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Art and Marginality
Author(s): John RobertsSource: Circa, No. 30 (Sep. - Oct., 1986), pp. 44-46Published by: Circa Art MagazineStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25557135Accessed: 11-08-2014 11:21 UTC
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CIRCA
44
AND
MARGINALITY
John
Roberts
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Discussion
over
the shrunken
public
space
for
art and
its criticism is
the
central
terrain
of
post-war
Western
art.
In
fact the
political
strategies,
aesthetic
bifurcations and
managerial
neuroses
of
post-war
art
are
structurally
determined by the theorised or felt
marginality
of
art's
social role.
All
major
theorists of
art
under
capitalist
modernity
have taken
on,
irrespective
of
political
position,
the function
of
art
as
operating
out
of
a
sense
of historical
closure.
For
Adorno under
the
freeing
of
art from
its communal
"cult function"
modern
art
was
inconceivable
now
without the
moment
of
"anti-art";
for
Greenberg
modern
art
traumatised
by
the kitsch
of
dominant
narrative
traditions
and
the
mass
media could
only
revitalise
its
humanizing
role
by
withdrawing
from such
messages
into
'pure
form';
for
Benjamin
in the
wake
of
the
second
technological
revolution
art
had
to
take
on
the
new
media
if
it
didn't
want to
lose
further
political
ground
to
the
bourgeoisie.
Each
of
these
positions
could
be
said
to
represent
the critical
parameters
under
which
the
majority
of
art
has
been
produced
snce
the '50s
and
the
rise
of
post-war
media
culture:
the
anti-traditionalist
critique (post-Dada
(Rauschenberg,
New
Realism),
performance, body
art,
conceptual
art),
the
expressionist-Romantic
(Abstract
Expressionism,
post-painterly
abstraction,
neo-expressionism)
and
the
political
?
analytic (deconstructive
photography, art-as-sociology).
One
may
of
course
say
these
categories
are
arbitrary,
or
rather
that the
work
placed
in
these
categories
have
different causal histories than
implied
by
the
categories,
but nonetheless
we
might
point
with
some
degree
of
conviction
to
a
tripartite
division
in
post
war
art's
self-conscious
articulation of
its
resistance
to
capital
and
its
institutionalisation
of
art:
the
anti
aesthetic,
the
formalist,
and the
political-instrumental.
That all three
of
these
categories
have been
found
wanting,
insofar
as
their
aesthetic
responses
to
the
reification
of
art
under late
capitalism
have shown
to
be
partial
or
idealised,
(for example
that
painting
is
dead)
is
perhaps
the
basis for
that
opening
up
of
ossified
vanguard
art
categories
that
is
now
nominally
?
on
the left
at
least
?
called
postmodernism.
In
essence
art's
'powerlessness'
can no
longer
be
'resolved'
on
the twin
horns of
Utopian
modernism:
radical withdrawal
or
functionalism,
i.e.
that
society
will
eventually
'catch
up'
with
the
challenges
of
art,
or
that
mechanical
production
can
finally
democratise
art
for the
public
sphere.
In
this
sense
the
weakness
of
the
above
modernist
models is
that
their
view
of
the
importance
of
art
is
predicated
on
the
assumption
that
art's
powers
of social
transformation
this
century
have
ineliminibly
'lost out' to
the reified
structures
of
the
capitalist
life-world.
Thus
at
the
beginning
of
Aesthetic
Theory
Adorno
says:
"Everythingabout
art
has
become
problematic:
its inner
life,
its
relation
to
society,
even
its
right
to
exist.
One
would
have
thought
that
the
loss
of
an
intuitive
and
naive
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CIRCA
45
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approach
to art
would be offset
by
a
tendency
to
increased
reflection
which
seizes
upon
the
chance
to fill
the
void
of
infinite
possibilities.
This
has
not
happened.
