The Society of Situationism, Ken Knabb

“Even if a constituted situationist theory had never existed as a possible source of inspiration, the system of commodity consumption implicitly contains its own situationism.”

—Daniel Denevert, Theory of Poverty, Poverty of Theory




1

The second proletarian assault on class society has entered its second phase.

2

The first phase — beginning diffusedly in the 1950s and culminating in the open struggles of the late sixties — found its most advanced theoretical expression in the Situationist International. Situationism is the direct or implicit ideologization of situationist theory, within the revolutionary movement and in the society as a whole.

3

The SI articulated the whole of the global movement at the same time that it participated as part of it in the sector where it found itself, taking up “the violence of the delinquents on the plane of ideas” and giving immediate practical follow-through to its theoretical positions. It thus presented a model to the revolutionary movement not only in the form of its conclusions but also in exemplifying the ongoing negating method; which method was the reason that its conclusions were almost always right.

4

In generating among many of its partisans the same exigencies that it practiced itself, and in forcing even the most unautonomous to become at least autonomous from it, the SI showed that it knew how to educate revolutionarily. In the space of a few years we have seen a democratization of theoretical activity that was not attained — if it was even sought — in the old movement in a century. Marx and Engels were not able to incite rivals; none of the strands of Marxism maintained Marx’s unitary perspective. Lenin’s observation in 1914 that “none of the Marxists for the past half century have understood Marx” is really a critique of Marx’s theory, not because it was too difficult but because it did not recognize and calculate its own relation with the totality.

5

The very nature of the situationists’ mistakes — exposed and criticized by them with pitiless thoroughness — is a confirmation of their methods. Their failures as well as their successes serve to focus, elucidate and polarize. No other radical current in history has known such a degree of intentional public theoretical debate. In the old proletarian movement consequential theoretical polarization was always the exception, the explosion that came out contrary to the intentions of the theorists themselves and only as a last resort when the very continuation of a factitious unity was visibly no longer possible. Marx and Engels failed to dissociate themselves publicly from the Gotha Program because “the asinine bourgeois papers took this program quite seriously, read into it what it does not contain and interpreted it communistically; and the workers seem to be doing the same” (Engels to Bebel, 12 October 1875). Thus, in defending by silence a program against its enemies, they defended it equally against its friends. When in the same letter Engels said that “if the bourgeois press possessed a single person of critical mind, he would have taken this program apart phrase by phrase, investigated the real content of each phrase, demonstrated its nonsense with the utmost clarity, revealed its contradictions and economic howlers . . . and made our whole Party look frightfully ridiculous,” he described as a deficiency of the bourgeois press what rather was precisely a deficiency of the revolutionary movement of his time.

6

The concentrated expression of present historical subversion has itself become decentralized. The monolithic myth of the SI has exploded forever. During the first phase this myth had a certain objective basis: on the level on which it was operating, the SI had no serious rivals. Now we see a public and international confrontation of autonomous situationist theories and ideologies which no tendency comes close to monopolizing. Any situationist orthodoxy has lost its central referent. From this point on, every situationist or would-be situationist must follow his own path.

7

The first critiques of situationism remained fundamentally ahistorical. They measured the theoretical poverties of the pro-situ up against the theory of the first phase. They saw the subjective poverties and internal inconsistencies of this milieu, but not its position as related to the sum of theoretical and practical vectors at a certain moment; they failed to grasp this “first nondialectical application” as the qualitative weakness of the ensemble, as a necessary “moment of the true.” Even Theses on the SI and Its Time — in so many respects the summation of the first phase at its point of transition into the second — scarcely broaches the properly historical aspect of situationism.

8

At each stage of the struggle the partial realization of the critique generates its own new equilibrium point with the ruling society. As the theory escapes its formulators, it tends through its autonomous ideological momentum to be run through all possible permutations and combinations, though principally those reflecting the new developments and illusions of the moment. Caught in the transition of the first phase to the second, the pro-situationists in the post-1968 “ebbing of May” period were the embodiments of the inertia of a confirmed theory. This ideological lag — in which the partisans of situationist theory failed to confront the new developments in their own practice, that of the proletariat and that of the society as a whole — measured the weakness of the situationist movement; while the unprecedented quickness with which it engendered its own internal negation — effectively sabotaging itself in order to affirm the explosion that had already escaped it and clear the grounds for the new phase — marks its fundamental vindication.

9

The pro-situationists saw the issues of the second phase in terms of those of the first. In treating the new, widespread and relatively conscious worker struggles as if they were isolated nihilist acts of an earlier period, which therefore lacked first of all the proverbial “consciousness of what they had already done,” the pro-situs only showed that they lacked the consciousness of what others were already doing and of all that was still lacking. In every single struggle they saw the same simple, total conclusion and identified the progress of the revolution with the appropriation of this conclusion by the proletariat. In thus abstractly concentrating the intelligence of human practice above the complex process of the development of class struggle, the activist pro-situs were the would-be bolsheviks of a fantasized coup of class consciousness, hoping by this shortcut to bring about the councilist program whose implications they overstepped out of incomprehension or impatience.

10

The SI did not apply its theory to the very activity of the formulation of that theory, although the very nature of that theory implied its eventual democratization and thus put this question on the order of the day. In the aftermath of May neither the SI nor the new generation of insurgents it had inspired had really examined the process of theoretical production, either in its methods or its subjective ramifications, beyond a few vague, empirical rules of thumb. The backlash of the partial realization of situationist theory flung them unprepared from megalomaniac delirium, to incoherence, to chain-reactions of contentless breaks, to impotence and finally to the massive psychological repression of the whole experience, without their ever having asked themselves what was happening to them.

11

Even if the SI attracted many poorly prepared partisans, the very fact that such a mass of people with no particular experience in or aptitude or taste for revolutionary politics thought to find in situationist activity a terrain where they could engage themselves autonomously and consequentially confirms the radicality of both the theory and the epoch. If the situationist milieu has manifested so many pretensions and illusions, this was merely the natural side-effect of the first victory of a critique that burst so many pretensions of and illusions about the ruling society.

12

To the extent that the ideologies of the first phase suppressed anything to do with the situationists — including therefore the concepts most explicitly associated with them — the eventual discovery of the situationist critique had the contrary exaggerated effect of giving the situationists an apparent monopoly of radical comprehension of modern society and its opposition. Hence the adherence to the situationist critique had the abrupt, fanatical character of a sudden religious conversion (often with a corresponding ulterior rejection of it in toto). In contrast, the young revolutionary who now adheres to situationist positions tends to be less subject to this fanatical excess precisely because diverse nuances of situationist struggle and of its recuperation are a familiar aspect of his world.

13

In the second phase, revolution has moved from being an apparently marginal phenomenon to a visibly central one. The underdeveloped countries have lost their apparent monopoly of contestation; but the revolutions there haven’t stopped, they have simply become modern and are resembling more and more the struggles in the advanced countries. The society that proclaimed its well-being is now officially in crisis. The formerly isolated gestures of revolt against apparently only isolated misery now know themselves to be general and proliferate and overwhelm all accounting. 1968 was the moment where the revolutionary movements began to see themselves in international company, and it was this global visibility that definitively shattered the ideologies that saw revolution everywhere but in the proletariat. 1968 was also the last time major revolts could seem to be student revolts.

14

The proletariat has begun to act by itself but as yet scarcely for itself. Revolts continue to be, as they have been over the last century, largely defensive reactions: the taking over of factories abandoned by their owners or of struggles abandoned by their leaders (particularly in the aftermath of wars). If sectors of the proletariat have begun to speak for themselves, they have yet to elaborate an openly internationalist revolutionary program and effectively express their goals and tendencies internationally. If they serve as examples for proletarians of other countries, it is still through the de facto mediation of radical groups and spectacular reportage.

15

The ideology of the first phase that stressed the concrete realization of radical change without grasping the negative or the totality has found its realization in the proliferation of so-called alternative institutions. The alternative institution differs from classic reformism in being chiefly an immediate, self-managed reformism, one that does not wait for the State. It recuperates the initiative and energy of the mildly dissatisfied and is a sensitive indicator of defects in the system and of their possible resolutions. Alternative production — whose development on the margins of the economy recapitulates the historical development of commodity production — functions as a free-enterprise corrective to the bureaucratized economy. But the democratization and “autogestionization” of social structures, though productive of illusions, is also a favorable factor for the development of the revolutionary critique. It leaves behind the superficial focuses of struggle while providing a safer and easier terrain from and on which to contest the essentials. The contradictions in participatory production and alternative distribution facilitate the détournement of their goods and facilities, going up to the point of quasi-legal “Strasbourgs of the factories.”

16

The hip notion trip expresses the fact that as commodities become more abundant, adaptable and disposable, the individual commodity is devalued in favor of the ensemble. The trip offers not a single commodity or idea but an organizing principle for selecting from among all commodities and ideas. In contrast with the block of time where “everything’s included,” which is still sold as a distinct commodity, the commodity character of the indefinitely extended trip (art, craft, pursuit, fad, lifestyle, subcult, social project, religion) — carrying with it a more flexible complex of commodities and stars — is obscured behind the quasi-autonomous activity whereby the subject seems to dominate. The trip is the moment where the spectacle has become so overdeveloped that it becomes participatory. It recovers the subjective activity lacking in the spectacle, but runs into the limits of the world the spectacle has made — limits absent in the spectacle precisely because it is separate from daily life.

17

The diminution of the exclusive sway of work and the fragmentation of the consequently expanded leisure give rise to the widespread dilettantism of modern society. The spectacle presents the super-agent who can tell to a degree the correct temperature at which saké should be served and initiates the masses into exotic techniques of living and to connoisseur enjoyments previously reserved for the upper classes. But the heralded “new Renaissance Man” is no closer to mastering his own life. When the spectacle becomes overdeveloped and wants to cast off the poverty and unilateralness at its origin, it reveals itself as simply a poor relative of the revolutionary project. It may multiply amusements and make them more participatory, but their commodity basis ineluctably forces them back into the matrix of consumption. Isolated individuals may, in a caricature of Fourier, come together around ever more precise nuances of common spectacular tastes, but these nexuses are all the more separated from each other and from the social totality and the sought-for passionate activity founders on its triviality. The new cosmopolitan remains historically provincial.

18

The spectacle responds to the increasing dissatisfaction with its tendency toward lowest-common-denominator uniformity by diversifying itself. Struggles are channeled into struggles over the spectacle, leading to the semi-autonomous development of separate spectacles tailor-made for specific social groupings. But the singular power of a spectacle comes from its having been placed for a moment at the center of social life. Thus the increase of spectacular choice at the same time reduces the spectacular power that depends on the very magnitude and undivided enthrallment of the pseudo-community the spectacle draws together. The spectacle must contradictorily be all things to all men individually while continually reasserting itself as their single, exclusive unifying principle.

