One of the characteristic activities that goes on in an artistic practice is reflection upon that very practice of which it is a part. Much of this reflection is implicit within the works produced within the practice. Any work of art embodies a kind of reflective attitude towards a practice; the most routine work, for example, carries the sense that the practice is worth continuing, and that its routine manifestations are at least ‘good enough’ for whatever range of human needs, interests, and desires they are meant to satisfy. More ambitious artistic works will typically draw selectively from earlier instances of the practice, and some reflective evaluation is given implicitly in the choices of what is refused, what retained, and what extended from prior instances of the practice. A ‘radical’ work will embody an attitude of large-scale rejection (‘No more monuments!’; ‘No more bourgeois painting!’), but will also necessarily invoke, by hybridization and analogy, other artistic practices, and their genres and histories, in building up its own distinctive kinds of meaningfulness and significance. Also accompanying an artistic practice is a great deal of talk about the practice, both from those who work within the practice and those who encounter and appreciate its works. Some times the talk of those encountering the works may seem internal to the practice, as when the relevant artists are highly sensitive to the judgments of those who encounter the works; at other times the judgments of those who are not the relevant artists are ignored by insiders and so seem external to the practice, as expressed in the composer Milton Babbitt’s notorious ‘Who cares if you listen?’.
One of the most distinctive features of the contemporary visual arts is the relative porosity of distinctions among art forms (such as painting and sculpture) and genres. A corollary of this is the relative prominence of explicit linguistic or quasi-linguistic evaluative reflections within a traditional genre such as painting, as in Joseph Beuys’s placard stating ‘The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Over-rated’ or Philip Guston’s painting of a monumentalized canvas next to the names of Masaccio, Giotto, and Tiepolo. Both of these features are particularly distinctive in contrast to main lines of modern art, especially those that highlight a concern for a puristic use of artistic media, one that aims to minimize or eliminate features and values of an artwork that can be readily realized in different media, while foregrounding those features that are mostly limited to those of a particular art form, such as linearity in drawing, or atmospheric coloring in painting.
In recent decades historians of modern art have come to focus less on figures in late modern art whose works are readily grasped as part of a concern for medium purism, such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, and more on figures who represent alternative paths. One outstanding instance of this more recent concern is Alex Pott’s Experiments in Modern Realism (2013). Potts therein considers a range of figures, including the Americans Pollock, Claes Oldenburg, and Allan Kaprow, but also the Frenchman Jean Dubuffet, the Dane Asger Jorn, the Scot Eduardo Paolozzi, and the Germans Wols and Joseph Beuys, as exemplars of different strains of modernist realism, understood as “a broad tendency defined by the significance accorded the referential, outwardly directly, representational aspects of an artwork.” (Potts p.24) Potts follows Roman Jakobson’s canonical essay ‘Realism in Art’ (1921) in noting that the use of the term ‘realism’ with regard to the arts encompasses many features, not all of which in practice are exemplified in any particular artwork or artistic movement. These figures are not so to speak conventionally realistic in their works, but rather avant-gardist without practicing abstract art. Potts notes that some of the figures are motivated to make realist works as part of their response to political concerns and social criticism, but he does not suggest that any single aim or ideal or commitment binds these figures together.