What looked like
an
expansion
of
art
turned
out to
be
its
contraction. The
great
expanse
of
the
unforeseen
which
revolutionary
artistic
movements
began
to
explore
around
1910
did
not
live
up
to
the
promise
of
adventure
and
happiness".
Likewise
in
Modernist
Painting
Greenberg
sees,
in
the
wake
of
the
collapse
of
the
Enlightenment
project,
a
purely
self
regulating
job
for
art,
a
holding
in,
within the
high-arts
of
painting
and
sculpture,
of the
highest
aspirations
of
the
Western
fine-art
tradition.
In
Benjamin
the
demise
of the
ritualised
and
socialised
relations around
the
production
and
consumption
of
cultural
artefacts
can
only
be reinstated
through
embracing
the
technological
advances
of
capitalism
itself.
However,
if
Benjamin's
model at
least offers
a
practical understanding of the place of
the
fine-arts
in
the
post-Enlightenment
world,
nonetheless all
theorists
conceptualise
the crisis of
art
from
within the thematic of
a
fall. Art then for
this
pessimistic
modernist tradition is
something
that
has been central
(under
other
names)
in
pre-capitalist
cultures
and which exists
today
in
a
permanent
state
of
sclerosis
or
limbo,
before
its
future
restitution
under socialism.
Now
this
is
not to
say
that
under
socialism,
understood
as a
break with
capital,
such
a
restitution would
not
involve the
democratisation of
the
production
and
consumption
of
art,
but
that the structural exclusion of art from
the lives of most
people
under
late
capitalism
have been
subject
in
theory
and
practice
to
forms
of
analysis
which
have
distorted both the conditions
under
which
art
might
reasonably
be
made
and
talked about
under
capitalism
and
reinforced the
interests of
those who
act
as
its
managers
and
mediators.
Essentially
the
pessimistic
modernist
tradition with
its
dual and
contradictory
emphasis
on
withdrawal
and
functionalism
has
too
readily
taken its
sense
of
marginality
from
the
meanings
of
the
dominating:
that
successful
art
rests
on
its
capacity
to
'get
across
to
a
lot of
people'.
As
a
result
art
has
either
resisted
all
discussion of
effect
(art's
powers
of
communication
lie
outside
any
form of
political
rationalisation,
pace
Greenberg)
or
taken
it
on
hysterically
(the
need
for
a
more
popular
art,
murals
etc).
Much
of the
discussion
around art and
politics
in
the
seventies in
Britain
took
on
the
arguments
of the
latter
against
the
former
in
a
kind
of
up-date
of
the
confrontation
between
John
Berger
and
Patrick
Heron in
the
1950s
around the
respective
virtues
of
'socially
concerned
art'
(art
that
dealt with
Big
Human
Themes) and experimentation (art that
was more
heuristic in
ambition).
Art
for
Society
and Art For
Whom with all their
gross
idealisations
(the right
content
produces
the
right
effects:
more
people
in
the
galleries,
votes
for
the
Labour
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CIRCA
46
Party)
was a
good example
of
this and
a
perfect
example
of
how discussion
over
art's
marginality rarely
gets
beyond
either
the
sentimental
or
self
satisfyingly
smug
?
particularly
in
Britain
where
a
good
deal
of
the
nervous
reflexes of this
Manichean
discussion
can
be
mapped
out onto
the
deep
antipathy
towards modern
art
amongst
the British
ruling
classes and the
hegemonic
nature
of
'popular'
British
TV
culture.
Anyway,
what the
crisis
of
the
pessimistic
modernist tradition allows
us
under
the critical rubric of
postmodernism
is
to
discuss art's
production
in
a
way
that
abrogates
the
necessity
of
talking
about
art
as
if its
marginality
constituted
a
loss. This of
course
means
moving
from
a
position
that
sees
art
as on
the outside of
our
culture
looking
in
the dream of
parity
or
popular
legibility,
so
to
speak
?
to
one
that
sees
art
as
ideologically
mobile
and contentious
within the
culture
itself. A position that places art within
the
intellectual
arena
of
many
critical
constituencies
and
across a
number
of
ideological
fronts,
subject
positions
and
expressive
resources.