19

The spectacle revives the dead, imports the foreign and reinterprets the existing. The time span required for things to acquire the proper quaint banality to become “camp” continually decreases; the original is marketed simultaneously with its spoof, from which it is often scarcely distinguishable; aesthetic discussions increasingly center around the simple question as to whether something is a parody or not. This expresses the increasing contempt felt for the cultural spectacle on the part of its producers and consumers. Society produces a more and more rapid turnover of styles and ideologies, going up to the point of a delirium that escapes no one. As all the permutations and combinations are run through, the individual poverties and contradictions make themselves known and the common form that lies behind the diverse contents begins to be discerned; “to change illusions at an accelerating pace gradually dissolves the illusion of change.” With the global unification exerted by the spectacle, it becomes increasingly difficult to idealize a system because it is in a different part of the world, and the global circulation of commodities and therefore of people brings ever closer the historic encounter of the Eastern and Western proletariats. The recycling of culture sucks dry and breaks up all the old traditions, leaving only the spectacular “tradition of the new.” But the new ceases to be novel and the impatience for novelty generated by the spectacle may transform itself into an impatience to realize and destroy the spectacle, the only idea that continually remains really “new and different.”

20

Inasmuch as situationist theory is a critique of all aspects of alienated life, the diverse nuances of situationism reflect in concentrated form the general illusions of the society, and the ideological defenses generated by the situationists prefigure the ideological defenses of the system.

21

Situationist theory has come full circle when its critique of daily life is drawn on to provide the sophisticated vocabulary of a justification of the status quo. Individuals expressing dissatisfaction with self-satisfied pseudo-enjoyments in the situationist milieu, for example, have been characterized as lacking a “capacity for enjoyment,” a “sense of play” or even “radical subjectivity,” and accused of “voluntarism” or “militantism” for having concretely proposed radical projects or more experimental activities.

22

Vaneigemism is an extreme form of the modern anti-puritanism that has to pretend to enjoy what is supposed to be enjoyable. Like the city dweller who affirms his preference for “living in the country” although for some reason he never goes there or if he does soon gets bored and returns to the city, the Vaneigemist has to feign pleasure because his activity is by definition “passionate,” even when that activity is in fact tedious or nonexistent. In letting everyone know that he “refuses sacrifice” and “demands everything,” he differs from the man in the ads who “insists on the best” only in the degree of his pretension and in the often scarcely more than token ideological avowal of the obstacles that remain in the way of his total realization. Dissatisfaction and boredom are forgotten in their boring, ritual denunciation, and at a time when even the most retrograde ideologies are becoming frankly pessimistic and self-critical in their decomposition, the Vaneigemist presents an effective image of present satisfaction.

23

Vaneigemist ideological egoism holds up as the radical essence of humanity that most alienated condition of humanity for which the bourgeoisie was reproached, which “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest”; differing only accidentally from the bourgeois version in envisaging a different means of realization for this collection of isolated egos. This position is contradicted by the actual historical experience of revolutions and often even by the very actions of those who invoke it.

24

The situationists’ criticality and often appropriate calculated “arrogance” and use of insults — once taken out of the context of active struggle to change things — find a natural place in a world where everyone is presented with a spectacle of inferiority and encouraged to think that he is “different”; where every tourist seeks to avoid “the tourists” and every consumer prides himself on not believing the ads (an illusion of superiority that is often intentionally programmed into ads in order to facilitate the simultaneous penetration of the essential subliminal message). The pseudo-critical individual affirms his static superiority through his contemptuous and consequenceless critiques of others who have cruder or at least different illusions. Situationist humor — product of the contradictions between the latent possibilities of the epoch and its absurd reality — once it ceases to be practical, approaches simply the median popular humor of a society where the good spectator has been largely supplanted by the cynical spectator.

25

As reinvestors of the cultural riches of the past, the situationists, once the use of those riches is lost, rejoin spectacular society as simple promoters of culture. The process of the modern revolution — communication containing its own critique, continuous domination of the present over the past — meshes with that of a society depending on the continuous turnover of commodities, where each new lie criticizes the previous ones. That a work has something to do with the critique of the spectacle — in manifesting an element of “authentic radicality” or in representing some theoretically articulated moment of the decomposition of the spectacle — is hardly disadvantageous for it from the standpoint of the spectacle. While the situationists are right in pointing out the detournable elements in their forebears, in so doing they simultaneously win for those forebears a place in the spectacle, which, because it is so sorely lacking in the qualitative, welcomes the affirmation that there is some to be found among the cultural goods it markets. The detourned fragment is rediscovered as a fragment; when the use goes, the consumption remains; the detourners are detourned.

26

Such a vital concept as situationist necessarily knows simultaneously the truest and the most false uses, with a multitude of intermediate confusions.

27

As with other pivotal theoretical concepts, one cannot suppress the interested confusionism engendered by the concept situationist by suppressing its label. The ambiguities of the term “situationist” reflect the ambiguities of the situationist critique itself, at once separate from and part of the society it combats, at once separate party and its negation. The existence of a distinct “situationist milieu” — at once social concentration of advanced revolutionary consciousness and social embodiment of concentrated situationism — expresses the contradictions of the uneven development of conscious struggle in this period; since while to be explicitly situationist is hardly a guarantee of intelligent practice, not to be so is virtually a guarantee of aims of falsification or of an ignorance increasingly difficult to maintain involuntarily. The “spectacle” will be considered as a specifically situationist concept as long as it is considered as merely one more peripheral element of the society. But in simultaneously repressing its central aspects and the theory that has most radically articulated them and then thinking to kill two birds with one stone by lumping these uncategorizable entities together, the society confirms their real unity; as when for example a bibliography contains a section: “Daily Life, Consumer Society, and Situationist Themes.”

28

For the SI, the situationist label served to draw a line between the prevalent incoherence and a new exigency. The importance of the term withers away to the extent that the new exigences are widely known and practiced, to the extent that the proletarian movement becomes itself situationist. Such a label also facilitates a spectacular categorization of what it represents. But this very categorization at the same time exposes the society to the very coherence of the diverse situationist positions that makes possible a single label, the power of this exposure depending on the net total of significances carried by the term at a given moment. It is the trenchancy of the term which is at issue in the diverse struggles over whether someone or something is situationist, and it is a notable measure of this trenchancy that the term “pro-situationist” has been rendered universally recognized as pejorative. Although association with the label serves as no defense for acts, the actions of situationists do in a sense defend the word, in contributing toward rendering it as concentrated and dangerous a bomb as possible for the society to play with. The society that with little difficulty presents sectors of itself as “communist,” “Marxist” or “libertarian” finds it as yet impossible or inadvisable to present any aspect of itself as “situationist,” although it certainly would have done so by now if for example a “Nashist” (opportunistic neo-artistic) sense of the term had prevailed.

29

At its beginnings, as long as no one else is very close, the situationist critique seems so intrinsically anti-ideological that its proponents can scarcely imagine any situationism other than as a mere gross lie or misunderstanding. “There is no such thing as situationism,” such a term is “meaningless,” declares Internationale Situationniste #1 [Definitions]. A simple differentiation suffices to defend the term from misuse: the 5th Conference of the SI decides that all artistic works produced by its members must be explicitly labeled “antisituationist.” But the critique that opposes itself by definition to its ideologization cannot definitively or absolutely separate itself from it. The SI discovers a tendency “far more dangerous than the old artistic conception we have fought so much. It is more modern and therefore less apparent. . . . Our project has taken shape at the same time as the modern tendencies toward integration. There is thus not only a direct opposition but also an air of resemblance since the two sides are really contemporaneous. . . . We are necessarily on the same path as our enemies — more often preceding them” (Internationale Situationniste #9) [Now, the SI].

30

It is notorious that the modern intelligentsia has often utilized elements of situationist theory, formerly without acknowledgment, more recently — when such a plagiarization has become more difficult and when at the same time spectacular association with the situationists adds more to one’s prestige than knowledge of dependence on them detracts from it — more often with acknowledgment. But even more significant are the numerous theoretical and ideological manifestations that, in spite of no direct influence or even knowledge of the situationists, are ineluctably drawn to the same issues and the same formulations because these are nothing other than the intrinsic pivotal points of modern society and its contradictions.

31

To the extent that the situationist critique extends and deepens itself, modern society — merely to minimally understand its own functioning and opposition, or to present the spectacle reflecting what is most generally desired — must recuperate more and more elements of that critique, or in repressing it become the victim of its own correspondingly increasing blind spots.

32

Everything the SI has said about art, the proletariat, urbanism, the spectacle, is broadcast everywhere — minus the essential. While in the anarchy of the ideological market individual ideologies incorporate elements of situationist theory separated from their concrete totality, as an ensemble they effectively reunite the fragments as an abstract totality. All of modernist ideology taken as a block is situationism.

33

Situationism is the stealing of the initiative from the revolutionary movement, the critique of daily life undertaken by power itself. The spectacle presents itself as the originator or at least the necessary forum of discussion of the ideas of its destruction. Revolutionary theses don’t appear as the ideas of revolutionaries, that is as linked to a precise experience and project, but rather as an unexpected outburst of lucidity on the part of the rulers, stars and vendors of illusions. Revolution becomes a moment of situationism.

34

The society of situationism does not know that it is; that would be giving it too much credit. Only the proletariat can grasp its totality in the process of destroying it. It is principally the revolutionary camp that generates the diverse illusions and ideological nuances that can shore up the system and justify a restored status quo. The very successes of revolts having arrived at an ambiguous point of equilibrium with the system serve in part to advertise the greatness of a system that could generate and accommodate such radical successes.

35

By its very nature situationism cannot be immediately or fully realized. It is not supposed to be taken literally, but followed at just a few steps’ distance; if it were not for this albeit tiny distance, the mystification would become apparent.

36

In producing its situationism, the society shatters the cohesion of other ideologies, sweeps aside the archaic and accidental falsifications and draws the fragments capable of reinvestment to itself. But in thus concentrating the social false consciousness, the society prepares the way for the expropriation of this expropriated consciousness. The sophistication of recuperation forcibly disabuses revolutionaries, its unity pushes the conflict to a higher level, and elements of situationism diffused globally provoke their own supersession in regions where they had not yet developed from an indigenous theoretical base.

37

The SI was exemplary not only for what it said, but above all for all that it did not say. Diffuseness dilutes critical power. Discussion of things that don’t make any difference obscures the things that do. Entering onto the platform of ruling pseudo-dialogue turns truth into a moment of the lie. Revolutionaries must know how to be silent.



From the journal Bureau of Public Secrets #1 (January 1976). Reproduced in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb.

