 |
| Arman, untitled combustion, 1964 |
Plight of the After: Further Notes on Cage,
Silence, Arman, Beuys, Adorno, Beckett, Trauma, Rememoration and Negative
Presentation in Post-1945 Visual Art
by Gene Ray
 |
| Beuys, Plight, 1985 |
Two works by Joseph Beuys,
or more precisely, two contrasting moments in his output: the first, a proposal
for a Holocaust memorial produced in 1958, a feeble misfire; the second, the
installation Plight, made and
exhibited in 1985, a forcefully effective work of historical avowal. These two
moments document the impressive development of one German artist. But more than
that, they indicate the whole painful struggle within the visual arts to
confront and respond to the Nazi genocide, a crime of state terror for which
the place-name ‘Auschwitz’ has come synecdochically to stand. For visual
artists willing to risk such a confrontation, the means and strategies with
which to do so were by no means clear or obvious in 1958; if, after 1985, such
means and strategies were established and available, that was due to the work
of many, in a collective development that was absorbed and synthesized in Plight.
Beuys’ proposal for a
memorial at Auschwitz-Birkenau, submitted in March 1958 to the juried
competition organized by an association of camp survivors, was a failure by any
standard. His offer to overshadow the camp with a monumental ‘monstrance’ derived
from Roman Catholic ritual was wildly, monstrously inappropriate. I register
this moment of misfire only to establish Beuys’ relatively early concern with
the meaning, legacy and representation of Auschwitz. Beuys was one of 426
artists who submitted proposals to the jury convened in 1956 by the Comité
international d’Auschwitz. For it, he produced numerous drawings and models in
wood, pewter and zinc. None are compelling or evince much insight. Some were
later incorporated into various installations and vitrines, including Auschwitz
Demonstration 1956-1964; the dates
in the title of the latter indicate the artist’s retrospective desire to
establish his continuous engagement with the Nazi genocide and the problem of
its artistic representation. This desire is significant, especially given
Beuys’ evident reticence with regard to Nazism and its crimes. These early
sketches and models, loaded with the Christian symbolism of sin, guilt,
sacrifice and forgiveness, may betray the stirrings of the artist’s own
unresolved conflicts in facing this history. They certainly illuminate a
profound confusion before the crisis of representation imposed on art ‘after
Auschwitz’, to use the phrase of Theodor W. Adorno. This confusion was hardly
unique at the time; it marks a moment when the dialectic between genocidal
history and representation was felt by some European visual artists as the
pressure of a still unclarified problematic.
 |
| Beuys, Auschwitz Demonstration, 1964 |
The negative presentation
of Auschwitz through the indirect material linkages and evocative strategies
deployed so effectively in Plight
– the environment he installed in the London gallery of Anthony d’Offay in 1985
– was only possible after the investigation of negative presentation in the
visual arts had reached a certain point of development. The artistic strategy
evident in this work manifests an understanding of the potentials of negative
evocation to respond to historical trauma and catastrophe, as well as an at
least minimally conscious control of the sculptural means for such evocation.
With regard to artistic means, all the techniques used by Beuys in Plight had probably been developed by other artists by
the end of 1961, although their potentials would not have been immediately
clear to all.[1] The necessary historical disclosures no doubt took longer to
circulate and fully sink in; the critical processing of those disclosures is by
no means complete today.
Plight is a culminating work, in the precise sense that
it consolidates this collective investigation and development that took place
in the visual arts between 1945 and the end of 1961 in a way so compelling that
it establishes a new standard for artistic approaches to Auschwitz. The
negative memorials that in the 1990s would become the institutionally preferred
model for monumental public remembrance are prefigured by Plight and are, by and large, merely echoes or variations
on it. I am not concerned in this essay to treat Beuys’ personal development or
career in any detail, beyond what I have done elsewhere.[2] Here I focus on Plight, in order to unfold from this one work the
outlines of a larger history – the discovery and development, in the visual
arts, of negative, dissonant strategies for representing catastrophic history
in the aftermath of World War II.
