No Truth Without A Fight

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[This text was originally published in C Magazine #86 in 2005.]

This question of the existence of truths (that “there be” truths) points to a co-responsibility of art, which produces truths, and philosophy, which, under the condition that there are truths, is duty-bound to make them manifest (a very difficult task indeed). Basically, to make truths manifest means the following: to distinguish truths from opinion. So that the question today is this and no other: Is there something besides opinion? In other words (one will, or will not, forgive the provocation), is there something besides our “democracies”?
– Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics

The writings of French philosopher Alain Badiou carve out their own distinct path in almost militant opposition to what he sees as philosophies’ current failure to renew itself or provide effective opposition to the ‘repulsive mixture of power and opinion’ that typifies capitalism’s vision of democracy. His works implore us to ‘keep going’, keep pushing against the mere sophistry of an academic overemphasis on the limits of language (he cites Plato: “We philosophers do not take as our point of departure words, but things.”) and towards a manner of thinking that would allow philosophy to regain its primary historical function as a search for ‘truth’. This conviction – that concepts such as truth are essential if we are to continue to effectively think about, and act upon, the world in which we live – is clearly of great relevance to any assessment of contemporary aesthetics.

Concepts such as “truth” might well sound a bit awkward (perhaps even ridiculous) to our post- post modern ears and are certainly a hard-sell when confronted with the widespread certainty that pluralism and tolerance are the most appropriate responses to the complexities of the world in which we live. But if pluralism is no longer doing the trick, if you’re looking for something a little bit more uncompromising, Badiou’s doing what he can to provide it in a manner worthy of the name philosophy, the four dimensions of which he defines as ‘revolt, logic, universality and risk.’

Badiou approaches truth from a provocative and unexpected angle. According to his central work L’Etre et l’Evénement, the only way to become a subject is by encountering an event and then persisting in your fidelity to the truth of that event. At first glance this might seem a bit harsh: if you have never experienced an event (of which there are only four kinds: artistic invention, emancipatory politics, scientific re-foundation and love) and then stood firm in your loyalty to its truth, you simply don’t qualify as a subject. However, no one said truth was going to be easy.

For example, if you were a scientist in the twenties and thirties it would be impossible to practice science in the same way after having experienced the event of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as you did previous to it. The theory of relativity creates a truth that changes the way you think about and practice physics. It is your fidelity to this truth that defines you as a scientist and it is now possible that the rest of your life might be spent teasing out the many complications and consequences of your encounter.

Badiou goes on to define and re-define his central terms in great detail, a few of which I will attempt to summarize as follows:

Situation
A situation is simply the way things are in any given field of experience. It is the status quo, the unquestioned set of assumptions that make up our knowledge of life and thought. If nothing happens the situation remains the same, it can only be changed by an event.

Event
An event is always ‘unpredictable and incalculable’, never something that you can plan, always something that unexpectedly happens and you simply have to deal with. What differentiates an event from other significant occurrences is that the truth it generates cannot be assessed using current criteria. To decide whether or not a given event is significant, whether or not it has generated a ‘truth’, one is forced to change the way one thinks. An event creates something new, something that has the potential to alter the situation once and for all. In doing so, it also reveals the void of the situation, showing that the situation previous to the event was devoid of truth.

Truth
Stemming from the rupture of an event, truth forms ‘a hole in knowledge’, breaking open the situation, pushing at the limits of what potentially can be said. In this it contains a paradox since it is both ‘something new and exceptional’ while at the same time encompassing ‘the most stable, the closest, ontologically speaking, to the initial state of things.’ Badiou never sees truth as an unchanging verity. To the contrary, he always views it as an ‘infinite multiplicity.’ Any given truth is not the only one, contains infinite aspects, and therefore should never be rigid. If it goes too far or becomes totalizing, it betrays itself, opening the way to terror and disaster. Significantly, philosophy is not a ‘truth procedure’ and therefore can never create truths. Rather, philosophy’s role is to identify truths that have already been brought into being by one of it’s four conditions – Art, Politics, Science and Love – and to seize them, both in the sense of giving them a name and in the sense of being seized by them, of being astonished.