The prominent historian of recent art Hal Foster has in his Mellon lectures of 2018, and now published as Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg (2020), taken up a sub-set of Potts’s figures, added the writings of the philosopher, novelist, and pornographer Georges Bataille on the topic of Paleolithic art, and treated them as part of a single multi-faceted project undertaken from the mid-1940’s to mid-1960’s: the creation and practice of what Foster in the first chapter calls ‘brutal aesthetics’. The time-span of the project indicates its motivation: an artistic response to the devastations of World War II. For Foster the formulation of the project’s motivation was primarily and proleptically given by the German literary theorist and critic Walter Benjamin in an essay of 1933, ‘Experience and Poverty’. As in Benjamin’s better known essay ‘The Storyteller’, Benjamin distinguishes two senses within the English word ‘experience’: Erfahrung, the sense of experience as something undergone, something that admits of accumulation, and something which can be transmitted in stories and teachings; and Erlebnis, as something undergone in a temporally-bounded period, something felt and subjective, and something not readily admitting of linguistic formulation. (Foster oddly characterizes these two as ‘wisdom’ and information’ respectively. (p.1) On Benjamin’s account, modern Europeans after World War I exhibited a loss of their previous generations’ ability to tell stories, and so a loss of Erfahrung. Foster sees this alleged condition as intensified by World War II and the subsequent spread of industrialized consumer culture throughout the West. Benjamin urged artists to face up to this condition and “to start from scratch” (Foster p.2) This is a kind of ‘positive barbarism’, in that it involves a whole-sale rejection of whatever counts as part of ‘civilization’, and the pursuit of which Foster thinks unites the figures he treats. The sense of ‘brutality’ in this barbarism is suggested in Dubuffet’s attempt to develop an ‘art brut’. In Dubuffet’s case, and by extension also of the other figures treated, this ‘brutality’ has two aspects prima facie: first, Dubuffet successively appeals to the models of artistic production by those ‘outside’ civilization: the mad, children, the Native or indigenous (pp.5-6). Second, Dubuffet allegedly attempts to “seek a ground in brute materiality.” (p.6) For Foster this second aspect amounts to a willed negation or inversion of deep-seated conventional values in art. So instead of a painting suggesting the vertical orientation of the artist, the viewer, and an implied visual field, a painting rather the painting suggests something at least worked upon horizontally; and instead of the painting and its materials being treated as a cultural luxury and valuable, the product and process of painting are conceived as shit and a kind of psychic regression to what Sigmund Freud indicated as infantile pleasures centered on the anus. Foster then generalizes Dubuffet’s motivation and these two characterizations of his artistic practice into a ‘brutal aesthetics’ shared among the five figures treated in the book. Foster immediately notes that brutal aesthetics cannot be practiced solely as conceived in this austere manner, because the artist, in attempting to start over, never finds themselves with a blank slate. Rather they are confronted with, and so use as their materials, the heterogeneous stuffs and junk of industrialized life. So practitioners of brutal aesthetics, like most of the artists throughout human history, must conceive of themselves as something like the ‘bricoleurs’ famously described by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée Sauvage (1962), practitioners of bricolage, everyday meaning-making through collage, juxtaposition, and alteration of what is at hand, regardless of whether the materials are hitherto accredited as vehicles of artistic meaning and regardless of how such materials have hitherto been worked.
Foster devotes a chapter to each of the five figures, and proceeds in a roughly chronological order in terms of their achievements most relevant to brutal aesthetics. Dubuffet’s work and thought exhibits the characteristics and problems of brutal aesthetics most clearly. In the 1940’s Dubuffet attempted to model his work successively on figures of ‘otherness’, that is, cultural types whose sensibilities lie outside the mainstream: the child; the ‘common man’ who makes graffiti; and the insane. In each case he comes to realize work made on these models is never ‘outside’ the mainstream of European civilization and its art. The ‘outside’ figure is revealed as already part of, or destined to be, part of the mainstream; and Dubuffet’s resultant works in any case come to be just more products of the culture. In the mid-late 1940’s Dubuffet begins to use non-traditional materials such as earth, gravel, and sand, and conceptualizes the basic action of the painter as ‘besmearing’ (p. 56), and this latter poetics, rather than the former appeal to kinds of outsiders, forms the basis of Dubuffet’s artistic practices at least through the 1950’s. Foster claims that the characteristic effect of this latter poetics is the cultivation of a sense of artistic practice as a continual de-figuring, transforming, and yet preserving of three basic established artistic conceptualizations. First, within an art form such as painting, Dubuffet treated subjects in ways that conflated sub-genres; so, for example, Dubuffet remarks that “A man, his physical person, is a small world like any other, a landscape” (quoted on p. 62). Second, Dubuffet’s manner of treatment “plays with the contradiction between painting steeped in material and painting open to transformation.” (p. 64). Third, Foster obscurely suggests that there is a basic tension in Dubuffet’s work between its foregrounding of materiality and its ‘addressing the mind’ (ibid). By the late 1960’s Dubuffet comes to re-conceptualize his artistic practice to such an extent that its contact with his initial motivation is uncertain. Dubuffet’s late aim is to induce his audience to re-enact mentally the process wherewith the work is made (p. 66), and he acknowledges that the figure of ‘the man without culture’ is an ideal and utopian fiction.