No copyright.

above copied from: http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/situationism.htm

After the End of Art, Arthur C. Danto

Introduction: Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary

At roughly the same moment, but quite in ignorance of one another's thought, the German art historian Hans Belting and I both published texts on the end of art.(1) Each of us had arrived at a vivid sense that some momentous historical shift had taken place in the productive conditions of the visual arts, even if, outwardly speaking, the institutional complexes of the art world--the galleries, the art schools, the periodicals, the museums, the critical establishment, the curatorial--seemed relatively stable. Belting has since published an amazing book, tracing the history of devotional images in the Christian West from late Roman times until about A.D. 1400, to which he gave the striking subtitle The Image before the Era of Art. It was not that those images were not art in some large sense, but their being art did not figure in their production, since the concept of art had not as yet really emerged in general consciousness, and such images--icons, really--played quite different role in the lives of people than works of art came to play when the concept at last emerged and something like aesthetic considerations began to govern our relationships to them. They were not even thought of as art in the elementary sense of having been produced by artists--human beings putting marks on surfaces--but were regarded as having a miraculous provenance, like the imprinting of Jesus's image on Veronica's veil.(2) There would then have been a profound discontinuity between artistic practices before and after the era of art had begun, since the concept of the artist did not enter into the explanation of devotional images,(3) but of course the concept of the artist became central in the Renaissance, to the point that Giorgio Vasari was to write a great book on the lives of the artists. Before then there would at best have been the lives of the dabbling saints.

If this is at all thinkable, then there might be another discontinuity, no less profound, between the art produced during the era of art and art produced after that era ended. The era of art did not begin abruptly in 1400, nor did it end sharply either, sometime before the mid-1980s when Belting's and my texts appeared respectively in German and in English. Neither of us, perhaps, had as clear an idea as we now might have, ten years later, of what we were trying to say, but, now that Belting has come forward with the idea of art before the beginning of art, we might think about art after the end of art, as if we were emerging from the era of art into something else the exact shape and structure of which remains to be understood.

Neither of us intended our observations as a critical judgment regarding the art of our time. In the eighties, certain radical theorists had taken up the theme of the death of painting and had based their judgment on the claim that advanced painting seemed to show all the signs of internal exhaustion, or at least marked limits beyond which it was not possible to press. They were thinking of Robert Ryman's more or less all-white paintings, or perhaps the aggressive monotonous stripe paintings of the French artist Daniel Buren; and it would be difficult not to consider their account as in some way a critical judgment, both on those artists and on the practice of painting in general. But it was quite consistent with the end of the era of art, as Belting and I understood it, that art should be extremely vigorous and show no sign whatever of internal exhaustion. Ours was a claim about how one complex of practices had given way to another, even if the shape of the new complex was still unclear--is still unclear. Neither of us was talking about the death of art, though my own text happens to have appeared as the target article in a volume under the title The Death of Art. That title was not mine, for I was writing about a certain narrative that had, I thought, been objectively realized in the history of art, and it was that narrative, it seemed to me, that had come to an end. A story was over. It was not my view that there would be no more art, which "death" certainly implies, but that whatever art there was to be would be made without benefit of a reassuring sort of narrative in which it was seen as the appropriate next stage in the story. What had come to an end was that narrative but not the subject of the narrative. I hasten to clarify.

In a certain sense, life really begins when the story comes to an end, as in the story every couple relishes of how they found one another and "lived happily ever after."(4) In the German genre of the Bildungsroman--the novel of formation and self-discovery--the story is told of the stages through which the hero or heroine progresses on the way to self-awareness. The genre has almost become a matrix of the feminist novel in which the heroine arrives at a consciousness of who she is and what being a woman means. And that awareness, though the end of the story, is really "the first day of the rest of her life," to use the somewhat corny phrase of New Age philosophy. Hegel's early masterpiece, The Phenomenology of Spirit, has the form of a Bildungsroman, in the sense that its hero, Geist, goes through a sequence of stages in order to achieve knowledge not merely of what it itself is, but that without the history of mishaps and misplaced enthusiasms, its knowledge would be empty.(5) Belting's thesis too was about narratives. "Contemporary art," he wrote, "manifests an awareness of a history of art but no longer carries it forward."(6) And he speaks as well of "the relatively recent loss of faith in a great and compelling narrative, in the way things must be seen."(7) It is in part the sense of no longer belonging to a great narrative, registering itself on our consciousness somewhere between uneasiness and exhilaration, that marks the historical sensibility of the present, and which, if Belting and I are at all on the right path, helps define the acute difference, of which I think that awareness only began to emerge in the mid-1970s, between modern and contemporary art. It is characteristic of contemporaneity--but not of modernity--that it should have begun insidiously, without slogan or logo, without anyone being greatly aware that it had happened. The Armory show of 1913 used the pine-tree flag of the American Revolution as its logo to celebrate a repudiation of the art of the past. The Berlin dada movement proclaimed the death of art, but on the same poster by Raoul Hausmann wished long life to "The Machine Art of Tatlin." Contemporary art, by contrast, has no brief against the art of the past, no sense that the past is something from which liberation must be won, no sense even that it is at all different as art from modern art generally. It is part of what defines contemporary art that the art of the past is available for such use as artists care to give it. What is not available to them is the spirit in which the art was made. The paradigm of the contemporary is that of the collage as defined by Max Ernst, with one difference. Ernst said that collage is "the meeting of two distant realities on a plane foreign to them both."(8) The difference is that there is no longer a plane foreign to distinct artistic realities, nor are those realities all that distant from one another. That is because the basic perception of the contemporary spirit was formed on the principle of a museum in which all art has a rightful place, where there is no a priori criterion as to what that art must look like, and where there is no narrative into which the museum's contents must all fit. Artists today treat museums as filled not with dead art, but with living artistic options. The museum is a field available for constant rearrangement, and indeed there is an art form emerging which uses the museum as a repository of materials for a collage of objects arranged to suggest or support a thesis; we see it in Fred Wilson's installation at the Maryland Historical Museum and again in Joseph Kosuth's remarkable installation "The Play of the Unmentionable" at the Brooklyn Museum.(9) But the genre is almost commonplace today: the artist is given free run of the museum and organizes out of its resources exhibitions of objects that have no historical or formal connection to one another other than what the artist provides. In some way the museum is cause, effect, and embodiment of the attitudes and practices that define the post-historical moment of art, but I do not want to press the matter for the moment. Rather, I want to return to the distinction between the modern and the contemporary and discuss its emergence into consciousness. In fact, it was the dawning of a certain kind of self-consciousness that I had in mind when I began to write about the end of art.

In my own field, philosophy, the historical divisions went roughly as follows: ancient, medieval, and modern. "Modern" philosophy was generally thought to begin with Rene Descartes, and what distinguished it was the particular inward turn Descartes took--his famous reversion to the "I think"--where the question would be less how things really are than how someone whose mind is structured in a certain way is obliged to think they are. Whether things really are the way the structure of our mind requires us to think they are is not something we can say. But neither does it greatly matter, since we have no alternative way of thinking about them. So working from the inside outward, so to speak, Descartes, and modern philosophy generally, drew a philosophical map of the universe whose matrix was the structure of human thought. What Descartes did was begin to bring the structures of thought to consciousness, where we could examine them critically and come to understand at one and the same time what we are and how the world is, for since the world is defined by thought, the world and we are literally made in one another's image. The ancients simply went ahead endeavoring to describe the world, paying no attention to those subjective features modern philosophy made central. We could paraphrase Hans Belting's marvelous title by talking about the self before the era of the self to mark the difference between ancient and modern philosophy. It is not that there were no selves before Descartes, but that the concept of the self did not define the entire activity of philosophy, as it came to do after he had revolutionized it and until reversion to language came to replace reversion to the self. And while "the linguistic turn"(10) certainly replaced questions of what we are with how we talk, there is an undoubted continuity between the two stages of philosophical thought, as is underscored by Noam Chomsky's description of his own revolution in the philosophy of language as "Cartesian linguistics,"(11) replacing or augmenting Descartes's theory of innate thought with the postulation of innate linguistic structures.

There is an analogy to the history of art. Modernism in art marks a point before which painters set about representing the world the way it presented itself, painting people and landscapes and historical events just as they would present themselves to the eye. With modernism, the conditions of representation themselves become central, so that art in a way becomes its own subject. This was almost precisely the way in which Clement Greenberg defined the matter in his famous 1960 essay "Modernist Painting." "The essence of Modernism," he wrote, "lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence."(12) Interestingly, Greenberg took as his model of modernist thought the philosopher Immanuel Kant: "Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as the first real Modernist." Kant did not see philosophy as adding to our knowledge so much as answering the question of how knowledge was possible. And I suppose the corresponding view of painting would have been not to represent the appearances of things so much as answering the question of how painting was possible. The question then would be: who was the first modernist painter--who deflected the art of painting from its representational agenda to a new agenda in which the means of representation became the object of representation?

For Greenberg, Manet became the Kant of modernist painting: "Manes's became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted." And the history of modernism moved from there through the impressionists, "who abjured underpainting and glazes, to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors they used were made of paint that came from tubes or pots," to Cezanne, who "sacrificed verisimilitude, or correctness, in order to fit his drawing and design more explicitly to the rectangular shape of the canvas." And step by step Greenberg constructed a narrative of modernism to replace the narrative of the traditional representational painting defined by Vasari. Flatness, the consciousness of paint and brushstroke, the rectangular shape--all of them what Meyer Schapiro speaks of as "nonmimetic features" of what may still have been residually mimetic paintings--displaced perspective, foreshortening, chiaroscuro as the progress points of a developmental sequence. The shift from "premodernist" to modernist art, if we follow Greenberg, was the shift from mimetic to nonmimetic features of painting. It was not, Greenberg asserts, that painting had to become itself nonobjective or abstract. It was just that its representational features were secondary in modernism where they had been primary in premodernist art. Much of my book, concerned as it is with narratives of the history of art, must perforce deal with Greenberg as the great narrativist of modernism.

It is important that the concept of modernism, if Greenberg is right, is not merely the name of a stylistic period which begins in the latter third of the nineteenth century, the way in which Mannerism is the name of a stylistic period which begins in the first third of the sixteenth century: Mannerist follows Renaissance painting and is followed by the baroque, which is followed by rococo, which is followed by neoclassicism, which is followed by the romantic. These were deep changes in the way painting represents the world, changes, one might say, in coloration and mood, and they develop out of and to some degree in reaction against their predecessors, as well as in response to all sorts of extra-artistic forces in history and in life. My sense is that modernism does not follow romanticism in this way, or not merely: it is marked by an ascent to a new level of consciousness, which is reflected in painting as a kind of discontinuity, almost as if to emphasize that mimetic representation had become less important than some kind of reflection on the means and methods of representation. Painting begins to look awkward, or forced (in my own chronology it is Van Gogh and Gauguin who are the first modernist painters). In effect, modernism sets itself at a distance from the previous history of art, I suppose in the way in which adults, in the words of Saint Paul, "put aside childish things." The point is that "modern" does not merely mean "the most recent."