Fidelity
There is no truth without choice. If in your lifetime you happen to encounter an event, you must choose whether or not what you have experienced is significant enough to have generated a new truth and if so whether this truth should be brought into the fold of your situation (therefore changing everything). If so, this truth will demand of you a fidelity that then leads to an ongoing (possibly lifelong) investigation into its complications and consequences. There is nothing easy about such fidelity, you might change your mind, be killed in the struggle to establish the truth you have encountered, be ostracized from your community, etc. But something new has arisen: precarious, fragile, unable to fend for itself against the tides of convention, corruption, your own exhaustion and the inertia of prevailing wisdom. Without your fidelity to it, the truth you have encountered is unlikely to prevail.

Badiou claims that contemporary philosophy is a kind of ‘generalized, potent sophistry’; the foundational principle of all sophistry, both ancient and modern, being that there is no truth, only social convention, argument, desire, self interest, opinion, etc. It is telling that his response to this situation is not to try and ‘do away’ with the sophists but rather to enter into an ongoing dialogue with them, accepting them as philosophy’s necessary ‘enemy-brother’.

In visual art today we can also recognize something analogous to sophistry: a conception of art that – in its skilful, eccentric rejection of truth – undeniably forfeits certain possibilities for clarity and direction. This loss can then be reintegrated back into the work in the form of institutional or social critique. An institutional critique that unintentionally doubles as an acceptance of art’s socially marginal status by turning in on itself, by attacking the very institutions which, for better or worse, have been set up for art’s benefit and protection. Or a social critique that does in fact acknowledge the role of art within a larger set of social relations but does so under the cloak of a ‘defence mechanism’ irony that is really just the other face of an inability to meaningfully alter our surroundings. Such a strategies are certainly a reflection of the world in which we live, of capitalism’s ability to absorb absolutely anything, and gains further resonance by skirting the thin line between being a reflection of the problematic nature of the world and the spectator’s implicit acceptance of these same problems. However, without principles, without some consideration of questions pertaining to truth as a foundation on which to build, such strategies spin endlessly in circles.

I suppose the main thing I’m arguing for here is that we consider what contemporary art might look like if, much like David Hickey brought ‘beauty’ back into the art discourse of the mid-nineties, Alain Badiou managed to do the same for ‘truth.’ If art today often seems like a series of ‘opinions’, what might an art look like that moves past opinion and tries to encompass truth in Badiou’s sense of the term? At first glance this might appear an unlikely scenario, but fifteen years ago it certainly didn’t seem likely that beauty would become the buzzword of the mid-nineties. And much like beauty, if only as a provocation to current art world thinking, I suspect ‘truth’ has a great deal to offer.

Artists today very much need something like this. Perhaps not precisely what Badiou explores, but definitely something along these lines. For example, what would it mean to see ‘Duchamp’ as a central event (in Badiou’s sense of the term) in the formation of contemporary art? Of course, a great deal of work has been done along these lines already, but for the most part such work has been done while studiously avoiding (or rejecting) words such as ‘truth’. To see Duchamp as an event certainly doesn’t mean that Marcel Duchamp, as an individual artist, should be further lionized. Rather, we would have to search for the truth of what Duchamp and his legacy brought into the situation of art and what it might mean to continue to work in fidelity to this truth. Not just to continue working conceptually because it remains, in one way or another, the dominant paradigm. But rather to intensify one’s relationship with what is essential within the foundation of this paradigm. Of course, it is equally possible that we might realize that the event we are referring to here as ‘Duchamp’ is devoid of truth and therefore the contemporary art situation must simply change.

More to the point, I suspect an engagement with truth (or something like it) is essentially what most artists do anyway, almost as a dirty little secret or unspoken impulse. They feel that within their work there is something true and they bear this truth, remaining loyal to early breakthroughs and realizations, continually teasing out the many complications and consequences of their ongoing endeavour. Dealing with the language of ‘truth-procedures’ more directly has the potential to challenge the unspoken nature of this struggle, asking us to think about what art means on a more fundamental level, intensifying our engagement with our fundamental artistic concerns, allowing the multiplicity of our practice to swarm around a central point, giving us back a clear, yet still hazardous, sense of direction.