Any such outline
necessarily takes up problems articulated after 1945 by critical theory,
namely, the very specific predicament or indeed plight of art ‘after Auschwitz.’
Critical reflection on the meaning and implications of Auschwitz, and indeed on
the whole social context of violence that produced it, emerged and circulated
relatively slowly. Of the few sustained reflections in the early postwar
period, only Adorno’s attempted to articulate fully the implications of
Auschwitz for music, literature, philosophy and all forms of serious cultural
production. A detailed study of Adorno’s reception has yet to be written, but
his critique of traditional culture in the aftermath was probably disseminated first
in fragments and echoes. It would be surprising, though, if partial, more or
less distorted forms of Adorno’s complex arguments were not beginning to
penetrate the visual arts in Europe by the late 1950s, given a push no doubt by
the impact of Alain Resnais’ 1955 documentary Nuit et brouillard. Literature and music led the way in developing
new means and strategies for responding to Auschwitz, as even Resnais’ film
confirms: much of the force of Nuit and brouillard comes from the dissonance generated between the
images qua visual evidence and the critical glossing of those images by Jean
Cayrol’s voice-over text and Hanns Eisler’s score. Indeed, Adorno’s thinking
about dissonance was strongly stimulated by postwar developments in literature,
music and theater. About the visual arts, he wrote relatively little. But as I
show, visual analogues of dissonance and negative presentation emerged in sculpture
and installation art as well beginning in the late 1950s.
The Elements of Plight: Installed Forms, Materials and Objects
Stepping through a doorway
or passage, the spectator enters a rectangular room lined floor to ceiling with
standing felt columns: two columns of equal size stacked vertically, one on the
other, so that two closed ranks of standing columns extend horizontally, wall
to wall. Each constituent column is about a meter and a half in height, and
roughly the volume of a person. The repeated felt forms affect the space as an
echoing lining that both isolates and insulates. Sound from outside is
suppressed, temperature inside is conserved, and light seems to be absorbed by
the rough gray tactility of the felt. Toward the back of the room, an opening
in the lower row of columns on the right wall leads to a second room, also
lined with felt columns. To navigate this opening, most spectators will have to
bend down and pass beneath the upper row of columns. Having gained the second
room, which in the original London installation contained no other openings,
one finds a grand piano.[3] Both its case and keyboard are closed. A chalkboard
lined with musical staves lies flatly on top of the piano; no notes are written
on it. Lying on the staff board is an ordinary fever thermometer. From the dead
end of the second room, the spectator’s line of sight to the outside is severed,
and the suppression of outside sound increases. An L-shaped, felt-columned
cul-de-sac, then, containing three objects.
The wall label or equivalent
signage identifies all this as the work of Beuys, a German artist. A certain
history necessitates that we qualify this nationality rather severely. Beuys
was eleven years old when, through no fault of his own of course, the Reichstag
Fire Decree and Enabling Act of 1933 handed vast powers to the new Nazi
Chancellor and his party. Subsequently, we know, Beuys was a member of the
Hitlerjugend and served in the Wehrmacht. These facts do not permit us to think
of Beuys the artist as just any ‘German’. Encountering or considering his art,
we are enjoined to remember that he was a boy scout and combat veteran of the
Nazi regime. As such, he is indelibly marked as a member of the so-called
perpetrating generation.[4] These facts are not a warrant for arrest. They
cannot be construed in a way that would fix or freeze Beuys beyond any growth
or change, or would deny to him any possibility of critical understanding or agency.
And they certainly do not suffice to indict or automatically discredit his art.
But neither can they be forgotten or blithely avoided. The work is not
reducible to the life, but neither can it be isolated from it, behind a cordon
sanitaire. Beuys’ position within
a certain, extremely violent and disastrous history is a social fact that is
objective in a very unanswerable sense.