It means, rather, in philosophy as well as in art, a notion of strategy and style and agenda. If it were just a temporal notion, all the philosophy contemporary with Descartes or Kant and all the painting contemporary with Manet and Cezanne would be modernist, but in fact a fair amount of philosophizing went on which was, in Kant's terms, "dogmatic," having nothing to do with the issues which defined the critical program he advanced. Most of the philosophers contemporary with Kant but otherwise "precritical" have dropped out of sight of all save scholars of the history of philosophy. And while there remains a place in the museum for painting contemporary with modernist art which is not itself modernist--for example, French academic painting, which acted as if Cezanne had never happened, or later, surrealism, which Greenberg did what he could to suppress or, to use the psychoanalytical language which has come naturally to Greenberg's critics, like Rosalind Krauss or Hal Foster,(13) "to repress"--there is no room for it in the great narrative of modernism which swept on past it, into what came to be known as "abstract expressionism" (a label Greenberg disliked), and then color-field abstraction, where, though the narrative did not necessarily end, Greenberg himself stopped. Surrealism, like academic painting, lay, according to Greenberg, "outside the pale of history," to use an expression I found in Hegel. It happened, but it was not, significantly, part of the progress. If you were snide, as critics schooled in Greenbergian invective were, it was not really art, and that declaration showed the degree to which the identity of art was internally connected with being part of the official narrative. Hal Foster writes: "A space for surrealism has opened up: an impense within the old narrative, it has become a privileged point for the contemporary critique of this narrative."(14) Part of what the "end of art" means is the enfranchisement of what had lain beyond the pale, where the very idea of a pale--a wall--is exclusionary, the way the Great Wall of China was, built to keep the Mongol hordes outside, or as the Berlin Wall was built, to keep the innocent socialist population protected from the toxins of capitalism. (The great Irish-American painter Sean Scully delights in the fact that "the pale," in English, refers to the Irish Pale, an enclave in Ireland, making the Irish outsiders in their own land.) In the modernist narrative, art beyond the pale either is no part of the sweep of history, or it is a reversion to some earlier form of art. Kant once spoke of his own era, the Age of Enlightenment, as "mankind's coming of age." Greenberg might have thought of art in those terms as well, and seen in surrealism a kind of aesthetic regression, a reassertion of values from the childhood of art, filled with monsters and scary threats. For him, maturity meant purity, in a sense of the term that connects exactly to what Kant meant by the term in the title of his Critique of Pure Reason. This was reason applied to itself, and having no other subject. Pure art was correspondingly art applied to art. And surrealism was almost the embodiment of impurity, concerned as it was with dreams, the unconscious, eroticism, and, in Foster's vision of it, "the uncanny." But so, by Greenbergian criteria, is contemporary art impure, which is what I want to talk about now. Just as "modern" is not simply a temporal concept, meaning, say, "most recent," neither is "contemporary" merely a temporal term, meaning whatever is taking place at the present moment. And just as the shift from "premodern" to modern was as insidious as the shift, in Hans Belting's terms, from the image before the era of art to the image in the era of art, so that artists were making modern art without realizing they were doing anything different in kind until it began to be retrospectively clear that a momentous change had taken place, so, similarly, did it happen with the shift from modern to contemporary art. For a long time, I think, "contemporary art" would have been just the modern art that is being made now. Modern, after all, implies a difference between now and "back then": there would be no use for the expression if things remained steady and largely the same. It implies an historical structure and is stronger in this sense than a term like "most recent." "Contemporary" in its most obvious sense means simply what is happening now: contemporary art would be the art produced by our contemporaries. It would not, clearly, have passed the test of time. But it would have a certain meaning for us which even modern art which had passed that test would not have: it would be "our art" in some particularly intimate way. But as the history of art has internally evolved, contemporary has come to mean an art produced within a certain structure of production never, I think, seen before in the entire history of art. So just as "modern" has come to denote a style and even a period, and not just recent art, "contemporary" has come to designate something more than simply the art of the present moment. In my view, moreover, it designates less a period than what happens after there are no more periods in some master narrative of art, and less a style of making art than a style of using styles. Of course, there is contemporary art in styles of a kind never before seen, but I do not want to press the matter at this stage of my discussion. I merely wish to alert the reader to my effort to draw a very strong distinction between "modern" and"contemporary."(15)

I don't especially think that the distinction was sharply drawn when I first moved to New York at the end of the forties, when "our art" was modern art, and the Museum of Modern Art belonged to us in that intimate way. To be sure, a lot of art was being made which did not as yet make an appearance in that museum, but it did not seem to us then, to the degree that the matter was thought about at all, that the latter was contemporary in a way that distinguished it from modern. It seemed a wholly natural arrangement that some of this art would sooner or later find its way into "The Modern," and that this arrangement would continue indefinitely, modern art being here to stay, but not in any way forming a closed canon. It was not closed, certainly, in 1949, when Life magazine suggested that Jackson Pollock might just be the greatest American painter alive. That it is closed today, in the minds of many, myself included, means that somewhere between then and now a distinction emerged between the contemporary and the modern. The contemporary was no longer modern save in the sense of "most recent," and the modern seemed more and more to have been a style that flourished from about 1880 until sometime in the 1960s. It could even be said, I suppose, that some modern art continued to be produced after that--art which remained under the stylistic imperatives of modernism--but that art would not really be contemporary, except again in the strictly temporal sense of the term. For when the stylistic profile of modern art revealed itself, it did so because contemporary art itself revealed a profile very different from modern art. This tended to put the Museum of Modern Art in a kind of bind no one had anticipated when it was the home of "our art." The bind was due to the fact that "modern" had a stylistic meaning and a temporal meaning. It would not have occurred to anyone that these would conflict, that contemporary art would stop being modern art. But today, as we near the end of the century, the Museum of Modern Art has to decide whether it is going to acquire contemporary art that is not modern and thus become a museum of modern art in the strictly temporal sense or whether it will continue to collect only stylistically modern art, the production of which has thinned down to perhaps a trickle, but which is no longer representative of the contemporary world.

In any case, the distinction between the modern and the contemporary did not become clear until well into the seventies and eighties. Contemporary art would for a long time continue to be "the modern art produced by our contemporaries." At some point this clearly stopped being a satisfactory way of thinking, as evidenced by the need to invent the term "postmodern." That term by itself showed the relative weakness of the term "contemporary" as conveying a style. It seemed too much a mere temporal term. But perhaps "postmodern" was too strong a term, too closely identified with a certain sector of contemporary art. In truth, the term "postmodern" really does seem to me to designate a certain style we can learn to recognize, the way we learn to recognize instances of the baroque or the rococo. It is a term something like "camp," which Susan Sontag transferred from gay idiolect into common discourse in a famous essay.(16) One can, after reading her essay, become reasonably adept at picking out camp objects, in just the same way it seems to me that one can pick out postmodern objects, with maybe some difficulties at the borderlines. But that is how it is with most concepts, stylistic or otherwise, and with recognitional capacities in human beings and in animals. There is a valuable formula in Robert Venturi's 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: "elements which are hybrid rather than `pure,' compromising rather than `clean,' `ambiguous' rather than `articulated,' perverse as well as `interesting.'"(17) One could sort works of art out using this formula, and almost certainly you would have one pile which consisted pretty homogeneously of postmodern works. It would have the works of Robert Rauschenberg, the paintings of Julian Schnabel and David Salle, and I guess the architecture of Frank Gehry. But much contemporary art would be left out--say the works of Jenny Holzer or the paintings of Robert Mangold. It has been suggested that perhaps we should simply speak of postmodernisms. But once we do this, we lose the recognitional ability, the capacity to sort out, and the sense that postmodernism marks a specific style. We could capitalize the word "contemporary" to cover whatever the disjunction of postmodernisms was intended to cover, but there again we would be left with the sense that we have no identifiable style, that there is nothing that does not fit. But that in fact is the mark of the visual arts since the end of modernism, that as a period it is defined by the lack of a stylistic unity, or at least the kind of stylistic unity which can be elevated into a criterion and used as a basis for developing a recognitional capacity, and there is in consequence no possibility of a narrative direction. That is why I prefer to call it simply posthistorical art. Anything ever done could be done today and be an example of post-historical art. For example, an appropriationist artist like Mike Bidlo could have a show of Piero della Francescas in which the entirety of Piero's corpus was appropriated. Piero is certainly not a post-historical artist, but Bidlo is, and a skilled enough appropriationist as well, so that his Pieros and Piero's paintings could look as much alike as he cared to make them look--as much like Piero as his Morandis look like Morandis, his Picassos like Picassos, his Warhols like Warhols. Yet in an important sense, not easily believed accessible to the eye, Bidlo's Pieros would have more in common with the work of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Sherrie Levine than with Piero's proper stylistic peers. So the contemporary is, from one perspective, a period of information disorder, a condition of perfect aesthetic entropy. But it is equally a period of quite perfect freedom. Today there is no longer any pale of history. Everything is permitted. But that makes the historical transition from modernism to post-historical art all the more urgent to try to understand. And that means that it is urgent to try to understand the decade of the 1970s, a period in its own way as dark as the tenth century.

The seventies was a decade in which it must have seemed that history had lost its way. It had lost its way because nothing at all like a discernible direction seemed to be emerging. If we think of 1962 as marking the end of abstract expressionism, then you had a number of styles succeeding one another at a dizzying rate: color-field painting, hard-edged abstraction, French neorealism, pop, op, minimalism, arte povera, and then what got to be called the New Sculpture, which included Richard Serra, Linda Benglis, Richard Tuttle, Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, and then conceptual art. Then what seemed to be ten years of nothing much. There were sporadic movements like Pattern and Decoration, but nobody supposed they were going to generate the kind of structural stylistic energy of the immense upheavals of the sixties. Then all at once neo-expressionism arose, in the early eighties, and gave people the sense that a new direction had been found. And then again the sense of nothing much so far at least as historical directions were concerned. And then the dawning sense that the absence of direction was the defining trait of the new period, that neoexpressionism was less a direction than the illusion of one. Recently people have begun to feel that the last twenty-five years, a period of tremendous experimental productiveness in the visual arts with no single narrative direction on the basis of which others could be excluded, have stabilized as the norm.