In what could also serve as a critique of contemporary art, Badiou condemns the framework of current philosophy as being ‘too strongly committed to the polyvalence of meaning and the plurality of languages’. He feels there is something in it that goes ‘too far in reflecting the physiognomy of the world itself’, that it is ‘too compatible with the status quo to be able to sustain the rupture or distance that philosophy requires.’ In many ways philosophy’s unacknowledged compliance with the status quo is what lies behind Badiou’s preoccupation with truth. If philosophy does not have the tools to sustain ‘revolt, logic, universality and risk’, there is probably something lacking. An ‘end of philosophy’ thinking now dominates which leads towards an unbreakable sense of paralysis.

This sense of cultural paralysis is certainly not an unusual modern sensation. What is unusual, and reveals Badiou’s activist roots, is his ongoing attempt to break it. He characterizes this attempted break as a kind of gamble, a roll of the dice. Perhaps it will succeed, perhaps not. When one is seized by a truth it is imperative to try, to roll the dice, see what might be possible if one chooses not to accept the current situation and instead work towards something that, while seemingly impossible under the current conditions, might suddenly become possible if things were to change.

In the end what Badiou tells us is that there is no truth without a fight, that to be a subject requires a certain degree of militancy (he quotes Mallarmé in saying that we must become ‘militants of restraint’), that ‘respect for the Other’ means nothing without some deeper conception of truth to guide one’s thoughts and actions.

It is only by declaring that we want what conservatism decrees to be impossible, and by affirming truths against the desire for nothingness, that we tear ourselves away from nihilism. The possibility of the impossible, which is exposed by every loving encounter, every scientific re-foundation, every artistic invention and every sequence of emancipatory politics, is the sole principle – against the ethics of living well whose real content is the deciding of death – of an ethic of truths.
– Alain Badiou, Ethics

As artists today, what events can we call upon and generate to destabilize the current situation, to undo unexamined certainties and replace them with something more flexible, more useful, more courageous? Are we willing to leave behind the stifling comfort of relativity in order to once again start thinking about truth? It’s certainly unlikely, but hopefully intriguing to consider. If, without for a moment loosing sight of moderation and critical distance, we allow ourselves to believe that artistic invention has the potential to generate truths – with all the complexity, rigour and multiplicity such a word implies – what might this change? Would anyone care to find out?



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Fact

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The novelty act of fact.






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Gustaw Herling on Bukharin and Nikolaevsky

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Bukharin went to Paris in February 1936 at the head of a delegation that was to negotiate the purchase of the Marx and Engels archives, which Nikolaevsky had taken from Berlin at the request of the German social democrats. Negotiations went on for two months and got nowhere despite a handsome offer from Moscow. But the “legal” – nay, “official” – cover offered by the proposed transaction made it possible for Bukharin and Nikolaevsky often to meet privately. It is likely that Nikolaevsky took notes after every meeting.

Bukharin was tired, exhausted; he longed for a rest. It was suggested that be become an émigré and found an opposition paper. “I couldn’t live outside Russia. All of us have become used to the strain of life in Russia,” he answered. One day, half serious and half facetious, he suggested they both go to see Trotsky in Oslo: “We have had our clashes, but I will never cease to admire and respect him.” Bukharin avoided direct comment about the situation in the USSR, either because he did not trust his interlocutor one hundred per cent or because (and this is Nikolaevsky’s hypothesis) he feared the conclusions he would inevitably have been forced to reach by too open an exchange of ideas.

Did he know, or even suspect, what was in store for him? There would seem to be evidence that he did, since he described his relations with Stalin as “exceptionally bad.” There would seem to be evidence that he did not, since he spoke of the new Soviet constitution with unfeigned euphoria: “I wrote the whole thing with this very pen. Yes, the whole thing, only Radek helped out a bit. I came to Paris because I had finished the job. They are printing the text now. From now on there will be more room for the people, they can no longer be ignored.” In any case, euphoric or not, he kept coming back obsessively to two points: the need to found a second party and the extreme urgency of purifying the work of the revolution through “proletarian humanism.”