The title, Plight, constitutes the artist’s concise statement about
the work. A title is a linguistic tag, hence a conceptual anchor, tied to the
work by a rode of intention. As such, it cannot be read naïvely. ‘Plight’, an
English noun, denotes a dangerous, difficult or unfortunate situation. A verb
form, marked as a secondary meaning of archaic origin, means to make a solemn pledge
or promise. This semantic range points, if it is not ironic or deceptive, to
some danger, difficulty or misfortune still to be specified. Alternatively or
perhaps additionally, there may be some pledge or promise operative in or
activated by the work.
The three objects
installed in the work – piano, staff board and thermometer – are so-called
found objects, the authorized presentation of which in art spaces was long
established by 1985. The selective principles of montage and assemblage reach
back to Cubist collage, which around 1912 first opened the door to invasions of
visual art by bits and pieces of empirical life. Passing through Dada and the
readymades of Duchamp, such object-choices were given additional psycho-erotic
charges by the Surrealists. In the postwar period, empirical reality once again
flowed undigested into works and galleries, this time in the service of
divergently developing artistic agendas that tended, even in their divergence,
to erode the borders between art and life and to subvert the stability of
mimetic representation. The ambiguity and disruptive potential of found objects
have undoubtedly been diluted with institutional acceptance and widespread use;
today their appearance troubles no one. But they still carried some force when,
in the 1950s and 1960s, the arts were overflowing the demarcations of
traditional media and were recombining globally into new streams of pronounced
performativity. Relevant here are Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, largely a movement
of New York painters spurred by the pressure of Jackson Pollock; the Gutai Art
Association of Japanese painters and sculptors; and Fluxus, a network of
composers and poets largely inspired by John Cage and active in Europe. The
latter, along with Nouveau Réalisme, gave strong impetus to Beuys’ artistic
development. If, as we will see, he learned a great deal about the sculptural
possibilities of found objects from Nouveaux Réalistes such as Arman and Daniel
Spoerri, it was through his participation in events organized by or around
Fluxus that Beuys was able to assimilate Cage’s deconstruction of music and to
work out his own more symbolist and allegorical approach to performance.
Beuys has gathered and
configured three specific objects into an assemblage installed in the dead-end
of the felt-walled space. The grand piano and the staff board clearly allude to
music. But the piano is closed and no musical notes have been written on the
staff board. So there is actually no music. Music is evoked by negative
presentation, called in as it were, not by naming but by the selection and
presentation of two found objects with specifically musical associations. Here,
in the installation, the evocation avows that there is, or at least was, music,
at the same time that it refuses, blocks and occludes the actual acoustic
phenomenon of music. The grand piano alludes to concerts and concert halls, the
practice and recital of sonatas. But no sonatas, or any other form of music,
will be performed on this piano. The possibility is foreclosed by the shutting
of the case and keyboard: music as such has been silenced. The staff board, a
pedagogical device, evokes scenes of musical instruction. But the lesson here
is: no notes, no music. Silence and silencing, then, are the common
associations of these musical found objects. Irony? Possibly. But what of the
third object? The household thermometer evokes domestic scenes of illness. Does
silenced music have a temperature or fever? A joke, perhaps? While such
questions cannot yet be answered, their posing is made more insistent by the
sound absorbing and temperature conserving character of the thick felt columns.
Silence and Demolition
It was John Cage, of
course, who famously investigated ambient and found sounds – indeed, the very
sounds of silence audible in the negation of formal or traditional
music. Cage’s best-known composition, the provocative 4’33” (1952) was precisely a score, in three movements
marked tacet, for the performed
silencing of a piano. Experiments with an anechoic chamber in 1951 convinced
Cage that so-called silence does not really exist. Music, he was proposing by
1955, is a duration of intended sounds and silences, while what we call silence
is merely all the sounds we do not intend.[5]
Perhaps because Cage
himself exuded a benign and serene gentleness and great personal generosity,
the violence of his gestures vis-à-vis the Western musical tradition often goes
unremarked. His experiments and compositions for prepared piano, dating back to
1938 or 1939 but intensifying between 1942 and 1948, enact mutilating
interventions on the piano qua traditional instrument. Notes and harmonies are
in effect disappeared and deflected into new and uncanny sounds, through the
distorting insertion of screws, bolts, weather stripping and other objects and
materials between the piano strings. Cage, a former student of Arnold
Schoenberg, was schooled in dissonance. But his investigations of ambient and
chance sounds eschew even that tradition. His subversion of artistic intention,
linking up to heretical streams of automatism and aleatory gaming, goes far
beyond the rigorous combinations of twelve-tone composition. With regard to the
whole context of traditional music and its performance, Cage is quietly
demolitionist. And his demolitions resound beyond the medium of music as such,
to challenge the other arts as well.