The remaining four chapters show how the various practitioners of brutal aesthetics are to some degree likewise afflicted with double binds, and in some cases to some degree evade the double binds through lessening the interest in starting over, and focusing rather on cultivating something like the model of the bricoleur. Bataille’s interest in Paleolithic painting, especially at Lascaux, suggests to Foster another attempt to return to origins (p. 102), but somehow Bataille is less afflicted by double binds than Dubuffet because of Bataille’s greater awareness of paradox of the attempt to break outside of social bonds (p. 103). Jorn’s paintings focus upon ‘the creature’, and Jorn writes in 1950 that “[w]e must portray ourselves as human beasts” (quoted on p. 108). Foster notes that this is close to Dubuffet’s poetics, but he insists that Jorn escapes Dubuffet’s double binds to the degree that “the creatures in Jorn point to cracks inside the law here and now, cracks that art might reveal, even open up, gaps in the symbolic order that, again, might be turned into point of purchase where power can be resisted or at least rethought, where new social links might be imagined and old displaced ones recovered.” (p.137) Foster gives a similar assessment of Paolozzi, whose positive barbarism consists in the attempt to practice a brutal aesthetics of something like collage that includes the imperative to “damage, erase, destroy, deface and transform” (Paolozzi quoted on p. 157), and whose bricolage-type work in sculpture and prints likewise evades something of Dubuffet’s double binds because it registers real contradictions “as fragments, rearrangements, breakdowns, gaps.” (p. 193) Finally, Oldenburg is given a similar and largely positive treatment. Already in 1956 the young Oldenburg stated that his art strives for the simultaneous presentation of contraries, which will come to include aesthetic values of the rigid and the pliant and the small and the large, and contents such as sex and destruction and ultimately life and death (p. 195). Oldenburg’s familiar use of heterogeneous everyday materials and shifts in scale make him the very model of positive barbarian and brutal aesthetician. What defeats Oldenburg’s project, so Foster claims in the book’s final paragraph, is not any internal contradictions, but history itself: “brutal aesthetics was no match for the society of the spectacle” because (?) “[Oldenburg’s] art, his time—our time—does not allow a redemptive last word.” (p. 247) Foster’s thought here is particularly obscure, but perhaps he is suggesting that brutal aesthetics is only sustainable when the artist, like Jorn, Paolozzi, and Oldenburg, works with and reveals the fissuring, fragmentation, and heterogeneity within everyday practices involving industrialized projects, and that a distinctive feature of the society of the spectacle, as diagnosed by the French theorist Guy Debord, was that social realities manifest themselves publicly as seamless spectacles wherein no sense of conflicting materials, frames, or views intrudes.
The chapter on Oldenburg is very much of a piece with the rest of the book’s approach, concerns, and style, and exhibits the book’s achievements and limitations as a piece of art history. The thematic concern with positive barbarism and brutal aesthetics organizes the figures in an illuminating way as providing lines of development in post-WWII European and American visual art that eschew abstraction and pursue ‘realism’ in some of the many senses of the term. It would be fruitful to extend and test Foster’s approach to the other figures treated by Potts. The limitations here are familiar from Foster’s other books and perhaps also in a great deal of academic writing about recent art. Little sense is given of what it is like to encounter, look at, and reflect upon the works. On only the rarest of occasions does Foster even note stylistic features; one such instance in the book is his helpful but characteristically unexplicated remark that “Oldenburg used softening not only to deform things but also to de-define them in a way that might disclose “unities” across otherwise disparate objects.” (p. 237) The framework occasionally seems Procrustean in its temporal limitations (for example, the important works of Dubuffet and Oldenburg after 1970 are undiscussed), as well as distorting the sense of the artists’ full achievements (for example, Paolozzi’s prints from the 1960’s that treat material from the philosopher Wittgenstein, and which are widely considered among his finest works, are not so much as mentioned). Foster’s explications of the content of the artworks is mostly limited to citing whatever comes to his mind from the writings of Freud and Lacan.
