Nina Power: Do you think art has become indeterminate as well?

Sylvère Lotringer: Absolutely. This has little to do with individual works – whether good or bad – only with the dizzying change of scale, the massive production, circulation and consumption world-wide. The art market has expanded exponentially and has been losing its shape to achieve monstrous proportions. It is occupying all the space, wildly metastasizing in every possible direction. It is so bloated at the core that it doesn’t seem able anymore to digest all the data. It is on its way to surpass its function. The early 1980s orchestrated the return to painting, and gave the art market a chance to fasten its hold. But it didn’t stop there and it didn’t take long before art started outgrowing its own boundaries, opening itself up to the exchangeability of capital. First it absorbed photography, until then considered unworthy; then it move to architecture, fashion and design. Along the way, it has integrated ‘outsider art’, abolishing its own internal limit, and put together ubiquitous ‘installations’ liable to be pitched anywhere and provide a fast pedigree for ‘rogue nations’. Today it is difficult to imagine anything that could be excluded from art. Its field has expanded exponentially to include the entire society. Along the way, it has grabbed anything that could be used for its own purpose, recycling garbage, forging communities, investigating political issues and perfumes, tampering with biology, etc., simultaneously appearing and disappearing with an ambiguous promiscuity. Art has finally fulfilled the program of Dada with a vengeance, embedding art into life. The only thing left for art to do is ‘auto-dissolve.’ Most avant-gardes promised too much and never delivered. Their manifestos of ‘auto-dissolution’, on the contrary, revealed them at their most radical and paroxysmal moment. This moment has come to contemporary art, and it may even spare itself the trouble of publicizing its own exit. Forget art then. Unless it is capable of bringing us up to the next paradigmatic shift, as Andy Warhol once did, forgetting about its own name and past history. Artists themselves maybe have been showing the way by venturing so far astray from home. All it would take is to cut off the umbilical cord that still ties art to the market, or rather turn it into a rich rhizome. Some art groups are already working at it. Autonomists used to say, ‘The margins at the centre’. We haven’t yet given art a chance to grow autonomously.

from “Intelligence Agency” in Frieze, Issue 125, Sep 2009

After seeing the Jonas Akerlund-directed “trailer” for Francesco Vezzoli’s orchestration of the MOCA 30th anniversary gala, entitled Ballet Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again), featuring the Ballet Russes and Lady Gaga, she instantly became more appealing to me; jaundiced and inobservant had been my eye in not considering the obvious contextualization of her work in the performative tradition of acts like Marlena Dietrich, Klaus Nomi, the Kipper Kids, Sasha Fierce, even Ali G.  It’s also rather timely that I am reading essayist David Shields’ recent “manifesto”, Reality Hunger, which attempts to codify the migration of fiction into real life, and that tonight at the New Museum there is a lecture on the parafictional work Headless by artist duo Senneby + Goldin.  Yet my new contextual reading of Lady Gaga was almost immediately overshadowed by the most fascinating internet meme in recent memory, South African hip-hop group Die Antwoord, who not only developed a global fanbase within days of their website’s launch, but will likely drop the jaws of cultural critics interested in issues of otherness, globalization, and parafiction.  There is no doubt, this is some of the most interesting performance art, understood in the sense of advanced popular culture, possible.

Robet Musil was a writer plagued by low demand throughout his literary career, though The Wall Street Journal coronated The Man Without Qualities as one of the three best novels of the twentieth century (the others being Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time).¹  I was looking at a collection of some of his of short stories, essays, and briefer articles, Volume 72 of “The German Library In 100 Volumes”, and came across his essay Monuments (Die Denkmale), written in 1932, the thesis of which is the “conspicuous inconspicuousness” of monuments.  Here is just a passage from that essay, which, though it focuses on the fate of monuments, bears relevance to contemporary public art and exhibitions with “open air” components such as Documenta, or inSite San Diego/Tijuana.

Everything permanent loses its ability to impress.  Everything that forms the walls of our lives, so to speak the stage set of our consciousness, loses the ability to play a role in this consciousness.  After a few hours we no longer hear a constant, bothersome noise.  Pictures we hang on the wall are sucked up by the wall within a few days; it happens very seldom that one places oneself in front of them and looks at them.  Half-read books which one has shelved in the magnificent rows of books in one’s library will never be read to the end.  For sensitive people it is sufficient to buy a book whose beginning they like, but they will never thereafter pick it up again.  In this case the process is aggressive, but one can also pursue its inevitable course in the higher feelings, and there its is always aggressive, for example in family life.  The firm possession of marriage is distinguished countless times from inconstant desire by the sentence: Must I tell you every fifteen minutes that I love you?  How much greater must be those psychological disadvantages to which the permanent is exposed in phenomena of brass and marble!

If one is well-disposed towards monuments, one must inexorably draw the conclusion that they make claims on us which run against our nature, and satisfying them calls for special arrangements.  If one were to make warning signs for trucks as inconspicuous in color as monuments it would be a crime.  Locomotives, after all, whistle shrilly and not timidly, and even mailboxes are painted in attractive colors.  In a word, monuments today should do what we all have to do, make more of an effort!  Anybody can stand quietly by the side of the road and allow glances to be bestowed on him; these days we can demand more of monuments.  Once one has grasped this thought — which thanks to certain cultural currents is slowly making headway — one can realize how backward the art of monuments is compared with the contemporary development of advertising.

Articles which mention Die Denkmale:

The Monument Is Invisible, The Sign Visible – Werner Fenz – October  #102

Monument: antimonument – Jeremy Melvin – Architectural Review (Oct 2002)

Commemorative Monuments – Lisa Moran – presented at Dublin City Council 2007

1. http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2006_08_009654.php [↩]