How much more devastating is Cage’s silence, for example, than Duchamp’s
fictional turn to chess and ‘silence’, or the automatic poems of Surrealist
aesthetes.
Cage’s demolitions of
tradition are not usually understood as responses to the violence of World War
II. Such a reading runs against the tenor of Cage’s own words and his well-marked
indifference to history. In an interview published in 1955, Cage refused the
suggestion that his suppression of intention must still maintain some hidden
lyric concern. He flatly cut off the interviewer’s question (‘Do not memory,
psychology – ‘) with a demonstrative ‘—never again.’[6] In a text from three
years later, he repeats this refusal, ventriloquizing Kafka in a question that
nevertheless endorses it: ‘Do you not agree with Kafka when he wrote, “Psychology
– never again”?’[7] If this refusal of memory and psychology, which might be
suspected of protesting too much, reflects an avant-garde grasp of some real
crisis of the subject under pressures of modernity, then, as we will see below,
any such crisis itself throws us back on history. For how else could we explain
it, or an art already looking beyond it? It is the violence of the
mid-twentieth century, Adorno will argue, that demonstrates in specific and
irrefutable ways, the crisis and fate of the autonomous – that is, the lyrical,
psychological – subject.[8]
In the Beckett-like ‘Lecture
on Nothing’, first delivered at the 8th Street Artists Club in New York in 1949
but not published until a decade later, Cage makes a rare but revealing mention
of the war. ‘The most amazing noise // I ever found / was that produced by /
means of a coil of wire / attached to the // pickup arm / of a phonograph and
then / amplified. / It was shocking, // really shocking, / and thunderous / . /
Half intellectually
and // half sentimentally / , when the war came a-long, / I decided to
use / // only / quiet sounds / . /
There seemed to me // to be no truth, / no good, in anything big / in society.’[9]
(The lecture was reprinted in 1961, in Cage’s collected texts, under the title Silence.)
Wars of course do not just ‘come along’, and the close proximity of shock
and thunder, insistently repeated, suggests that it, the war, rather than the
fabricated sound, is what Cage really ‘finds’.[10] These lines, including their
passing naturalization of social violence, can be read symptomatically as the
registration of a general, globalized trauma – one that Cage is
working-through, or better, playing-through, as method, in his opening of a new
line of artistic experiment. In this light it is not irrelevant that 4’33”, first performed by David Tudor at Woodstock in
1952, was conceived in the immediate postwar period, as Cage was working on the
Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946-48). Even his famous turn to Zen and chance did not really begin
until 1946.[11]
Even stronger confirmation
of such a reading is found in the gestures and production of Cage’s students in
and around Fluxus. Clearly understanding something else or more in the master’s
lessons, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young, Benjamin Patterson, George Brecht, Philip
Corner, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams and others, including Wolf
Vostell and – yes – Joseph Beuys, radicalized Cage’s relatively subtle and
symbolic demolitions into often aggressive enactments of literal violence and
destruction. Paik was the driving force.[12] In his notorious Étude for
Piano, performed in Cologne in
1960, Paik leapt from the stage and attacked his watching ‘fathers’, Cage and Tudor,
cutting off Cage’s tie and pouring shampoo on both composers before fleeing the
concert. In June of 1962, the symbolic violence was literalized onstage in
Paik’s One for Violin, at the
event Neo-Dada in der Musik in
Düsseldorf. Grasping a violin by the neck with both hands and raising it above