Without a second party, how can the Soviet regime distinguish itself from Naziism? It does not have to be a party contrary to the new order: suffice that it advocate “change and reform.” It might be drawn from the intelligentsia so as not to disrupt the unity of the working class. As to “proletarian humanism,” Bukharin himself had seen sufficient horrors during forced collectivization – horrors that could not even be compared to the pitiless but ineluctable cruelty of civil war – to look to the future with the utmost concern. The very psyche of the communists had been contaminated and mutilated: instead of going mad, after the experience of collectivization, they became professional bureaucrats, partisans of terror as the natural method of government, slaves of obedience to any order from above, of obedience considered as the supreme virtue. “They are no longer humans, they are gears in a terrible machine.” That is where the most serious danger is hidden, that is why the coming of “proletarian humanism” is so important and imperative to prevent the Soviet Union from turning into “a regime with an iron boot.”

He was so fervent, and constantly repeated the same things with such desperate obstinacy, that Nikolaevsky interrupted him at one point: “Nikolai Ivanovich, what you are suggesting is a return to the Ten Commandments. That’s not new.” Bukharin thought about it: “Do you believe that Moses’ commandments are outdated and anachronistic?” Nikolaevsky: “I am not saying they are outdated and anachronistic. All I am saying is that they have existed for five thousand years. Are we going to discover that the Ten Commandments are a new truth? Is that the point we have reached?” Bukharin made no answer. It was only in a Moscow prison cell that Aichenvald finally heard the answer, between the lines of Bukharin’s confession of the threshold of his last agony.

- Gustaw Herling


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Gustaw Herling on Andrzej Ciolkosz

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Andrzej Ciolkosz once argued at length that the replacement of candles and oil lamps by electricity inflicted a mortal blow on the novel. As usual, this charming and brilliant young man’s reasoning was seemingly facetious, with that contrary grin of his, but actually terribly serious. The light of a candle or an oil lamp cast a different, enigmatic dimension on the way in which a novelist looked at people; it sited the understanding of human destiny on the fragile border between the seen and the unseen, between the graspable and the ungraspable. The incandescent bulb dispelled the dark and created a flat and shallow illusion of clarity.

- Gustaw Herling



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New Emotions

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Have human emotions been the same since the beginning of time or, in different ages, are there new emotions that arise alongside new structures of social organization and technological innovation?



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Gustaw Herling on Konstanty Jelenski

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Not very long ago I was present when a well-known Paris publisher proposed publishing a volume of his essays in French. He shrugged his shoulders and received the offer with a conventional expression of thanks but was not interested in the slightest. Later the two of us went to a café and I tried to persuade him to reconsider the offer. He laughed: “Too much is written and published now, we could drown in a sea of printed paper.” And yet… in the “symposium of polygots” organized by Stempowski in 1961 in Kultura, this is what Kot said: “Why doesn’t the polygot-writer in exile always decide to do his writing in one language? It happens occasionally – and the results are often excellent: Pietrkieiwicz in English and Cioran and Ionesco in French. In my case, that of the ‘critic’ or ‘journalist,’ it is rather a different matter. My greatest satisfaction comes from writing in Polish for Kultura, for the simple reason that my articles evoke some response from a circle of friends, however small... I may have more French or English readers, but for them I am just one of a thousand anonymous hacks.” He had a cult of friendship, he was lavish with it, sometimes even extravagant.

I also remember the day I brought him the author’s copies of his Zbiegowie okolicznosci [Coincidences]. He barely gave them a glance, but when he accompanied me to the bus stop after tea, I watched from the window of the bus and saw him draw out a copy from under his raincoat; he avidly leafed through the pages as he walked, closed the book, opened it again, weighted it in his hands and smoothed it out. If he had looked up for a moment, I am sure I would have seen totally unbridled joy.