The sixties was a paroxysm of styles, in the course of whose contention, it seems to me--and this was the basis of my speaking of the "end of art" in the first place--it gradually became clear, first through the nouveaux realistes and pop, that there was no special way works of art had to look in contrast to what I have designated "mere real things." To use my favorite example, nothing need mark the difference, outwardly, between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the Brillo boxes in the supermarket. And conceptual art demonstrated that there need not even be a palpable visual object for something to be a work of visual art. That meant that you could no longer teach the meaning of art by example. It meant that as far as appearances were concerned, anything could be a work of art, and it meant that if you were going to find out what art was, you had to turn from sense experience to thought. You had, in brief, to turn to philosophy.

In an interview in 1969, conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth claimed that the only role for an artist at the time "was to investigate the nature of art itself."(18) This sounds strikingly like the line in Hegel that gave support to my own views about the end of art: "Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is."(19) Joseph Kosuth is a philosophically literate artist to an exceptional degree, and he was one of the few artists working in the sixties and seventies who had the resources to undertake a philosophical analysis of the general nature of art. As it happened, relatively few philosophers of the time were ready to do this, just because so few of them could have imagined the possibility of art like that being produced in such dizzying disjunctiveness. The philosophical question of the nature of art, rather, was something that arose within art when artists pressed against boundary after boundary, and found that the boundaries all gave way. All typical sixties artists had that vivid sense of boundaries, each drawn by some tacit philosophical definition of art, and their erasure has left us the situation we find ourselves in today. Such a world is not, by the way, the easiest kind of world to live in, which explains why the political reality of the present seems to consist in drawing and defining boundaries wherever possible. Nevertheless, it was only in the 1960s that a serious philosophy of art became a possibility, one which did not base itself on purely local facts--for example, that art was essentially painting and sculpture. Only when it became clear that anything could be a work of art could one think, philosophically, about art. Only then did the possibility arise of a true general philosophy of art. But what of art itself? What of "Art after Philosophy"--to use the title of Kosuth's essay--which, to make the point, may indeed itself be a work of art? What of art after the end of art, where, by "after the end of art," I mean "after the ascent to philosophical self-reflection?" Where an artwork can consist of any object whatsoever that is enfranchised as art, raising the question "Why am I a work of art?"

With that question the history of modernism was over. It was over because modernism was too local and too materialist, concerned as it was with shape, surface, pigment, and the like as defining painting in its purity. Modernist painting, as Greenberg defined it, could only ask the question "What is it that I have and that no other kind of art can have?" And sculpture asked itself the same kind of question. But what this gives us is no general picture of what art is, only what some of the arts, perhaps historically the most important arts, essentially were. What question does Warhol's Brillo Box ask, or one of Beuys's multiples of a square of chocolate stuck to a piece of paper? What Greenberg had done was to identify a certain local style of abstraction with the philosophical truth of art, when the philosophical truth, once found, would have to be consistent with art appearing every possible way.

What I know is that the paroxysms subsided in the seventies, as if it had been the internal intention of the history of art to arrive at a philosophical conception of itself, and that the last stages of that history were somehow the hardest to work through, as art sought to break through the toughest outer membranes, and so itself became, in the process, paroxysmal. But now that the integument was broken, now that at least the glimpse of self-consciousness had been attained, that history was finished. It had delivered itself of a burden it could now hand over to the philosophers to carry. And artists, liberated from the burden of history, were free to make art in whatever way they wished, for any purposes they wished, or for no purposes at all. That is the mark of contemporary art, and small wonder, in contrast with modernism, there is no such thing as a contemporary style.

I think the ending of modernism did not happen a moment too soon. For the art world of the seventies was filled with artists bent on agendas having nothing much to do with pressing the limits of art or extending the history of art, but with putting art at the service of this or that personal or political goal. And artists had the whole inheritance of art history to work with, including the history of the avant-garde, which placed at the disposition of the artist all those marvelous possibilities the avant-garde had worked out and which modernism did its utmost to repress. In my own view, the major artistic contribution of the decade was the emergence of the appropriated image--the taking over of images with established meaning and identity and giving them a fresh meaning and identity. Since any image could be appropriated, it immediately follows that there could be no perceptual stylistic uniformity among appropriated images. One of my favorite examples is Kevin Roche's 1992 addition to the Jewish Museum in New York. The old Jewish Museum was just the Warburg mansion on Fifth Avenue, with its baronial associations and connotations of the Gilded Age. Kevin Roche brilliantly decided to duplicate the old Jewish Museum, and the eye is unable to tell a single difference. But the building belongs to the postmodern age perfectly: a postmodern architect can design a building which looks like a Mannerist chateau. It was an architectural solution that had to have pleased the most conservative and nostalgic trustee, as well as the most avant-garde and contemporary one, but of course for quite different reasons.

These artistic possibilities are but realizations and applications of the immense philosophical contribution of the 1960s to art's self-understanding: that artworks can be imagined, or in fact produced, which look exactly like mere real things which have no claim to the status of art at all, for the latter entails that you can't define artworks in terms of some particular visual properties they may have. There is no a priori constraint on how works of art must look--they can look like anything at all. This alone finished the modernist agenda, but it had to wreak havoc with the central institution of the art world, namely the museum of fine arts. The first generation of great American museums took it for granted that its contents would be treasures of great visual beauty and that visitors would enter the tresorium to be in the presence of spiritual truth of which the visually beautiful was the metaphor. The second generation, of which the Museum of Modern Art is the great exemplar, assumed that the work of art is to be defined in formalist terms and appreciated under the perspective of a narrative not remarkably different from the one Greenberg advanced: a linear progressive history the visitor would work through, learning to appreciate the work of art together with learning the historical sequences. Nothing was to distract from the formal visual interest of the works themselves. Even picture frames were eliminated as distractions, or perhaps as concessions to an illusionistic agenda modernism had outgrown: paintings were no longer windows onto imagined scenes, but objects in their own right, even if they had been conceived as windows. It is, incidentally, easy to understand why surrealism has to be repressed in the light of such an experience: it would be too distracting, not to mention irrelevantly illusionistic. Works had plenty of space to themselves in galleries emptied of everything but those works.

In any case, with the philosophical coming of age of art, visuality drops away, as little relevant to the essence of art as beauty proved to have been. For art to exist there does not even have to be an object to look at, and if there are objects in a gallery, they can look like anything at all. Three attacks on established museums are worth noting in this respect. When Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnick admitted pop into the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in the "High and Low" show of 1990, there was a critical conflagration. When Thomas Krens deaccessioned a Kandinsky and a Chagall to acquire part of the Panza collection, a good bit of it conceptual and much of which did not exist as objects, there was a critical conflagration. And when, in 1993, the Whitney compiled a Biennial consisting of works that really typified the way the art world had gone after the end of art, the outpouring of critical hostility--in which I am afraid I shared--was by an inestimable factor unprecedented in the history of Biennial polemics. Whatever art is, it is no longer something primarily to be looked at. Stared at, perhaps, but not primarily looked at. What, in view of this, is a post-historical museum to do, or to be?

It must be plain that there are three models at least, depending upon the kind of art we are dealing with, and depending upon whether it is beauty, form, or what I shall term engagement that defines our relationship to it. Contemporary art is too pluralistic in intention and realization to allow itself to be captured along a single dimension, and indeed an argument can be made that enough of it is incompatible with the constraints of the museum that an entirely different breed of curator is required, one who bypasses museum structures altogether in the interests of engaging the art directly with the lives of persons who have seen no reason to use the museum either as tresorium of beauty or sanctum of spiritual form. For a museum to engage this kind of art, it has to surrender much of the structure and theory that define the museum in its other two modes.

But the museum itself is only part of the infrastructure of art that will sooner or later have to deal with the end of art and with art after the end of art. The artist, the gallery, the practices of art history, and the discipline of philosophical aesthetics must all, in one or another way, give way and become different, and perhaps vastly different, from what they have so far been. I can only hope to tell part of the philosophical story in the chapters that follow. The institutional story must wait upon history itself.

(C) 1997 the Trustees of the National Gallery of Art All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-691-01173-7

above copied from: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/ danto-art.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=login

Kenneth Goldsmith - Interview, Erik Belgum

Erik Belgum: Talk a little about your choice of the [r] sound as the phonemic structuring element on "No. 111." A friend of mine recently came back to the midwest after living in South Africa for several years and he said we all sounded like pirates. He was really keying in on our intense midwestern [r] sounds. I've been particularly interested in [r] since reading Gerard Gennette's book Mimologiques which places the [r] sound at a pivotal point between animal communication and human speech. The grrr of a dog, or wrrrr of a monkey for example. So, in No. 111 why [r]?

Kenneth Goldsmith: The sounds related around [r] is known in linguistics as the schwa [ah, ar, etc.]. I was inspired by the explanation given to me regarding the sacred significance of the Sanskrit word aum. It seems that when one speaks this word, all parts of the mouth are engaged: "au" forms on the outer lips; "uh", spoken second, resides in the middle of the mouth and nasal area; and "um" finishes deep in the throat. No. 111 is a book that was written to encompass the whole of speech and aural experience thus mirroring the Sanskrit ideal.

EB: Is there any particularly rich vein in the language arts that you feel has not been explored? For example, in my opinion, the possibilities of simultaneous speech have barely begun to be tapped, as it is too often treated as a kind of "sound effect" and comes off as basically synonymous with the instruction "insert chaotic sound here."

KG: I feel that the abundance of common, everyday speech which surrounds us has not been explored. We are drowning in a sea of language yet we feel we must jump through hoops to make it "poetic" or "meaningful." Even our most advanced poetries still find a need to make language "poetic." I am curious that there was never a literary equivalent to Pop Art (although I am reminded of Tuli Kupferberg's overtly expressive recitations of advertisements from the mid 60s). Andy Warhol's A is very good and I'm shocked that nobody took that direction into a fruitful practice. Along those same lines, the literary world has had few writers whom employ a Jeff Koons vacuum cleaner-like approach to literature or a Sherrie Levine appropriative use of words on a consistent basis.

I've lately been working on a piece which is nothing but media language — the language that flows out of the television — specifically advertising. It's language we tend to dismiss and as such, I've labeled it entartete wörter, that is degenerated words, what we consider to be language completely depleted of value; nutritionless language. Most people don't want to watch ads and there have been studies made that say we have no more than a 15 second recall on what we've just watched on television. I'm curious as to what effect will occur when we gather an abundance of entartete wörter in one place.

Likewise, we are not paying attention to speech, the second most abundant human product after thought. A few years ago, I did a piece called Soliloquy which was a book of every word I spoke from the moment I woke up on a Monday morning until the moment I went to bed the next Sunday night. It was 400 pages long. The moniker for the book was "If every word spoken in New York City daily were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, each day there would be a blizzard." I wanted to see how much one week of my speech "weighed." I'm interested in concretizing the ephemeral; and there's nothing both more concrete, yet ephemeral, than language.