To
articulate this
dispersed positional
logic
is
therefore
not
to set
up
a new
theory
for the visual
arts
but
to
recognise
that
historically
art
has been
made
with
and
performed
on
many
and
varying
cognitive
and
aesthetic
materials within
many
places
and
with
varying
effects
in
mind.
This
dispersal
of
critical interests
and
expressive
resources
within
a
political
culture
which
is
non-hierarchical
and
non
predictive in relation to the how and
what of
art
maybe
obvious,
but
given
the
vested
interests of
left
careerists,
art
for-the-people proselytizers
and
the
centralizing
impulses
of
the
market,
such
a
democratisation
has been
overridden
and
undertheorised.
In
a
sense
with
the
emergence
of feminist
and
anti-racist
discourses
into
the
British
art
arena
this
necessity
for
a
view
of
politics
and
representation,
art
and
knowledge,
form
and
function,
as
being
bound
by
a
multitude of
interests
and
operative
on
a
multitude of
sites,
has
become
glaringly
obvious.
As Art &
Language
said
a
few
years ago
'Socialism in
one
artwork'
is
a
total
fallacy.
Clearly
therefore
we
are
talking
about
a
deeper
shift
in
our
understanding
of
art's function and
place,
a
shift
that has
barely
begun,
but
one
that
might
be
labelled
in
the
language
of
Gramsci
a
'war of
position'
or
in
the
language
of
the
philosophy
of
science
a
proliferation
of
content
spaces.
Once
we
begin
to
start
talking
about art
in
these
terms
as an
articulation
and
re-working
of
cognitive
and
expressive
materials
at
work
in
the
culture,
then notions
of art
lying
in
wait
for
a
restitution
of
its
social
function
become
otiose.
Perhaps
such
thinking
has
been
thought
of
as
otiose
for
a
good
number
of
years,
but
recently
under the
articulation of a postmodern
problematic
which
has dealt
death
blows
to
Eurocentrism
and
patriarchy
the
cultural
space
to
position
these
arguments
has been
opened
out.
However
this
is not to
say
there
is
a
coherent
sense
of
enterprise amongst
those
who
are
dealing
critically
with
our
culture
and
its
hegemonic
agendas,
or
that
there should
be,
but
that there
is
now
an
increasing
sense
?
particularly
among
students
?
that the debates
that
were
judged
to
be
important
under
American modernism
and the Art For
Society
debates
(that
SDP
phase
of
British art
politics)
are
both
irrelevant
and misleading; that art cannot be
accredited
simply
in
terms of its
formal
coherence
or
its
'correct'
or
'popular'
content
or
on
the
supposed
radicality
of
the medium.
In
this
sense
although
it
would be
foolish
to
overlook
the
structural
impediments
to
the future
institutional
penetration
of this
process,
nonetheless
it would
seem
that
new
forms of
cognitive
mapping
in
art
^rirrmrrrrrrrrrrr1e ^rrrrrW
w
^mHBHH
Nick
Hedges, 'Unemployed
Sisters'.
Photograph
forShelter
1970,
from
the
Whitechapel
Art
Gallery
exhibition
'Art
or
Society',
1978.
attached
to
a
stronger
sense
of
social
particularity,
are
emerging
and
dispersing
themselves within
the
culture.
The
mythologies
of
art-for-the
masses
and
art-as-autonomous
expression
are
in
retreat.
John
Roberts'
book
'Utopian
Reading:
Politics,
Art
and
Modernity'
will
be
published
in
the
near
future
by
Verso.
Art and
Language
'Index:
The
Studio
at
3
Wesley
Place
painted by
Mouth
(II)'.
nk
n
paper
mounted
canvas,
135"
x
286",
1982.
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