If I had to tell what the world is for me
I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole
and place him in a theater seat one evening
and, bringing my ear close to his humid snout
would listen to what he says about the spotlights
sounds of the music, and movements of the dance

These were probably his favorite lines of Milosz. And this is what he had to say about the verse: “No one has expressed more beautifully the sole philosophical revolutions of our times (compared with which neo-Marxism, existentialsim, and structuralism are the equivalent of shorter or longer skirts in women’s fashions) – arising from the conviction that man is neither the ‘lord of all he surveys’ nor the centre of the universe, so that any ‘humanism’ is now impossible."

- Gustaw Herling on Konstanty Jelenski



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PDF Format manifesto

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PDF manifesto

- Just be awesome
- Don't think
- If you think something is awesome, be that, and stop thinking about it.
- fear no villain
- DaMaGe nothing


http://www.myspace.com/pdfmusic



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Assignment

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Assignment:


Andy Kaufman is a better artist than Anna De Keersmaeker. Discuss?



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Gustaw Herling on Nicola Chiaromonte

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Every new conversation, every new essay, every incidental note on politics and drama review showed me a writer who was unusual for Italy, a land of traditional literati, masters of the clever and fatuous scrawl at the service of the latest intellectual fashion. The kind of writing in which a sentence is not just the vehicle of free and lucid thinking but also of ceaseless moral tension, writing in which the words are alive with the whole being of the person who utters them as his long-mediated and suffered truth: that is the kind of writing that has always captivated me. And that was how Nicola wrote. He never let himself be caught in the trammels of “great systems” and “general interpretations,” he mistrusted “dialectical games,” which mutilated life, and “ideological shadows,” which obscured reality. He scorned psychologism and historicism, for what interested him was man in the concrete faced with concrete events, man capable of ethical judgment à la Tolstoy and at the same time aware of something impenetrable beyond him. How could this measured “humanism” have evoked a wide response in a world enchanted with the rhetoric of false “universal” ideologies, in a climate of hypocrisy half-mixed with fanaticism, in a “consumer civilization” of arid hearts and sterile minds? Nicola became even more acutely aware of his isolation. The title he gave his book was Credere e non credere (What should one believe in, and what not?) “Ours is not an age of faith, nor is it an age of disbelief. It is an age of bad faith, of beliefs which are clung to… in the absence of genuine convictions.” What is the cure for bad faith, this terrible ailment of our time? He desperately sought a remedy. And atheist or at least agnostic, he once admitted: “It is just as hard not to believe in God as it is to believe in him.”

- Gustaw Herling on Nicola Chiaromonte



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Spartacus Chetwynd's Hermito's Children

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The best works here take you down a route where radically crazy dreams and hands on pragmatism converge. Spartacus Chetwynd's Hermito's Children (2008) is a case in point: presented on a wall of monitors, it is a bonkers ride into a zone where trash television meets raunchy underground culture; where transgender detectives investigate the case of a girl who died of too many orgasms on a dildo see-saw, to a soundtrack swinging between death metal and lisped monologues about opening a Jewish restaurant (Chetwynd ran an improvised Jewish restaurant during the making of her film, channeling the experience into her recorded scenario.)

- from Frieze review of the Tate Triennial 2009



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Books bought in Krakow:

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The Celebration – Ivan Ângelo
The Island: Three Tales – Gustaw Herling
Volcano and Miracle – Gustaw Herling
The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa – Jan Potocki
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things – Gilbert Sorrentino
Selected Poems – Adam Zagajewski



(If you’re ever in Krakow definitely check out Massolit Books.)

(And also: Wódka Żołądkowa Gorzka.)



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What I am proudest of is having a life where work and love are impossible to tell apart.

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On Facebook I just learnt that J.G. Ballard died. (A writer who was very important to me when I was young.) Then a few moments later I learned that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick had also died, about a week ago:

http://tinyurl.com/cyky5u

(Perhaps Facebook is a good place to think about one's morality after all.) (Or at least as good as any.)

I heard Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick speak once a very long time ago, I think it might be about fifteen years ago now. I remember one thing she said quite clearly about academia. Something like: 'some academics say that The Simpsons is subversive, and then other academics say: no, actually The Simpsons subverts subversivity and therefore is not subversive at all, and you can just keep going on like that forever and get absolutely nowhere.' I don't remember much else about her talk that afternoon but I do remember I found it striking and in many ways something about her approach and attitude has really stayed with me. Afterwards I read her books and, at the time, was very much impressed by them.