Still, Foster’s studies raise the question of the character and content of artistic projects, and what sort of criteria are relevant to their evaluation. In outline Foster’s account is simple: 1. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a number of European and American artists conceive of the project of positive barbarism, whose artistic expression is a brutal aesthetics. This aesthetics is characterized by a thorough-going rejection of inherited art forms, at least in their characteristic manners; the attempt to start over; and the adoption of the model of the artist as bricoleur. 2. Double binds arise as artists attempt to realize the aesthetics; the source of the double binds is ultimately the recognition that any attempt to start over necessarily draws from some inherited materials, models, and practices. 3. Artists evade the double binds to some degree by resolutely adopting the model of the bricoleur and focusing upon the heterogeneity within the everyday life of industrialized societies. 4. The (artistic?) effectiveness of the project ends with the rise of the society of the spectacle, which puts an end to the public manifestation of the heterogeneity of everyday life characteristic from the end of World War II until the mid-late 1960’s.
The concept of a ‘double bind’ in human action was developed during this same post-WWII period by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues as part of research into learning broadly and also schizophrenia in particular. The notion of a ‘double bind’ depends upon the conceptualization of human communication as multi-leveled and multi–aspected. In a simple example, some content is conveyed, such as the command ‘Do X’. But something of the manner and/or context in which the command occurs sends a different content of ‘Don’t do X’. The receiver of the command is then in a double bind, that is, to the extent that the receiver accepts the authority of the sender to command, the receiver is ‘bound’ both to do and to not do X. In human life we deal with local double binds in various ways. We can simply ignore them. In many cases we can treat them as part of a learning process wherein we learn some richer conceptualization of the situation that doesn’t set the different commands at odds with each other. Foster seems to treat Dubuffet as offering just such an instance when he notes that Dubuffet came by the late 1960’s to conceptualize the ‘brut’ not as something existing outside of all human civilization and that could somehow ground a new kind of artistic practice, but rather as an ideal to be striven for. Foster seems to think that this is a kind of refutation of Dubuffet’s project, but I cannot see any reason not to think of it as rather an instance of cultural learning through testing and feedback.
This criticism of Foster’s use of the concept of a double bind suggests a further and general problem with Foster’s analysis. Foster assumes as outlined above that something like the small set imperatives and conceptualizations characterizes an artistic practice. Is that so? Consider by contrast the account offered by the art historian Michael Baxandall in his book Patterns of Intention (1985). Baxandall approaches the topic of the structure and content of an artistic practice by first considering a well-documented engineering project, the design and construction of the Tay Bridge in Scotland in the late nineteenth-century. The primitive structure of the engineering process is first marked with an imperative: Build a bridge! Then a very large number of secondary considerations are brought to bear upon the process, including the geographical location, the memory of a previous disaster, the evolving technology of girders, and contemporaneous public tastes. Baxandall calls the general imperative ‘the charge’, and the lengthy list of heterogeneous secondary considerations ‘the brief’. Transferring this to an account of an artistic practice, Baxandall notes that in the arts the charge is typically set by the artist’s understanding of prevailing practices. The kind of broad rejection of prevailing arts considered here would be a kind of avant-gardist charge characteristic of a great deal of prominent twentieth-century art. But it is implausible to think that the briefs of the various practitioners of brutal aesthetics are reducible to the small set of considerations cited by Foster. It may well be, particularly in the case of Dubuffet, that Foster is right in thinking that the artists sometimes experienced themselves as caught in a double bind, but as noted in the previous paragraph the double bind is typically a local and transient phenomenon within a much richer conception of a developing artistic practice. This richer conception would seem to lend itself more readily to description in terms of Baxandall’s account of charges and briefs, rather than Foster’s more austere conception of single imperatives and double binds.
--John Rapko
References:
Gregory Bateson, Steps To an Ecology of Mind (1975)
Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (1985)
Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” (1933) and “The Storyteller” (1936) in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934 (1999) and Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938 (2002)
Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (1967; multiple translations)
Hal Foster, Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg (2020)
Roman Jakobson, “Realism in Art” (1921) in Language in Literature (1987)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée Sauvage (1962; newly translated 2021)
Alex Potts, Experiments in modern realism: world-making, politics and the everyday in postwar European and American art (2013)