EB: That's a beautiful analogy. As a follow up, I've often felt that writers often jump through hoops to make their language or work innovative or experimental when the innovation is all around them. Someone recently asked me what avant-garde meant to me and I said that in one sense it seemed like a kind of political trick that I had gotten caught up in for years. I think this was largely because of the above. In what sense is being new or innovative important to you?

KG: An artist responding to their time cannot help but be new or innovative simply because parameters and paradigms shift constantly. This is especially pressing for artists using language which is radically shifting as of late. Only a few years ago, our culture was said to be moving toward the strictly visual (remember the Whitney's "Image World" show of the late 80s); the rise of the Internet has proved that wrong. In fact, due to the web we're responding to language in ways unimagined just a few years ago. Language is being influenced by the technology; compound word URLs are completely Joycean. Suddenly we can read Finnegans Wake and understand it in a different way. Rap music, which began compounding ordinary words to form mass-culture neologisms, is another example. Joyce certainly knew that one day we'd catch up to him yet he never could have anticipated that it would be the internet or rap music that would be responsible for it. I can imagine future generations understanding the Wake in ways my generation (or his) could never have imagined.

EB: Do you write by hand very often?

KG: No. I never write by hand. As a result, my penmanship has completely become illegible. It's bound to happen when people spend all their time typing. In fact, I think that cursive as we know it will be replaced by the script used on Palm Pilots, a sort of shorthand. Before I became devoted to the computer, I used to make drawings which I now no longer do. In fact, I find the computer to be physically engaging enough. I was trained as a sculptor so I have a need to make language physical, concrete. I find that sculpting language on the computer is satisfying enough.

EB: In your mind, does the method of writing you used in No. 111 and Soliloquy, in the sense that you kind of open up a certain linguistic channel and then proceed to let the writing flow through that channel, place you in any way in the tradition of mystics like John Dee or even something like the Koran or the Book of Mormon? Or possibly even some American Indian traditions of storytelling? Given your method of writing these books, a follow up question then presents itself which is the question of authorship. Personally, I think this is a relatively boring question, i.e. "is it really your work if other people said the words?," but I think some of our readers with inquiring minds might want to know.

KG: Almost a century ago Duchamp settled these questions with his Fountain. After that, authorship simply became a matter of framing. I'm shocked how long it's taken our culture so long to legitimize framing or "brushing" content as a valid artistic practice. In the late 70s and we began to see artists like Sherrie Levine "appropriating" images and now, of course, we have a culture built entirely on sampling and recycled material. What was once branded "plagiarism" has long ceased to be an issue.

I don't feel comfortable with the word "mystical" associated in any way with my work. What I do, anyone can do. For example, anyone could rewrite No. 111 using the rules I set up and it would turn out completely different. Same with Soliloquy: anyone can tape and transcribe every word they said for a week and the book would be entirely different. There's just too much shared common language out in the world to ever assume that we are solely possessive of it. Every thought I've ever had I've probably read or heard elsewhere, while wading through this thick band of language which surrounds us daily.

EB: You mention that you were trained as a sculptor. I'm curious, were there specific artists or, better yet, specific works that either forced, or eased, your transition into the world of sound poetry and concrete poetry from the world of sculpture.

KG: It was a long process moving into poetry from fine art which happened over the course of 15 years. As a sculptor, my first mature body of work was very beautifully crafted plywood books, each with texts carved into them. As time went on, I became much more interested in the texts than in the craft of making the books. By the end, I was so invigorated by writing the texts that I began to feel resentful toward the enormous amount of time needed to craft each object. So I stopped making the books and began to instead focus on writing texts. I've ended up a writer, although I came to it in a most unexpected way.

EB: Did any specific artists or works ease the transition?

KG: Like generations before me, I read John Cage's Silence and found that it granted certain permissions I was seeking in my own practice. That was in the late 1980s and although Silence was published in the early 60s, it's amazing how potent that book still is. Cage's message goes in and out of fashion depending on the cultural climate but it seems that some portion of every generation ends up rediscovering it for themselves as I did. Recently, many of the experimental digital musicians are working out Cagean ideas and we're seeing rock groups like Sonic Youth embrace the same tradition.

EB: I suppose there is an obvious connection between your highly systematized method of writing and the work of the OULIPO group. However, I see a very significant philosophical difference. I think it comes from Cage's influence that you just mentioned and it all centers around the word "Potential." Briefly, it's this. The OULIPIENS, even though they have produced many "finished products" are, at least philosophically, expressly interested in the formula or the system over the finished product. That's why they call it "Potential Literature." Although many people don't see it this way, Cage was the exact opposite. For him, the detailed working out and realization of a system or formula was a critical step and this seems to be a critical step in your work also. For example, instead of actually recording and documenting all your speech for a day, you could have realized Soliloquy as a Dick Higgins' type of instruction that said "Record and transcribe all your speech for 24 hours." To me that would have been a OULIPIEN versus a Cagean approach to the same project. There's a question in here somewhere, but I'll leave it to you to find.

KG: One of the greatest problems I have with OULIPO is the lack of interesting production that resulted from it. While I like the idea of "potential literature," it strikes me that their output should have remained conceptual — a mapping, so to speak; judging by the works that have been realized, they might be better left as ideas. On the whole, they embraced a blandly conservative narrative fiction which seems to bury the very interesting procedures that went into creating the works.

I'm interested in writing that is born of process and where the process is brought to the forefront of the practice. However, what is more interesting than process is the resultant writing. This sort of writing achieves a balance between Cagean chance operative writing and Oulipian ideals. It allows for a certain amount of control and a certain amount of surprise.

There's a type of sports practice that calls itself Extreme: Extreme Skiing, Extreme Skateboarding, things like this. I'm interested in Extreme Writing; and I'm convinced that the procedures that set it up inform the intensity of the writing. Without going through the rigorous exercise of documenting every move my body made over the course of one day, I never would have achieved the quality of writing that made Fidget the book that it is. And of course Soliloquy achieved the same intensity through its very rigorous process of production.

EB: Anyone who has transcribed speech from tape recordings knows that there's a fairly large amorphous area of, let's call it "material," that gets left on the cutting room floor. Stuff that maybe isn't "language," but is certainly part of communication. Certainly things like coughs, throat clearing, hmms, umms, lips sticking together briefly, unusual breathing patterns are left out, but even phonemic stutters or repetitions of whole words often don't make it onto the transcribed page. What's your position on this "material" in relation to your work which sits, as it does, between spoken and written language?

KG: Soliloquy changed my entire relationship to the spoken word. After Soliloquy, I could never hear language the same way I did before. It became completely opaque and concrete, like lead. Sometimes now when someone is talking to me, I don't hear what they say but how they're saying it. The rhythms of speech come to the forefront — the "um" and the "ahs." After Soliloquy, I am never able to watch movies in the same way; after learning the divergent and stumbling nature of speech, I am never able to drop my suspension of disbelief — the actors speak too streamlined and neatly!

When it comes to transcribing the pieces, certain decisions need to be made. In Soliloquy, all the sounds I considered to be language-based went in it (the um's and ah's). The bodily sounds which you mention — coughs, lips sticking together briefly, etc. — all were moved into Fidget.

Next comes the task of writing and the formal decisions based around it. People often wonder why I punctuated, capitalized etc. the Soliloquy transcriptions instead of leaving it a flow of language á la Molly Bloom. I'm interested in the work reading as a written document, not simply as an historical documentation of spoken language during a certain period of time (although that is what created the work in the first place).

My work finds its final form as language although it assumes a variety of forms along the way: clothing, CDs, gallery installations, etc. are just a few of the many manifestations that my words have taken. While the parameters may be slightly shifted to produce an entirely different sort of products / projects, my work ultimately resorts to a writerly manifestation.

EB: I'd like to hear you talk about your show from 1998 which, I believe, was basically a show of concrete poetry stills taken from a web project. I'm particularly curious how collectors, buyers or investors, etc. reacted to purchasing website stills from the show.

KG: The show to which you're referring was a manifestation of the Fidget project which took many forms: a performance, a website, a musical score, a gallery exhibition and a book. For this show I made "drawings" based on an applet. I snapped screen shots of the Fidget Java applet and then entirely reconstructed the screen shots out of monochromatic hand-cut paper. They were very beautiful and very well crafted, yet they still failed to sell. The critical response, however, was different: The New York Times positively reviewed the show without once mentioning the derivation of the images; instead, they focused on the craftsmanship and the content of the work. In the art world, the cult of the artist's hand still reigns supreme. At this late date, artworks of mechanical reproduction still generally fail to sell.

On the other hand, the web has given the hand-crafted arts a new life. Until a computer can reproduce the physically visceral qualities of a painting, painting remains a valid practice. In fact, with everyone creating graphics from the same tools such as PhotoShop and Illustrator, coupled with the limited aesthetic range of a 72 DPI screen, those things made by hand seem more important and valuable than ever.

EB: A similar economic question is this: are you ever approached by business types who maybe wanted to advertise on, or buy, UbuWeb?

KG: Not really. Poetry is such a non-profit economy that it functions outside the general traffic of capital. However, I do have people constantly trying to buy the domain name from me, often offering very high prices for it. Of course, I never sold.

EB: It strikes me as interesting that many of the folks involved in sound poetry as practitioners are also often quite involved in the practical, curatorial, editorial, distribution end of their art form. Your UbuWeb website dedicated to concrete, visual and sound poetry (ubu.com) is a perfect example. Some other examples just off the top of my head are Gaburo's Lingua Press, my own VOYS CD journal, any of the numerous Kostelanetz anthologies, Larry Wendt's curatorial work. There are lots of others. What do you make of this? Am I imagining that this phenomenon is more prevalent in soundtext work? What drove you to set up the UBU site?

KG: As I said before, poetry generally is so off the beaten track in this culture that if the producers of it don't set up the distribution channels, no one will. And since it lacks the capital and market of painting, it's of no use to museums who might actually be able to fund adventurous poetries which move along similar intellectual tracks as the art they're showing.

I set up UbuWeb in 1996. In the late 80s Ruth and Marvin Sackner purchased some work of mine and flew me down to install their piece and see their collection. I was blown away by their 10,000+ pieces and became very interested in this somewhat obscure art form (unlike Fluxus, concrete poetry has yet to realize any sort of intellectual / economic revival). When I first saw Netscape in January of 1995, I was taken by the way the graphics loaded and were laid out (the interlaced .gifs reminded me of Jean Bory's sequential concrete poems of the 1960s) and it occurred to me then that this was an ideal space to show text and image. I turned out to be correct: the first 5 years of the graphical web's existence has shown to be a perfect melding of text and image and sometimes the entire thing strikes me as one giant work of concrete poetry.

EB: Last fall, my niece, who was in 8th grade at the time, said she was going to do a paper on sound poetry because of what she'd seen there. She found it all on her own, just kind of by browsing around the web. She knew nothing about the subject (nor did her English teacher), but got really caught up in it through your site.

