CULTURAL CRITICISM

All action designators are, if otherwise not explicitly apparent in the context, to be understood as gender neutral.

ART
What we are experiencing today in Austria is an unprecedented attack against work-crafting art. The genus of the work-crafting artist seems antiquated today; it simply no longer fits into the image of a modern society. What is demanded instead is the conceptualizing, projecting artist – a kind of organizer and manager of himself, who, like an advertising agency, blatantly displays easily comprehensible ideas while deliberately overlooking their contextual appearance and stifling every discussion about it with words like: It has nothing to do with that. Characteristically, the most vehement attacks and taunts against the outmoded artist genus, as well as against the very term itself, come out of the ranks of the artists themselves – admittedly from those whose work actually did not bring forth any significant pieces of art. However, by simply turning the values around, which succeeds so much the easier, seeing that the so-called artists cause the bourgeoisie and, from time to time, also the governments a certain discomfort anyway, they heave themselves into a position from which it is possible for them to indoctrinate the whole cultural landscape: the conception of exhibitions, concerts, festivals, radio and television programs and, not in the least, the provision of grant guidelines for various governmental agencies and foundations dealing with art and culture. By undermining every existential possibility for creating art as well as successfully hindering its presence in the public, they can apparently prove what was only polemic before: Work-oriented art is outdated and no longer viable. (Not unlike the logic of fascists concerning life they declared as ‘non-viable’ and, therefore, to be destroyed). Of course, such anti-artistic forces, which are not to be personified here, have an easy game: For one thing, one can be sure wherever the talk is about the creation of art and work, an ineradicably false image of it will also be thought of, a truly ridiculous and out-of-date image that is more applicable than ever before, but is nonetheless inexhaustibly nurtured by numerous popular artist biographies and commercial films. On the other hand, any further reflection about this theme goes under in an awful medial chaos. This confusion is fueled by technology apologists who lie the heavens of cyberspace down to us with their clamoring about progress and who rave about new, unthought-of possibilities during every so succinct technical transformation, while in reality they can be glad it doesn’t apply to them in their case, because they would never, ever be any match to the abysses that are necessarily linked with new possibilities and whose fathoming is the task of real art and science.
It is almost superfluous to mention that the gravediggers of art are collaborating with, if not identical to, the midwives of technical progress: “Ars Electronica calls art into question,” it was written in an official press release of a pertinent festival, “and presents … works that are no longer observations and interpretations of the cultural change brought on by the digital revolution, but are rather one of its immediate consequences.” And further: “Characterized by the human ability to process information, our evolution is fundamentally intertwined with technological development. Complex tools and technologies are an integral part of our evolutionary ‘fitness.’ Genes that are not able to cope with this reality will not survive the next millennium." The usual fascistoid trick: Every sentence is an indifferent hybrid of prophecy and threat. If the threat succeeds in becoming a reality, the prophecy is fulfilled; the new thousand-year Reich (the Reich of the ‘new millennium’) is established. It has long been obvious that the actual refuge of a new, global fascism is the global networks in which the fundamental right of all living things to not be informed gets lost, despite the urge for information euphemistically formulated as the “human ability to process information.” The big fascist danger is not just a matter of ‘hanging’ the few anachronisms, the swastikas or other heavily loaded symbols ‘in the Net.’ It is in the global interconnectedness itself: The Internet is the “Volksempfänger” (a table-top radio people were obliged to use in the Nazi era) of the new millennium. Whoever today, without institutional backing, operates a network-independent computer as a digital tool makes himself suspicious, just like those at that time who refused the “Volksempfänger” to rather listen to the foreign news with an own detector. With the small difference that now there is no ‘foreign country’ anymore whose help we can naively hope for.
How could it come to such a development, particularly in the arts? Apparently, in the course of the last centuries, artists in all sectors have repeatedly tried to contextually and formally chum up to the respective ruling and influential classes of society or institutions of the time which seemed to guarantee them an existence: the clergy, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the military, the party. Without wanting to set values, the palette ranges from church music to war poetry to the paintings of social realism. In the last decades, however, a new class in society, which has at least partially taken over the long-vacant role of the haute bourgeoisie, has formed. It is recruited from professional groups such as: managers, entrepreneurs, directors, high officials, politicians. What they all indeed have is influence and money (be it private, communal or public), but what they don’t have is time – for time is indeed money, according to their credo, but money does not necessarily mean time. Besides the ability to devote one’s sensual attention to it, the reception of an artwork demands from the person who does not want to register it, but really ‘enjoy’ it (whatever that may mean), one thing in particular: to be at leisure. This, however, does not only mean time as something quantitative. Leisure also implies slowness. It has nothing to do with free time. (Free time is rather a euphemism for empty time, and the only thing someone can rightfully do with this time is to kill it, for instance, through ‘distraction,’ Greek /English: ‘sport’). In this way, the exponents of a new societal elite face the embarrassing paradox that they have all the means at their disposal with which they, according to their second great credo, can attain everything – influence, power and money – and yet are excluded from a whole cultural area that is nevertheless open to every unemployed person: art. – First-class Philistines.
