a whole, which no whole was ever made for, which thus makes one an awkward whole unto oneself.

Decadent disintegration and artificial wholeness—they are inseparable, for the artificial whole is a sum of fragments that do not integrate, making them all the more decadent—are the ingredients of modern novelty. But modern novelty—the invention of fresh fictions of wholeness out of fresh anarchy—is always decadent, and thus hardly a cure for decadence. The cure is perverse—a changed outlook: the recognition that "classical" wholeness has always been a fiction, a necessary narcissistic illusion. Without the magical illusion of wholeness of being, we could not imagine such "higher" organizationas as art, nor convince ourselves that we are among them, that is, higher beings. Without it, we would have to recognize that we are always in a decadent state, that is, inwardly split, and about to fragment—torn between meaning and desire, and forced to live in the moment, that is, be modern, as the only way of acknowledging both without submitting to either, thus keeping them superficial.

*Quoted in William Eickhorst, Decadence in German fiction (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1953), p. 15

"Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!"