KG: I love stories like that. And they happen all the time. UbuWeb is on countless curriculums all over the world, ranging from grade schools to Ph.D. programs. One of the things that thrills me the most about the web's distributive paradigm is the potential for education and access. Today anyone anywhere can get offbeat and specialized knowledge from their home. Before the web, people were always able to acquire arcane knowledge, but it took a great deal more effort.

EB: Does the creation of sound poetry or concrete poetry, in a way, automatically presume the question of distribution by the very non-book nature of these literary mediums? This goes back to my first question about the tendency of sound poets to get involved in distribution.

KG: I disagree that these literary forms have a non-book nature. Concrete poetry has always been delivered on the page and sound poetry has always been distributed on disc. What I'm saying is that the new methods of distribution are equally suited to unleash these forms from their old methods of distribution, with the result that they are readily available for more people around the world with at a touch of a finger. A book is no longer limited to the 1000 copies that were printed; an obscure sound poetry recording will now never go out of print. The web, at this point, delivers texts, pictures and sound very well, even with slow dial-up connections (it fails with moving images but this will be improving relatively soon). Thus, sound / concrete poetry needn't readjust its historic agenda to become suited for the web. New works will respond to the new medium and the old ones can quite happily live on in their older forms. UbuWeb shows this sort of mix. While our Historical section is comprised of static images that were either scanned or reformatted for the web, our Contemporary section is a mix of static and dynamic web-specific works made of Java, VRML, dHTML, Javascript, RealMedia, Flash, Shockwave, etc. These works are the one that move beyond the book — they cannot be reconstituted for the page without losing some essential quality.

Distribution in the material world is changing too as the 20th century avant-garde is fetishized. One of the unexpected upsides of super capitalism is that there is an abundance of previously unavailable or out of print material from the historical avant garde. For example, an Italian record label, Alga Marghen, has been recently repackaging sound poetry discs gorgeously making them as sexy as any other commercial product. When I took Christian Bök into Other Music in New York City, he bought Alga Marghen's Gil Wolmans LP even though he doesn't own a turntable!

EB: This abundance of material is also leading to what I like best about the whole "electronica" culture. Young kids who've often never heard experimental music listening to LaMonte Young or Stockhausen or Xenakis right alongside of Roni Size or Sonic Youth. I worked with this 17 year old guy and we got talking about music and so we swapped some CD's. The next day he said, "That was great. I love electronic music." The funny thing to me was that I had loaned him "Hymnen," yet he had no problem ingesting it right alongside "Meat Beat Manifesto - Subliminal Sandwich," which he had loaned to me. Now, there's also an incredibly stupid downside to a lot of electronica (although there are incredibly stupid moments in "Hymnen" also). What do you think of the electronica world?

KG: I'm only interested in it in so much as it brings kids into art. Your teenage pal's Stockhausen / electronica connection was probably greased by Thurston Moore's own label, Ecstatic Peace!, releasing a 1971 performance of Stockhausen's Kontakte featuring James Tenney. Any Sonic Youth fan is bound to buy something released by their favorite rock star. It's not a great leap from the noisier bits of SY records to Hymnen. Their ears have been opened by SY. On Sonic Youth's recent CD, the one-time Lollapalooza headliners do respectable versions of John Cage, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney, George Maciunas, etc. pieces. Again, the more curious kids buying this stuff will want to seek out more about these composers. I've seen the same thing happen when DJ Spooky plays electronics for Xenakis concerts: the kids come out in droves to see Spooky and I suppose that many become interested in Xenakis this way.

EB: Who are your favorite writers?

KG: I can respond by saying that I was recently asked to participate in an odd show in which artists were asked to give a list of books that have been particularly influential on their work. These books were then displayed at Waterstone's (the British Barnes + Noble). So, in place of my favorite artists are, here is a bibliography of my most important books:

Bruce Andrews I DON'T HAVE ANY PAPER SO SHUT UP (OR, SOCIAL ROMANTICISM), David Antin WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AVANT GARDE, Walter Benjamin THE ARCADES PROJECT, Samuel Beckett NOWHOW ON, James Boswell THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, John Cage SILENCE, Buckminster Fuller CRITICAL PATH, Abbie Hoffman STEAL THIS BOOK, Henry James THE GOLDEN BOWL, James Joyce FINNEGANS WAKE, M. THE GOSPEL OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA, Georges Perec SPECIES OF SPACES AND OTHER PIECES, Marjorie Perloff RADICAL ARTIFICE, Ezra Pound THE CANTOS, Ron Silliman TJANTING, Gertrude Stein THE MAKING OF AMERICANS, Ludwig Wittgenstein CULTURE AND VALUE, Emile Zola ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (20 novels), Louis Zukofsky A.

EB: For a closer, how about a similar list of albums/CD's of particular influence on you?

KG: George Antheil BALLET MÉCHANIQUE, Robert Ashley IN SARA MENCKEN CHRIST AND BEETHOVEN THERE WERE MEN AND WOMEN, Béla Bartók THE SIX STRING QUARTETS, The Beach Boys Pet Sounds, The Beatles White Album, Erik Belgum Bad Marriage Mantra, Carla Bley Escalator Over the Hill, Jaap Blonk Flux-de-Bouche, Anton Bruhin In/Out, John Cage Indeterminacy, Cornelius Cardew Piano Music, Ray Charles What'd I Say, John Coltrane A Love Supreme, Noël Coward Classic Recordings 1928-1938, Coyle & Sharpe The Insane (But Hilarious) Minds of Coyle & Sharpe, Miles Davis Pangaea , Claude Debussy Préludes Vol. 1, Donovan A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, Bob Dylan Blonde on Blonde, Hanns Eisler + Bertolt Brecht Collaboration, Morton Feldman Three Voices, Beniamino Gigli Historical Recordings 1927-1951, Alois Hába Centenary, Raoul Hausmann Poemes Phonetiques, The Heptones On Top, The Impressions Keep on Pushing, Charles Ives Symphony No. 4, Charles Ives Universe Symphony, Charles Ives Old Songs Deranged, Mauricio Kagel Der Schall, Los Angeles Free Music Society L.A.F.M.S BOX, Frank Loesser Frank Sings Loesser, Giovanni Martinelli Volume 2, Pietro Mascagni Cavalleria Rusitcana (Gigli), Rod McKuen Takes A San Francisco Hippie Trip,Olivier Messiaen Turangalila-Symphonie, Darius Milhaud Composers in Person, Charles Mingus Better Git It In Your Soul, Thelonious Monk Genius of Modern Music Vol. 1, Thelonious Monk Genius of Modern Music Vol. 2, Thelonious Monk Monk's Music, Moondog Elpmas, Ennio Morricone A Fistful of Film Music, Mothers of Invention We're Only In It For the Money, Carl Orff Orff-Schulwerk Complete Edition, Harry Partch Delusion of the Fury, Giacomo Puccini La Bohème (Toscanini), Giacomo Puccini Turnadot (Serafin / Callas), Giacomo Puccini Tosca (Prêtre - Callas), Maurice Ravel Ma mère L'Oye, Steve Reich Drumming, Terry Riley All Night Flight Vol. 1, Arthur Russell Another Thought, Frederic Rzewski The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (Oppens), Erik Satie Piano Music VolumeS 1-6 (Ciccolini), Sly & The Family Stone Fresh, The Soft Machine Volumes One & Two, Karlheinz Stockhausen Hymnen, Igor Stravinsky Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky: The Mono Years, Sun Ra The Singles , T. Rex The Slider, Various Artists The Conet Project, Sophie Tucker Her Latest and Greatest Spicy Songs, Tyrannosaurus Rex UNICORN, Tyrannosaurus Rex BEARD OF STARS, Galina Ustvolskaya Piano Sonatas No. 1-6, Edgard Varèse The Varèse Album, Various Artists Ethiopiques 3, Giuseppe Verdi Don Carlos (Giulini), Giuseppe Verdi Falstaff (Toscanini), Giuseppe Verdi Otello (Levine), Giuseppe Verdi Rigoletto (Serafin), Richard Wagner Der Ring Des Nibelungen (Solti), Kurt Weill Lady in the Dark, Kurt Weill Die Dreigroschonoper Berlin 1930, Neil Young On the Beach, ZNR Barricades.

EB: I have sense that you responded to the "favorite CD's" question with a little more relish than the "favorite books" question. I heard Eddie Murphy say that he'd give up comedy and acting in a second if he could be Prince. I heard Wanda Coleman opine that Baraka would give up writing in a second if he could be Archie Shepp. Personally, if I could do what Sly Stone did in the 70's, I would drop the small press/experimental literature world like a hot potato. Am I imagining things or is there anything to this sense, as far as your work is concerned?

KG: Yes and no. A recent book of mine, 6799, is simply a list of my enormous LP and CD collection — about 100 pages worth. And it happens to be sitting on my hard drive as I answer these questions. So I just scrolled down the list and grabbed the most essential ones. In the end, there seemed no reason to edit it.

I've been a music fanatic since 1967 when I got my hands on The Monkee's Headquarters. Since then, I've been an unstoppable music junkie and can't live a day without buying a record. I also host a radio show on WFMU that is always hungry for new material. In addition, I write music criticism for New York Press and other publications. In all honesty, the only reason I went into music criticism was so I could get CDs for free. Now I'm hooked.

I have a hunch that we pursue those occupations where we're at a disadvantage rather than at an advantage. I'm a much more of a naturally talented musician than I am either artist or writer. But I love music so much that I never wanted to ruin it by making it my profession. So I turned to occupations that I wasn't as passionate about. As a result, music remains very free to me. I can have massive contradictions in taste and not have to explain myself. I'm simply a fan.

Oh, and in response to your Sly Stone comment, I another life I would be either Abbie Hoffman, Bob Dylan or Allen Ginsberg.

above copied from: http://www.epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/readme.html

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY, Jason Gross

Interview (March 1998)

Where hip-hop artists revolutionized what was possible as a disk jockey, Christian Marclay upped the ante with making the turntable into a legitimiate instrument itself. Since the late '70's, in performances, recordings, installations and exhibtions at clubs, concert halls, galleries and museums around the world, Marclay has taken the stereo components that we take for granted and made them into expressive tools. Creating a dizzying array of sound collages with dozens of records at a time, with no steady, reassuring beat to go along with it, he makes and remakes the sounds from all kinds of sources something much different from their original intention. If there's a way to scratch, break, bend, warp or reconstruct a record, Marclay knows how to do it.
One important point here- it's not just the WAY that he uses records and turntables that is astonishing because his sound sculputures themsevles are provactive, funny, challenging and inventive. Two new CD's from Marclay will be coming out later this year on Asphodel.

PSF: You started working with records/turntables as instruments in college. How did that start?