Conceptual art helps them out of this dilemma. Art for people who have no time; comprehensible in a few seconds, describable and easy to bring across medially. It is certainly not an historical coincidence that the beginning of the conceptual art movement temporally corresponds to the rise of a certain social group (let’s call it, for the sake of simplicity, ‘managerdom’). Of course, the vast majority of exactly those art products that can speculatively serve such contexts are in no way declared concept art, but rather: concept-heavy. In particular cases, it is also completely conceivable that the conceptual approach, which represents a type of basic condition for marketing in the sphere of managerdom, results out of an inner artistic necessity. However, to expect that this should be present in every one of the countless, concept-heavy art projects of today is plainly and simply incredible. One doesn’t have to be a great expert of art or people to dare to make the presumption that the far larger portion of artists who use such means or join in stylistic trends simply follow the feeding trough, no matter how modest it may be. The mirage of feed alone creates proselytes. Insisting on a serious artistic approach, in contrast, would be the purest stupidity; a type of argumentation of a dilettante, who, out of simple-mindedness, loses every control over the work as well as the situation, in order to say in the end, no matter what the result is, with the voice of conviction: That’s exactly what I wanted. Naturally, the circumstances are merciless. Whoever does not bow to the current socio-cultural pressure will see where he remains. (If Van Gogh had to plead today for canvas and colors so that he could continue to paint, he would be told: “Submit a project, describe your intention very exactly therein, together with a detailed statement of costs about all expected earnings and expenses. Point out in particular to which extent your scheme makes reference to the annual theme, which this year is ‘The Pug Dog in Acrylic Painting’”). The trend towards conceptualism is completely supported by institutions and cultural ventures that increasingly administer the originally freely available public funds for art and demand ‘projects’ from the artists, where possible still, as already mentioned, under the requirement of themes and contents often laced with despotic arbitrariness, which, due to a lack of resistance, sometimes seems to grow into folly. One example is the escapade in which a whole region’s already meagre funds for contemporary music creation were used to celebrate Bertolt Brecht’s hundredth birthday. The most frightening thing about it is that such absurdities, which have almost become the normal case, don’t appear to catch anyone’s intention and are not capable of inciting the slightest public indignation. Generally, it must however be said that also seemingly factually justified theme requirements are, where they begin to drift into the totalitarian – where the creation of art of a whole country is placed under the dictates of a theme or motto for a whole year –inadmissible in every case. It plainly is an insult to creating art, an attack against the autonomy of art, and, from this perspective, even unconstitutional. The artists of a region or a country are not a school class which has to be given assignments. And the better artist is, in this regard, always the one who misses the topic because of the power of his autonomy. The term ‘project,’ which is incessantly strained in such a context, slowly buts surely covers all of the tabooed areas that have to do with the work of art and the artistic work itself. Its original etymological meaning as one of a draft has long been discarded. A project will be created, the project will be presented and judged, the project will be executed, and the end product is nothing less than a ‘work,’ but rather, according to the relevant linguistic usage, the ‘project.’