his head, the artist suddenly swung it down, shattering it on a tabletop.[13]
In September of the same year, a Fluxus gang in Wiesbaden performed Corner’s Piano
Activities. A photo shows Maciunas, Higgins,
Vostell, Patterson and Williams cutting into a grand piano with a tree saw. Crowbars
and hammers were also inflicted on the hapless instrument. In the following
year, at Paik’s Exposition of Music Electronic Television in Wuppertal, three prepared pianos and thirteen
prepared television sets were demolished. At the opening, Beuys took an axe to
one of the pianos.[14]
Such demolitionist tendencies
are by no means limited to music, or the overlapping of music, performance and
visual art in Fluxus. We could trace a certain family resemblance across all of
the arts in the wake of World War II. Two streams or tendencies are entwined,
converging and diverging with a pulsing ambivalence: one, more cautious,
forsakes or abandons traditional object-making and makes a leap into
performativity, which then becomes a new object of investigation; the other,
less restrained, attacks traditional culture, at first symbolically but soon
enough literally. Both streams are globalized.[15] The Lettristes in Paris
liquidate first poetry and then cinema. Fontana stabs and slashes the canvas in
Milan, while in Japan, Shozo Shimamoto punches and kicks through stretchered
paper and Kazuo Shiraga wrestles mud. Neo-Dada here and there cries havoc and
raises hell. And so on. Nouveaux Réalistes Daniel Spoerri and Arman carried the
demolition into sculpture. In 1961, Spoerri made two works of papable menace: Hommage
à Fontana, which carries the
painter’s slashes into an image of actual throat-cutting, and Les lunettes
noires, a blinding booby-trap that
jokes grimly on the optimist’s rose-colored glasses, even as it raises the
stakes of Man Ray’s Gift.[16]
Also in 1961, the year before Paik destroyed a violin onstage, Arman began his colères (tantrums or rages), in which beautiful stringed
instruments of traditional music were systematically smashed to pieces,
more or less instrument by instrument – a violin, a bass, a mandolin, a piano, a harp – and
the gathered bits and splinters affixed to boards. Three years later, in 1964,
he varied the gesture in the combustions series; this time he burned the instruments to crisps and hung the
charred remains on the gallery walls. This cursory highlighting would of course
need to be backed up by close readings of specific works in context. But it
suffices to indicate how far such attacks on the media and body of art can be
grasped in general as mirroring displacements of the violence and trauma of the
war.
‘This radically guilty and
shabby culture’ (Adorno)
The bulk of postwar art
was undoubtedly restorative and accommodating. But even if it is granted that
the examples I have cited do constitute countertendencies of hostility and a
crisis of faith in art’s traditional authority, why should we think they are
responses to World War II? The period indicated, from 1945 to the mid-1960s, is
after all complexly full of momentous transformations, antagonisms and
struggles. What about the Cold War and nuclear arms race, whose shadows fell
constantly on the economic miracles of reconstruction culture? What about the
anti-colonial struggles and wars of national liberation flaring across the
so-called Third World? Was there not always much to be worried, anxious and
angry about? Was not the traumatic ferocity of the Algerian War, for example,
the more potent context of Nouveau Réalisme? Such questions are valid and point
to factors that were no doubt operative, but the tumults and stresses of the
postwar period unfolded within a global social process that was itself radically
and irreparably altered by the violence of World War II. It is Adorno who
announces and clarifies this.