CM: I was a student at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and I was interested in performance art and punk rock. I was interested in what artists like Vito Acconci or Joseph Beuys were doing with performance and I was also very interested in the energy of punk rock. For me there was an interesting relation between the two. Being in art school and wanting to make music was not an obvious choice but I felt a lot more energy coming out of the music world than from the art world. When I was visiting New York on the weekends, I tended to gravitate more towards what was happening in music clubs than towards what was happening in museums and galleries.

I came to New York in '78 on an exchange program at Cooper Union, and when I went back to Boston I started performing as a duo with guitarist Kurt Henry. I didn't have an instrument so I sang and made these background tapes for the performances. We didn't have a drummer so that's why I started using skipping records and things like that, to produce these rhythm tracks that we'd perform along with. We also used film loops from cartoons and sex films as audio-visual rhythm tracks. It was as much performance art as it was music. In 1980 I organized a festival (Eventworks), to explore the relation and influence of rock music on the art world. I invited people like DNA, Rhys Chatham and Karole Armitage, Dan Graham, Johanna Went, Boyd Rice, Zev to Boston. I showed films by Eric Mitchell, Jack Smith, Vivienne Dick, and others.


PSF: How did you pick out which records would be used?

CM: They were just thrift store records --I never spent more than a dollar on a record. It was just junk, and I would stick things on them to make them loop. I even used an old wind-up gramophone that I found in the garbage. It was also at MassArt that I found these great turntables (Califone) that I've been using ever since. They used to be in every school's audio-visual department for instructional presentations.


PSF: Do you think of recontextualization with your work?

CM: Sometimes people will hear something, and they'll ask 'did you play this' when I actually didn't. It's interesting that audiences have this need to identify the source material. Once different unrelated records are combined, they sometimes have the power to trigger the memory of a tune. I don't consciously make music to trigger memory but it happens naturally. Music has such powers in triggering memory, collective memory and private memory. What I consciously try to do is to use the widest variety of music. These records often have different sets of references for different people, because most memories are personal and subjective. Whatever happens in their mind is something that I can't control, I can't control what they think about what I'm doing. It's like silent audience participation.


PSF: A lot of your work has involved the destruction of records. What was your idea behind that?

CM: I realized that when I listened to a record, there were all these unwanted sounds, clicks and pops, because of the deterioration of the record, the surface noise, scratches. Instead of rejecting these residual sounds, I've tried to use them, bringing them to the foreground to make people aware that they're listening to a recording and not live music. These sounds make people aware of the medium, of the vinyl, a cheap slab of plastic. It's something so important because it's the way that we relate to music most of the time, through recordings. We usually make abstractions of the medium. For me, it was important to have this awareness and underline it, to give it a voice. It has an expressive power in itself. When something goes wrong, like when the needle skips, something unpredictable happens, that wasn't the intention of the recording artist. In that incident, something new and exciting happens. For me, it has creative potential.


PSF: That makes me think of a quote I heard where someone at a concert said 'you know, this almost sounds as good as the CD.

CM: Because people hear music mostly through recordings, the recording becomes the reference, the template. Musicians try to reproduce their CD's on stage, the audience already knows the music through the recording and that's what they are expecting to hear.

What happens on the stage is not necessarily what I want to happen on the CD. That's why there's so few live recordings of my work. Your concentration and your attention are so different when you're listening to a recording at home, where you can play the same piece over and over and stop it at any time you want or be lying down in bed. It's a totally different experience. When I listen to live recordings of my performances, I become very critical, a recording is not a live concert, it requires a different listening, and it changes with multiple plays. When you're performing live, you're really responding to the moment. A section may feel good live, but as a recording it drags, it doesn't have the same intensity it did when you were present because you're missing the visual, the process.

In my work the process is very important, to be able to see it and hear it. I'm using these records and you can see how I manipulate them and abuse them. Everything, the pace that the records get changed, how long they stay on the turntables, what kind of shape they're in, the manipulations, etc. All these actions inform the listening. I use the recording studio very differently. When you're not on stage, you can go back and try again and edit. The studio is another instrument. I don't want the listener to forget it is a recording. That's why when I made Record Without A Cover I made sure that when you put it down on your turntable, you wouldn't forget that you're listening to a record.


PSF: Have you thought of working with CD's in similar ways that you've worked with records?

CM: The CD's are part of a different technology. They're not as simple and mechanical as records and turntables. I tried fooling around with CD players but only in the recording studio. You can get them to stay in a skip mode and gradually slide through a song. That offers possibilities. Whatever the machine can do, except play the piece from beginning to end, whatever you can do to make it sound different is potentially interesting. There are people out there experimenting like Yasunao Tone who's been doing things with skipping CD's for a long time. But you can't physically scratch a CD or cut it in half and expect the machine to still play it. And performing with a CD on-stage is not very exciting visually.


PSF: You've talked about shows you had in the '80's where you performed with hip-hop DJ's. How do you compare their work to yours?

CM: They were doing dance music - that's the major difference. I've never tried to do dance music. The similarity is that we used records as instruments to create new music out of old music. The great thing about hip-hop is that it really made DJ'ing more of an accepted craft. MTV also helped in giving the scratched sound a gesture, showing the hand of the DJ back spinning, it became such a cool gesture and now everybody wants to scratch. I see kids now air-scratching while walking around with their walkman. That sound and the way it was used in hip-hop, scratching a beat and hearing the record go back and forth has become so natural in the pop music landscape. Now it's a staple sample on most keyboards. It's a normal sound now, but it was a revolutionary sound in the 80's --it really made the use of found sounds acceptable in pop music. Since the invention of records, experimental musicians have explored the field, such as Musique Concrete in the 50's. Before the tape recorder, everything was recorded on disc so people thought of ways to use these recordings to make music. It's so obvious. You have a recording and you play it at a slower speed and you get something new. So why not just use it?

As you were mentioning in the '80's, there were no collaborations --I was just a young marginal artist doing my thing. I had no power. I tried to get in touch with those DJ's but it was very hard. They wanted to make hit records. I just wanted to make challenging music and have fun. I was interested in things that had no commercial value at the time, so why try to convince people that listening to a lot of noise can be fun?


PSF: You've said 'thrift stores are a better place to find music than a record shop.' What did you mean there?

CM: It was part of a financial situation. I could only afford records in thrift stores. Then you could find wonderful things, but now everything is a collectible. I like the recycling idea --using the stuff that people don't want anymore, and make new music out of it. There was an element of looking back and listening to your parents' records and doing something with that stuff. Sort of acknowledging the past while rejecting it at the same time.


PSF: You've done some museum/gallery installations. You were talking about the differences between a studio recording and live shows so what about installations? How do you see that medium?

CM: Unfortunately, one of the big differences is the audience. I've always tried to break down these divisions. Some people just listen to music others just look at art, some do both but they don't do it in the same place. It's sad that a lot of people can't be open-minded enough to be curious about something they don't understand. Making exhibitions that focus on sound in a visual art context is interesting to me. Having an interest in both worlds it was natural for me to bring them together. Everybody experiences music one way or another, music is usually more democratic than art, so I feel I can touch more people with it, even if I make a piece that doesn't make any sound, but deal with notions of perception of sound. We take a lot of our sound experiences for granted. We don't question sounds as much as images.


PSF: With turntable musicians and DJ's, do you think that the style has evolved enough to produce a musical equivalent of a Jimi Hendrix or a John Coltrane?

CM: If the turntable is a legitimate musical instrument, then some people are going to push the boundaries and see how far you can go with this instrument. I don't think I've seen a Jimi Hendrix of the turntable. But there's so much more going on now. When I started using records, hip-hop was just being born, and now everybody wants to be a DJ. Still, most DJ's do very commercial work. But a lot of them are really pushing the envelope and stretching the notion of the DJ and with interesting results.


PSF: Anyone in mind when you say that?

CM: Otomo Yoshihide is someone I'm working with right now on a collaboration for Asphodel. He's an interesting DJ and really knows how to improvise with the records. He has great energy. Then there is the New York illbient scene with DJs like Olive, The Audio Janitor, and Toshio Kajiwara. They're always telling me about other kids doing interesting things and I'm just discovering new things through them. I've collaborated with Toshio and Olive in group improvisations. The other project I'm releasing with Asphodel is a compilation of live recordings that I've done over the last year with some of these younger DJ's. These are live performances. It's not a solo project -- when you think DJs, you think of them as solo artists with big egos. But if the turntable is really an instrument then why not have a band and play the instrument in combination with others. To react to sounds that don't come out of your own records, that's the ultimate challenge for a DJ. I've been trying for many years now to push this notion of the DJ as a band member, and I have been interested in groups of DJ's improvising together like a jazz band. So this record will be really featuring the instrument as a collaborative tool. It's hard to tell who's doing what when you're listening to these recordings. There's certain stylistics particular to each DJ, but when you hear a skipping loop, you think 'who's doing it' but who cares really? The result is a real collaborative effort and you have to listen to all these sounds democratically.


PSF: What do you think of other people who are other deconstructionists, like Negativland and John Oswald?

CM: They both do great work. I remember touring in 1980 in San Francisco when I found out about Negativland. They had just released their first LP with hand made covers, each cover was a different collage. What amazes me is how this kind of home-grown stuff, which was so marginal, so anarchic at the time, has been able to create such a following. It's interesting that you mentioned these two names because they both managed to get sued. It's probably why they've gotten famous. So its seems that to be famous you either have to make pop music or get sued by pop music. It's great work because it doesn't fit into any clean little box and it's very political. They are critical of the music industry but they're also totally dependent on these machines that the industry puts out like samplers and tape recorders. There's a contradiction between what's out there --available machines to record and remix-- and the legal system. I don't have a clear answer to the copyright issue but there's this huge contradiction between what artists are doing and what the law wants to set up. Sony corporation makes the machines but they'll sue you for using them. John Oswald and Negativland's work is essential. They're true artists in the sense that they've really created something original and very potent and in touch with what's out there. They're not just entertainers, they make us think.


PSF: What did you think of this interest in DJ's happening with techno now?

CM: When I heard of these new DJ's, I just felt like 'what's going on, I thought vinyl was dead?'. What's so hip and sexy about scratching record? I always thought it was a little nerdy. It didn't seem like this whole illbient and techno crowd could generate so much interest. But there's something about scratching a record that has become so glamorized, so photogenic that it's a cool thing to do. Maybe 'cool' is really the word because it's so detached and so distant in relation to live music, have you ever seen a DJ sweat? I was the first one shocked to see all these kids doing it. But the wonderful thing is that suddenly I have colleagues to play with and a new audience.


PSF: What kind of advice would you give to someone thinking of using a turntable as an instrument?

CM: Try something else! (laughs)

above copied from: http://www.furious.com/perfect/christianmarclay.html