At the end of the above link, knowing that she is going to die, she tells her therapist: "What I am proudest of is having a life where work and love are impossible to tell apart."

I wonder very much if, at the end, I'll be able to say the same thing, or anything even vaguely similar. I'm nervous that I won't but nonetheless hope that I will.

(And of course such a sentence makes me think very much of you, who knows very well the enormous joys and difficulties of such an attempt.)



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The longest state banquet

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The 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great, celebrated at Persepolis in 1971: this is the occasion around which this book and exhibition have been prepared.

Persepolis '71 was a party, held over three days by the last Shah of Iran, for invited monarchy and heads of state. It has been described as the most lavish party of the twentieth century. At five and a half hours, this event holds the endurance record in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest state banquet. It was certainly an extraordinary occasion, and one that retrospectively has had many consequences. To some extent at least, the party survives. Today at Persepolis, the luxurious city built by a French interior design company to accommodate the dignitaries remains standing. The site is now dilapidated, overgrown, and vandalised. The tents themselves exist as ruined, skeletal structures; their tattered cloth coverings have been all but destroyed by the elements.

- from the inside flap of Michael Stevenson's Celebration at Persepolis catalog



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Pierre Hadot quote

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I do not think that the fundamental desires of humans can change. The ruling or rich class seeks wealth, power, and honors, in antiquity just as in our day. All the misfortune of our actual civilization is in effect the exasperation of the desire for profit, in all the classes of society, for that matter, but especially the ruling class. Common mortals can have simpler desires: work, happiness at home, health. The invocations of the gods in antiquity were the same ones that are now made to the Virgin Mary. One asked the same things to soothsayers as we ask of our horoscopes. It is not a question of the epoch. But when Epicurus distinguished natural and necessary desires, natural desires that are not necessary, and desires that are neither natural nor necessary, he did not want to enumerate all legitimate desires and explain how they could be satisfied; he wanted to define a style of life, taking conclusions from his intuition, according to which the pleasure corresponds to the suppression of a suffering caused by the desire. There is an analogy with Buddhism, very much in fashion these days. To be happy one must thus maximally diminish the causes of suffering, that is, the desires. In this manner he wanted to heal the suffering of humans. He thus recommended renouncing desires that are very difficult to satisfy in order to attempt to be content with desires that can more easily be satisfied - that is, finally and simply, the desire to eat, to drink, and to clothe oneself. Under an apparently down-to-earth aspect, there is something extraordinary in Epicureanism: the recognition of the fact that there is only one true pleasure, the pleasure of existing, and that to experience it one merely has to satisfy the desires that are natural and necessary for the existence of the body. The Epicurean experience is extremely instructive; it invites us, like Stoicism, to a total reversal of values.

- Pierre Hadot, from The Present Alone is Our Happiness



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Something Might Still Change (Rough Early Proposal)

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I intend to do so by exploring a fairly specific thesis. This thesis is less like a scientific observation and more like a hunch. It is the idea that we, artists and viewers alike, know that art is in many ways fundamentally reactionary and conservative, yet we still want to believe that art is radical and revolutionary, and within the space of this paradox there is room for a great deal to happen. That in forging an emotional or theoretical connection to a work of art, even though it’s status as art solidifies it as part of the status quo, the fact that it has affected us simultaneously keeps open the possibility that something might still change.

My intention is to develop this idea into a book entitled: Something Might Still Change. In my mind this book would – in a clear, pleasurable style – work to convince the reader that paradox can be an extremely useful lens through which to view the relationship between art and politics (and perhaps also the relationship between art, politics and contemporary life.) I would like the book to focus specifically on five or six works from different fields, moving gradually towards a conclusion in which I contrast various disciplinary approaches to specific questions surrounding the nature of participation in performance.

Some works I am currently thinking of examining:

Gentlemen & Arseholes by Lene Berg
Artificial Respiration by Ricardo Piglia
etc.