It is a gapless wall of terms which deprives the sphere of artistic creating of the glances of those to whom it should no longer be suggested as being important. If the current notion of ‘project’ presupposes the ability to describe and arrange content even before the artistic examination it would have to accomplish is undertaken – what is a ‘project’ apart from the totalitarian manifestation of the idea of the concept? It has nothing more to do with a mere ‘intention.’ “I hope in the days that lie between today and your arrival to still paint the one or the other painting” (Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo) would probably scarcely fit as a project worth consideration, even if it were a hundred times clear that works of the greatest cultural value would be heralded. And especially not then! In the degree to which the instances ruling over the well-being and suffering of art – and these are not only the authorities that can award financial grants, but particularly the countless institutional administrative monads who decide over the allocation of space and opportunity – demand the draft for completely formulated projects, a specialistdom of project makers who, for the most part, have nothing more to do with the artists who originally were meant, comes into existence. Whether those in the subject area they are conceptually tangential to actually possess artistic competence is no longer a topic. On the contrary, the field is increasingly being annexed by people who, because of their profession, are better suited to formulate projects and to make them attractive: commercial artists, designers, architects. In the same measure, a transformation, respectively, a shifting to the original subject area is taking place. It no longer is concerned with handed-down artistic disciplines like sculpture, painting, music and such. Ambiguous fields like performance and installation are taking their place, sustained by a swarm of empty buzz words like multimedia, real-time, interactive. The protagonists of the disciplines that are intentionally kept diffuse react by all means aggressively – even the turncoats who still want to quickly jump onto the bandwagon – onto artists who insist on their passed-on disciplines. The standard phrases almost always sound like “It doesn’t make any sense simply because …: “It simply doesn’t make any sense to only hang pictures on the wall”; “It simply doesn’t make any sense to only play a tape in the concert” – aggravated by taunts a la “No one watches (or listens to) such a thing anymore today,” in which precisely that aforementioned fascistoid hybrid of prophecy and threat naturally comes through again. (People unfortunately forget much too easily that the fascist movements of all eras are based on the ideology of progress. In this way, the ‘degenerate’ artists in the Third Reich were not persecuted because they were too modern, but because they were deemed as decadent, as outmoded for the fascist ideology of progress. And here and there the banal resentment of the misled masses against things they do not or are not allowed to understand is used to justify the insolence of euthanasia). Artists who, disregarding all of this, want to continue to work in one of the fundamental, traditional sectors have more and more often made the experience that suddenly no one from the many institutions of an almost completely institutionalized culture wants to be responsible for their area, while the public authorities just as suddenly do not want to have any budget for it, insofar as the respective offices were not already closed altogether. Everywhere the talk is about the unavoidable cuts. At the same time, however, project making is booming. The millions are unfortunately not there anymore, one could say, now there are only billions. (A painter who needs a nail to hang a picture upon should best submit a project about a new museum today, otherwise he won’t get the nail either).

REALITY
When several years ago a stir was caused by a music performance in which the runtime of a laser that was beamed from the Earth and reflected by the Moon provided the temporal delay of sound elements, the criticism of professionals from the field boiled down to the fact that they suspected a swindle; that the said time delay of barely three seconds ‘in reality’ was accomplished through simple delays which have represented a standard in electrified music for fifty years. Insofar as they had even taken notice of it, the general public was not overcome by an attack of indignation against such duping. As dubious as it is on one hand, the more consequent it is on the other hand. The conceptual approach proves, what was presumed for a long time, to be a true child of documentarism. The concept itself suffices. It doesn’t matter with which means its proposition will finally be fulfilled and if it will be fulfilled at all. The concept is the reality against which its execution is degraded to documentation. The difference to the excesses of documentarism in medial reporting lies merely in the reversal of the order of media reality and the actual event. In that sphere where the creation of documentary is, in a production engineering sense, completely detached from the events it is to describe, a link between both of the separated areas only exists in the thin thread of the journalistic ethics of the editorial staffs whose reliability has already been doubted for the last one-hundred and twenty years. Viewed from the standpoint of media handwork, it is not sensible to put together a report, for example, about war events, with archive material – there is no other serious possibility anyway. It’s the same for the editor as it is for the sound effects maker in a film who, in order to illustrate a thing acoustically, uses everything else but the original sounds of the thing itself. (On the other hand, the repeatedly recurring attempts at acoustical authenticity, for instance, in film, are hopelessly manneristic, because they relapse into the laws of documentarism from the first moment onwards. The effective ‘original sound’ is also here a constructed one). The conservative criticism of such documentaristic methods, as an ethically reprehensible dealing with reality, fails solely because it presumes the possibility of a duplicative documentation as an alternative, and therefore subjugates itself to exactly those methods it intends to criticize. The only purposeful criticism would be that of documentarism as a whole: against its representatives who, against their better judgement, silently let the myth of the duplicative character of documentation have its way, if not nurture it; and against a society of media slaves who, even where the realms of the personally experienced and the documentation of it traceably diverge, clamour onto the possibility of a duplication as the one that is more comfortable to think about. In an analogical reversal, it would be downright senseless and technically unprofessional – in order to document an audacious conceptual premise whose reality is to be had within itself – to operate large radar and laser equipment for a modest effect that is available to any musical dilettante today. Wasted money. Less disquieting but much more repulsive about such concepts, which are innumerable in the medial performance field, whether it be a signal from the Earth to the Moon that is enervating or a telephone line from Graz to New York, is the type of protectionism which finds its unconcealed expression therein – astronomic protectionism in one case and urban protectionism in the other – in order to cut sensual-formal criticism off from the beginning. Whether the time delay (one of the myriads freely offered to artists), which was produced in this or that way, is also artistically immanently sensible, doesn’t even stand to debate. Such conceptually secured parameter values act sacrosanct. No objections can be raised against the distance between the Earth and the Moon or also between Graz and New York. (What remains to be desired is that all future projects designed according to this pattern for the purpose of time delay home in on the Andromeda nebula).

© Günther Rabl 2000
translated by Brian Dorsey
This text is understood as a literary work of art.
Quoting in context with a reference to the source is allowed until otherwise revoked.