Auschwitz, for Adorno, is not, strictly speaking, the catastrophe. The
catastrophe is rather the global social process founded in and reproduced by
antagonism and violence. All societies structured around the division of manual
and intellectual labor and the domination of man and nature are doomed to ‘perennial
suffering’.[17] Capitalist modernity is the latest and most totalizing form of
such a class society. Nor did Soviet-style ‘actually existing socialism’ offer
any liberating alternative. In both ‘late capitalism’ and its stunted rivals in
‘the East’, Adorno saw the same two dominant tendencies unfolding:
‘integration’, or the tightening of social control and increasing elimination
of difference under the reign of identity-thinking, and ‘administration’, or
the expanding powers of bureaucratic concentration and managerial direction. In
a globalizing society of expansive states and corporations tending toward
‘total administration’ and ‘total integration’, the scope for autonomous
subjectivity, capable of spontaneous experience and feeling as well as a
practice of critical thought, is progressively restricted. Dominated
individuals are trained to accommodate themselves to social and economic forces
indifferent to their happiness and beyond their control. Their anxiety and
repressed rage over this apparent fate predispose them to fascistic appeals and
ensure that episodic genocidal eruptions will be a perennial feature of
contemporary life.[18] In this light, Auschwitz was only the ‘first test piece’
(erstes Probestücke), the proof
that the tendencies of integration and administration contain within them the
logic of genocide: ‘Genocide is the absolute integration.’[19]
The industrial murder of
whole categories of individuals, then, was a latent potential within capitalist
modernity that was actualized under the specific conditions of Nazism and war.
Racism and anti-Semitism were unquestionably central to the conception and
execution of the Nazi genocide. However, the essence of Auschwitz, the fully
globalized meaning and implication of this actualized potential, cannot be
located in or reduced to anti-Semitism.[20] Once demonstrated, this potential
haunts all forms of contemporary society, as a deployable power of state
terror. Auschwitz was a qualitative leap in violence that reaches into and
changes – must change – the very meaning of life, humanity, society, the
future. Nor was it the only such leap, in the context of World War II.
Hiroshima, the other threshold-crossing event of violence, demonstrates a
different potential: the terminally genocidal power of weapons systems produced
under the merger of science and war machine. Adorno takes note of Hiroshima in
numerous places, but does not develop
its implications in a way comparable to his meditations on Auschwitz.[20]
Nevertheless, it follows relentlessly and necessarily from his arguments that
Auschwitz and Hiroshima must be thought together, as historically-demonstrated
genocidal potentials that remain entangled in the tendencies of the
contemporary social process.[21] The meaning of the change that this imposes on
us all, without exception, is that the future of humanity, in any form at all,
is now in question and fully open to doubt. We may not survive our own social
process.[22] Auschwitz and Hiroshima are the end of the myth of automatic
progress, full stop. ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanity, but
one does lead from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.’[23] For Adorno, then,
the catastrophe is emphatically not in the past, an event that happened once
and now is to be avoided. We are in the catastrophe and it is ongoing.
The implications of this
for art, Adorno argued, are intimidating. With modernity, the arts had acquired
a new autonomy, claiming their place, along with letters, learning and
autonomous science, within an honored production of ‘spirit’ (Geist). But such ‘culture’ remains the luxury of an
extracted social surplus, conditioned on the division of manual and
intellectual labor and thus implicated in domination. Emphatically
differentiating itself from ‘life’, art nevertheless remains bound to it. As
flaring promise of happiness, art cannot become the praxis that would realize
what is promised. And this constitutive frustration converts art’s very refusal
of function into functioning affirmation of the given social reality. Art’s ‘double-character
as both autonomous and fait social’
is thus an antagonism that ‘announces itself unceasingly from the zone of its
autonomy’.[24] And the same antagonism haunts all autonomous culture
conditioned on the splitting off of spirit in the division of labor, tainting
its claim to enlightenment: ‘all culture shares society’s nexus of guilt’.[25]
As the social process of modernity unfolds, and its totalizing tendencies of
integration and administration undermine the very autonomous subjectivity on
which culture depends and for which it alone can have any redeeming meaning,
art’s predicament becomes increasingly acute. Under the heading of ‘culture
industry’, Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe how the market, mediating these
social pressures, tends systematically to undermine art’s autonomy and, behind
the mirage of diversity, to reduce culture to conformist ‘Ähnlichkeit’ (sameness).[26] Even before Auschwitz, a crisis