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Loneliness

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Loneliness must be recruited in the fight against capitalism.










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Artists

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Not all artists are artists.










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the art market is an extreme example of what Marx termed commodity fetishism...

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Every exhibition tells a story, by directing the viewer through the exhibition in a particular order: the exhibition space is always a narrative space. The traditional art museum told the story of art’s emergence and subsequent victory. Individual artworks chronicled this story – and in doing so they lost their old religious or representative significance and gained new meaning. Once the museum emerged as the new place of worship, artists began to work specifically for the museum: Historically significant objects no longer needed to be devalued in order to serve as art. Instead, brand new, profane objects signed up to be recognized as artworks because they allegedly embodied artistic value. These objects didn’t have a prehistory; they had never been legitimized by religion or power. At most they could be regarded as signs of a “simple, everyday life” with indeterminate value. Thus their inscription into art history meant valorization for these objects, not devaluation. And so museums were transformed from places of enlightenment-inspired iconoclasm into places of a romantic iconophilia. Exhibiting an object as art no longer signified its profanation, but its consecration. Duchamp simply took this turn to its final conclusion when he laid bare the iconophilic mechanism of glorification of mere things by labeling them works of art.

Over the years modern artists began to assert the total autonomy of art – and not just from its sacred prehistory, but from art history as well – because every integration of an image into a story, every appropriation of it as illustration for a particular narrative, is iconoclastic, even if the story is that of a triumph of this image, its transfiguration, or its glorification. According to the tradition of modern art, an image must speak for itself; it must immediately convince the spectator, standing in silent contemplation, of its own value. The conditions in which the work is exhibited should be reduced to white walls and good lighting. Theoretical and narrative discourse is a distraction, and must stop. Even affirmative discourse and favorable display were regarded as distorting the message of the artwork itself. As a result: Even after Duchamp the act of exhibiting an object as an artwork remained ambivalent, that is, partially iconophile, partially iconoclastic.

The curator can’t but place, contextualize, and narrativize works of art – which necessarily leads to their relativization. Thus modern artists began to condemn curators, because the figure of the curator was perceived as the embodiment of the dark, dangerous side of the exhibiting practice, as the destructive doppelganger of the artist who creates art by exhibiting it: the museums were regularly compared to graveyards, and curators to undertakers. With these insults (disguised as institutional critique) artists won the general public over to their side, because the general public didn’t know all the art history; it didn’t even want to hear it. The public wishes to be confronted directly with individual artworks and exposed to their unmediated impact. The general public steadfastly believes in the autonomous meaning of the individual artwork, which is supposedly being manifested in front of its eyes. The curator’s every mediation is suspect; he is seen as someone standing between the artwork and its viewer, insidiously manipulating the viewer’s perception with the intent of disempowering the public. This is why, for the general public, the art market is more enjoyable than any museum. Artworks circulating on the market are singled out, decontextualized, uncurated – so that they have the apparently unadulterated chance to demonstrate their inherent value. Consequently the art market is an extreme example of what Marx termed commodity fetishism, meaning a belief in the inherent value of an object, in value being one of its intrinsic qualities. Thus began a time of degradation and distress for curators – the time of modern art. Curators have managed their degradation surprisingly well, though, by successfully internalizing it.

– Boris Groys



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Writing in Spanish

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Roberto Arlt (Argentina) - The Seven Madmen


Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay) - Let the Wind Speak


Ricardo Piglia (Argentina) - Artificial Respiration


César Aira (Argentina) - An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter


Horacio Castellanos Moya (Honduras) - Senselessness


Alvaro Mutis (Columbia / Mexico) - The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll



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graceful and ridiculous, lecherous and angelic, happily lost

