The title and authorship of this book is a difficult to explain. The title on the cover is Art and Subjecthood with the subtitle The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism. The editors of the book are listed above, and the book is a collection of essays presented at an academic conference. Following each of the essays is a response from one of the other conference attendees. One of the things I really loved about this book is that it felt authentic to academic conferences and it gave me that secondary inspiration of wanting to go be an academic again.
As a brief precursor to this review, I want to mention that Harneet got this book for me while on a trip to Vancouver, so I had no frame of reference going in—and I routinely find myself inspired when she gives me random things. That said, I have very little knowledge of the nuances of this book. I’ll attempt to characterize the essays faithfully and identify some of the arguments I found most compelling. Apologies if these comments are not accurate and failures of the arguments below should be attributed to me.
The introduction by Isabelle Graw was illuminating and had me thinking about connections to literature almost immediately. While I’m not familiar with the specific philosophical and artistic references in many situations, I was nonetheless drawn in with some of the applicability for the arguments. Seemingly fundamental to all the work in this collection is the philosophy of Michael Fried. Graw comments on Fried’s praise of “presentness” in artwork and she notes that he describes the artwork as one describes spontaneously falling in love: “a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced about it” (12). I’m intrigued by the notion; on the one hand it seems unrealistic, both in life and in art—the richness of both only presents itself over time, but I still find the comment illuminating. Graw notes that “the analogy to the romantic notion of the coup de foudre is quite obvious here—the moment you fall in love with the other person you will get a sense of knowing everything about her (an illusion, as we all know)---an illusion that I would claim that lies at the heart of the modernist ideal of presentness as well” (12). Graw points out this challenge in a way that I view as charitable, and then she uses this objection to consider the minimalist impulse of art: “Fried intuited how Minimalist works with their emphasis on the non-relational, the unitary, and the holistic were modeled after the ideal of other persons” (12). I find this curious. While Minimalism is reductive in the form, it is through that reduction that Fried seems to see the artworks like people. What this implies for subjectivity is somewhat alarming when viewed through a certain lens, and is illuminating in a different way when considering the works of someone like Samuel Beckett, who seems to pare down humanity to fundamentals and thereby creates an even more sympathetic view of mankind.
Graw continues on to consider the effect of artwork on its viewers. She refers to “Warburg’s famous dictum about the picture: ‘you are alive and you don’t hurt me’” (13). In the first place I find that notion at odds with some of what the best artworks do. Remember Kafka’s notion that we ought to read only the kinds of books that hurt and wound us, the axe for the frozen sea inside us, and such. The considerations of what an artwork does necessarily entail considerations of what an artwork is. Graw posits a few ideas about artwork’s agency. She posits the idea that artworks and images have a desire of their own, separate from the desire of its audience. She notes some of the benefits of such an approach, even though I get the sense that she’s ultimately dismissive of such a notion. In her words, “loading external interpretations onto artworks [...] seeks to do justice to the works’ own intrinsic dynamic” (13). It reminds me of the New Critics of the literary world, who suggest that the art work speaks for itself. It seems to me an immediately evident connection, but the implications for subjectivity outside of artwork are compelling. Graw states that “once you treat an image like a given and clearly delineated entity, you ignore the fact that the borders between its inside and outside have long [...] become unstable” (13). She argues that artworks require viewers: “for pictures to act autonomously there needs to be a viewer who ascribes actions to them” (13). It’s a simple idea, but grounds the conversation in material reality. By suggesting that artworks are incomplete on their own, in some ways it seems to demand considerations of producer and audience.
Graw elaborates on the idea of an artwork’s agency as follows: “There is a fine line between visual theory’s assumptions that pictures are alive and a belief that we, as art historians, as critics, and artists, are very attached to: I am referring to the wide-spread belief that artworks have agency. There is a problem with this belief: once we claim that artworks are able to do something, we have presupposed that they are alive” (14). This was the first claim in the text that I took issue with, and Graw seems to, as well.. I think it’s philosophically unsound to suggest that just because they are able to do something it means that they must be alive. There are non-living things that do things all the time. It recalls to me an essay of literary theory (title and authors escape me right now, sorry folks) that considers whether you would analyze text written when the tide comes in and out. The authors of that paper suggest you would not because it is done without intention. I think an analogous approach applies here: simply because the tide does something, it does not mean it’s alive. Same with the artwork here. That said, Graw and I agree that “we need to believe that artworks can or even do change something, otherwise we wouldn’t be interested in them. But it is also necessary to remember that they don’t have the capacities of a subject, they only occasionally present themselves as objects that turn into quasi-subjects, thereby pushing their flirtation with subjecthood to the extreme” (14).
Essentially, the uniting principle of this book is considerations of what it means to be a subject and what it means to be an object and how art negotiates those relationships. Graw claims that works “try to appear like quasi-subjects” and therefore “possess a certain degree of subjectivity” (14). What was fascinating about the line of argumentation is that she notes how the Formalist approach of analyzing art without the artist displaces agency into the artwork itself. I find that so very interesting. She paraphrases Adorno in that regard: “Adorno’s artwork-as-better (or universal)-subject is not to be confused with the artist-subject. He repeatedly emphasized how art is not a reflection of the artist-subject. It must go through the subject, but it is actually able to transcend it” (15). She notes that the artwork is elevated in proportion to the limitation on the importance of the author’s intentions and proceeds to hypothesize that “the less the artist was considered the primary source of her work in the course of the author-critique of the 1960s, the more one tended to compensate for the disempowerment of the author by ascribing author-like powers to the artwork. That which was formerly attributed to the author had become an attribute of her work. Works of art were regarded as subject-like once the power of the author-subject was radically questioned” (15). This, to me, is the most interesting claim that is made here. It illuminates an element of literary theory that I’ve never considered before and the implications for what works of art do is amazing. A distinction begins to emerge; Graw says, “I believe that it still makes a difference whether an artist opts for ways of eradicating traces of subjectivity or whether she encourages them” (14). As a result, different strata seem to emerge—subjects, quasi-subjects, and so on. Even when artists erase themselves in the process or mechanization of art, their subjectivity remains.