of faith would merely have reflected an accurate registration of social
reality. After it, art’s ‘very right to exist’ is in question, as the opening
sentence of Ästhetische Theorie
announces.[27]
These critical reflections
and arguments, developing and deepening in the period from Dialektik der
Aufklärung (1944) to Adorno’s
death in 1969, are the context in which we have to read his assertion that ‘after
Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’ – and indeed has become ‘impossible’ (unmöglich).[28] Written in 1949 and first published in 1951,
at the end of the programmatic essay ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, this
infamous provocation only began to circulate widely in 1955, as the lead essay
of Prismen. Adorno would
subsequently revisit this claim, moderating and qualifying it, but pointedly
leaving it in force.[29] If, as we have seen, the social process in general is
tending to restrict and eliminate the very conditions of autonomous
subjectivity, then the subject of spontaneous experience and feeling who could
write or read lyric poetry is disappearing with it. And if Auschwitz is the
demonstration that this tendency carries within it a genocidal potential, then
the meaning of Adorno’s provocation emerges clearly: poetry, already becoming ‘impossible’
through the loss of autonomous subjects who are its necessary condition, now
becomes barbaric, if, failing to register the social catastrophe, it attempts
to carry on as if nothing has happened. This first formulation, then, is a
demand for self-reflectivity, a wake-up call that challenges art to attain full
awareness of its own plight.[30]
Summing up in Negative
Dialektik, Adorno insists that
Auschwitz is the unanswerable proof of ‘culture’s failure’ (das misslingen
der Kultur):
‘After Auschwitz, all culture,
along with the urgent critique of it, is garbage. In restoring itself after
what took place in its own landscape, it has become entirely the ideology it
was potentially, ever since it presumed, in opposition to material existence,
to inspire that existence with the light that the separation of spirit from
bodily labor withholds from it. Whoever pleads for the preservation of this
radically guilty and shabby culture makes himself its accomplice, while whoever
refuses to have anything more to do with culture directly promotes the
barbarism that culture revealed itself to be. Not even silence gets out of the
circle.’[31]
Art and the whole
tradition of enlightened culture, then, must bear the ordeal of this
predicament, reflecting on its own failure, origins and continuing dependence
on injustice, brought to a head by its impotence in preventing or resisting genocide.
It can neither permit any uncritical restoration of its ostensible authority,
nor flee the field before the tightening knots of a hostile and totalizing
system.
Adorno’s critique of
traditional culture helps us to understand the gestural violence of the artists
and works I have cited. Struggling to find their way to the clarity eventually
expressed in Adorno’s late texts, these artists at first more or less blindly
‘acted out’ the predicament Adorno specifies.[32] Later on, we will see, some
of them were able to work it through to moments of lucidity. The demolitionism
that some artists directed toward art is misplaced, but is at least
understandable. Moreover, we note that Adorno’s first formulations of the
‘after Auschwitz’ problematic set out a general, structural predicament that
argues from the tendencies of a global social process and an analysis of art’s
position within that process. It is not yet a question of representing the
catastrophe in art.
Endgames
In the 1962 radio talk and
essay ‘Engagement’, in the context of a running polemic against committed art,
Adorno begins to grapple with the issue of artistic representation.[33]
Considering the various strategies by which artists have tried to represent
Auschwitz and the larger social catastrophe to which it belongs, Adorno begins
to theorize and advocate for a form of dissonant and hermetic production
grounded in negative presentation. Adorno concludes that Brecht’s and Sartre’s
committed representations are too direct, distorting and trivializing. As he
later summarizes this critique in Ästhetische Theorie: ‘Artworks exert a practical effect, if they do so
at all, through a barely apprehensible transformation of consciousness, and not
by haranguing.’[34] Kafka, Schoenberg and, above all, Beckett become his
favored models.
The new elaborations of a
negative art of dissonance, I have argued at length elsewhere, are Adorno’s rewriting
of the traditional sublime – or, more precisely, his attempt to understand how
Auschwitz has made the old sublime impossible and replaced it with something
radically different.[35] The traditional sublime had marked a passage from
terror and disturbance to a pleasing self-admiration. The imagination’s
distress before the power or size of nature was rescued by reason, which
reminds the subject of its supersensible destiny, as a free moral agent. But
after Auschwitz and the dead letter of automatic progress, the saving recourse
to human dignity is foreclosed. The terror of the social process supplants that
of nature as the trigger of the sublime, but now the terror remains in force.