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I remember my walk from the Solar to the movie theatre where Land in Anguish was playing. It must be said that I found the film even more uneven than Black God, White Devil. [Both films by Glauber Rocha.] The lamentations of the main character – a left-wing poet torn apart by conflicting ambitions to achieve the “absolute” and social justice – were at times frankly sub-literary. In addition, certain intolerable conventional shortcomings of Brazilian cinema – high society parties staged unconvincingly, female extras encouraged by directors to enact deplorable provincial caricatures of sexy glamour, an overall lack of narrative clarity – these were all in painful evidence (though less intensely.) Yet as in Glauber’s previous films and a great many other Cinema Novo productions, suggestions of a different vision of life, of Brazil, of cinema, seemed to explode on the screen, overwhelming my reservations. The poet-protagonist offered a bitter, realistic vision of politics – in flagrant contrast to the naïveté of his companions – as he resisted the recently imposed military dictatorship. The film stages the moment of the coup d’état as a nightmare he has at the moment of his death: a confusing spectacle evoking at once Buñuel’s La fièvre monte à El Pao (Republic of Sin), mixed with some of the bad habits of the New Wave and strokes of Fellini’s 8 ½. But that chaos contributed to the parodic force of the film. And the effect was not entirely a disservice to the character, even though his desperate attempts at maintaining a critical perspective on his political objectives while sustaining the will to carry them out – the kind of dilemma that would lead so many to madness, mysticism, or the trenches of the opposition – lead, rather gratuitously, to his death. It is touching to think, today, how such a series of events might provide, with slight variations, a succinct biography of Glauber himself.

The film was naturally not a box-office success, but it scandalized the intellectuals and artists of the Carioca Left. Some in the audience – leaders of politically engaged theatre – jeered as the lights came up. One scene in particular shocked them: During a mass demonstration the poet, who is among those making speeches, calls forward a unionized worker and, to show how unprepared the worker is to fight for his rights, violently covers his mouth, shouting at the others (and at the audience), “This is the people! Idiots, illiterate, no politics!” Then a poor wretch, representing unorganized poverty, appears from among the crowd trying to speak, only to be silenced by the point of a gun stuck in his mouth by one of the candidate’s bodyguards. This indelible image is reiterated in long close-ups.

I experienced that scene – and the indignant, heated discussions that it provoked in bars – as the nucleus of a great event whose brief name I now possess but did not know then (I would try to name it a thousand ways for myself and for other people): the death of populism. There is no doubt that populist demagogues are sumptuously ridiculed in the film: they are seen holding crucifixes and flags in open cars against the sky above the Aterro do Flamengo, a wide modern road by the sea, lined with landscaped gardens. There they are in their gaudy mansions, celebrating the solemn rites of the church and Carnival that touch the heart of the masses, and so forth. But it was their essential faith in the popular forces – and the very respect that the best souls invested in the poor man – that here was discarded as a political weapon and an ethical value in itself. It was a hecatomb that I was facing. And I was excited by the prospect of examining what drove it and anticipating its consequences. Tropicalismo would have never have come into being but for that traumatic moment.

This assault on traditional left-wing populism liberated one to see Brazil squarely from a broader perspective, enabling new and undreamt-of critiques of an anthropological, mythic, mystical, formalist, and moral nature. If the scene of the poet and the worker that incensed the communists charmed me with its courage, it is because the images that came before and after it were trying to reveal something about our condition and ask questions about our destiny. A great cross on the beach overshadows a gathering of politicos, transvestites dressed to the nines for a ball, and Carnival Indians; one feels the presence of the grotesque and with it the revelation of an island always newly discovered and always hidden – Brazil. Among the multitude at the rally, a little old man is dancing samba, graceful and ridiculous, lecherous and angelic, happily lost – the Brazilian people captured in a paradox. One does not know whether they are meant to seem despairing or suggestive; political decisions are discussed on cement patios with black lines dividing the floor, asserting a denial of the comings and goings of the characters. The camera weaves among groups of four, five, six restless agitators, who express disagreement over tactics through their body language, all shot in black and white with enormous areas of light threatened by ominous, looming shadows. It was a political dramaturgy different from the usual reduction of everything to a stereotype of class struggle. Above all, here was the rhetoric and the poetics of post-1964 Brazilian life: a deep scream of pain and impotent rebellion, but also an updated vision, nearly prophetic, of our real possibilities to be and to feel.

– Caetano Veloso, from Tropical Truth: A Story of Music & Revolution In Brazil



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