I’ve spent a great deal of time on the introduction to the book because it seems most broadly applicable. The other sections of the text are more narrowed and focused. The central essays are as follows:
“Philosophical Toys and Psychoanalytic Travesties: Anthropomorphic Avatars in Dada and at the Bauhaus” by Hal Foster
“Body Doubles” by Caroline Busta
“Contemporary Art, Daily” by Michael Sanchez
“Media Animism: Rachel Harrison’s Living Images” by Ina Blom
“Mad Garland” by Jutta Koether
I’ll treat each of them in some detail in due course, but before I get there I want to reference how great the format is one more time. Each essay is followed by a brief response that generally considers a particular premise in the work. The responses felt authentic and sincere—and also more critical than people tend to be at academic conferences I’ve attended. Their questions and critiques are more pointed and actually would lead to better discussion than cursory or surface-level engagement.
Anyway, the Hal Foster essay deals primarily with documenting a trend of dolls and automatons. Though this essay starts the collection, I found it actually one of the less compelling pieces. The argument is unclear, and as a result it reads more like a list of under-documented works that centre dolls.
Caroline Busta’s “Body Doubles” was an interesting essay—likely one of my favourites in the collection. The artworks she describes seem compelling, though I’m not at all familiar with what they actually look like.
“Contemporary Art, Daily” by Michael Sanchez was an interesting essay, less for its subject matter than its implications. It’s an essay about a curated site that highlights exhibitions from around the world. What is interesting is the idea of networks as they emerge in the artwork and digital age. Following from a weak premise (that all art serves as an avatar for connection), the argument redefines subjectivity. By considering the nodes of a network as “actors”, Sanchez is able to bracket considerations of human versus non-human or animate versus inanimate. It’s a great way of rendering some of questions surrounding subjectivity and agency moot. “No node in the network,” he writes, “is inactive, strictly speaking” (55). In turn, we might also consider ourselves all as part of a network. Since we’re all connected, we are all actors of varying subjectivity and agency—and yet we are all actors making things happen. This conception allows the non-conscious participation of various entities of artwork. I’m not convinced by Sanchez’ claim that the primary purpose of art is to network, but I do find the consideration valuable. Drawing from Michel Serres, Sanchez notes that “Paintins and sculptures become less like the inert currency of brands or tokens or signatures that they used to be, and more like [...] a quasi-object. For Serres, a quasi-object is not an object at all, but an activator of subjects” (60). The idea of being an activator implies, it seems to me by necessity, reciprocity and I really appreciate that.
Ina Blom’s essay “Media Animism: Rachel Harrison’s Living Images” is, perhaps, the one that most inspires me to engage with additional art. Her discussion of the exhibit is compelling in its own right, which is the sign of a good art critic. In the exhibit, there are colourful columns that, if I’m picturing it correctly, partly conceal found and repurposed portraits that seem to be in conversation with one another. Blom deconstructs the idea mentioned a little earlier about the desire of artwork: “To place images in the position of want or desire is notably a way of acknowledging that the mystical power ascribed to them is basically of our own doing, part of our systematic construction of prejudices” (71-72). Essentially, it means that we posit ourselves into artworks in a firmly humanist tradition, rather than a posthumanist framework that might place us on equal footing to the artwork. As an alternative, Blom imagines: “it is a way of imagining the possibility that images may in fact have agendas that are genuinely and positively foreign to whatever desires we project onto them. Running through this line of reasoning is the idea that images constitute independent life forms, if not in the strictest biological sense of the word: it is not for nothing that for thousands of years human cultures have associated images with life and aliveness, and not just a mimetic replication of life” (72). It’s a compelling thesis, but extraordinarily difficult to articulate outside of our typical assumptions about art.
The final “essay” in the collection is a piece called “Mad Garland” by Jutta Koether. I get the impression that this was an artwork / performance / poetry reading of sorts. I can’t help but feel I’ve missed out on something by not bearing witness to it in person. There are some photos, but it was left to my imagination how the words paired with the performance. As such, the overall thesis is somewhat untranslateable here, but one element that lingered with me was the line that “Mad Garland takes us away from being subject into being becoming-subject” (87). I find that articulation illuminating.
To fully explain the idea of artwork taking us from subject to becoming-subject, I’ll draw on some knowledge of Deleuze and Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus, they suggest that we are all in various states of becoming. Metaphors do not exist. We are actually always becoming other things, often simultaneously. We are ‘becoming animal’ in various respects, for instance. Why I find this so compelling is because it suggests an unfinished, procedural approach to existence rather than an essentializing fixed identity. The idea of an artwork returning us to a state of becoming-subject implies the destabilization that I find in the most compelling artworks. I feel myself shaken by great literature, for instance, but at the same time the artwork contributes to my reformulation. I can’t speak to “Mad Garland” itself, but as a framework for conceptualizing the role of art in transforming us into ‘becoming-subjects’ feels true and feels valuable.
Thus, despite the fact that I’m not familiar with much of the source material (either artistically or philosophically) that undergirds the essays of the book, I nonetheless found it engaging and enriching. I found myself often thinking of the thin suggestion of narrative in Beckett’s novels as a posthumanist approach and how these articulations of the effect of art might parallel such an approach. Oh, to be an academic again!
Anyway, happy reading, folks!
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