Indeed, autonomous reason, if that can be found at all, now confirms precisely
this. In the negative art Adorno favors, any feeling of enjoyment, any pleasure
still generated by the mimetic structure of artistic semblance, is pulled back
into terror when scrutinized. The subjects of this sublime are damaged, remnant
subjects; they can only watch, as from barrels in the maelstrom, their own slow
orbiting descent around the sucking trauma of history. The forceful dissonance
of unreconciled artworks, Adorno argues, triggers the emphatic ‘anxiety (Angst) that existentialism only talks about’.[36] In Ästhetische
Theorie, he will call this effect ‘Erschütterung’ – ‘shudder’.[37]
Kant had introduced the
notion of ‘negative Darstellung’
(negative presentation) in connection with the sublime in the Kritik der
Urteilskraft (1790). In a passage
famously including an admiration of the image ban of Jewish Law, he notes that
abstract notions, such as the ideas of infinity or God, can be represented
negatively, and that the feeling of the sublime loses nothing by a negative
approach.[38] Similarly, Adorno argues, the ‘abstractness of the objective law
prevailing in society’ cannot be captured in positive pictures or the
simplifying fables of committed art.[39] Like the God of old, the social catastrophe
can only be evoked and avowed negatively in art. Even Schoenberg, Adorno
implies, does not always remember this. Criticizing The Survivor of Warsaw, Adorno suggests that it is still too positive. The
remnants of enjoyment that still cling to even the most ascetic and rigorous
artworks, as the structural effect of semblance as such, have to be resisted.
Such remnants threaten to turn art ‘about’ Auschwitz into a new violation of
the victims. Only the most indirect, coded and hermetic representations of the
victims’ suffering generate adequate resistance and counter the enjoyment
intrinsic to art. For Adorno, Beckett shows the way. He evokes the catastrophe
in its essence, not by direct invocation or committed haranguing, but by
showing just how little is left of the autonomous subject in its crisis. In Endgame, the catastrophe comes onstage as the news that
Hamm has run out of painkiller.[40] ‘Beckett responds to the situation of the
concentration camp in the only way fitting – a situation he does not name, as
if it were subject to a Bilderverbot. What is, is like the concentration camp.’[41] Or again, from
Adorno’s 1961 essay on Endgame:
‘Only in silence is the name of the catastrophe to be spoken.’[42]
Adorno took a long time in
coming to a position on the poetry of Paul Celan. For his part, the poet
wrestled courageously with Adorno’s challenge. Celan’s Engführung, his radical 1958 reworking of Todesfuge (1945), was written in a full awareness of Adorno’s
works and arguments.[43] At the end, in the unfinished Ästhetische Theorie, Adorno granted Celan a place on his small list of
those deemed to have successfully responded to the plight of art after Auschwitz.
Arguably, this is the closest Adorno ever came to a real retraction of his 1951
stricture: ‘In the work of the most important contemporary representative of
German hermetic poetry, Paul Celan, the experiential content of the hermetic
was inverted. His poetry is permeated by the shame of art in the face of
suffering that escapes both experience and sublimation. Celan’s poems want to
speak of the most extreme horror through silence.’[44]
Negative Evocation and
Avowal in the Visual Arts
In the visual arts,
negative presentation had to develop in a different way. Found objects are
fully positive presentations, rather than mimetic representations, of selected
fragments of empirical life. But we have already seen that found objects can
also function as negative presentations of other things that are withheld: the
piano and staff board in Plight
are direct and positive
presentations of these objects but are negative presentations of music. The negative evocation
works because the association of these objects with music is established and
instantaneous. This suggests that negative presentation depends, and perhaps
always depends, on a positive image or association that stands behind or
underwrites it.
Before it would be
possible to attempt a negative visual presentation of Auschwitz, for example,
it would be necessary for positive images to circulate widely, deeply and long
enough to become burned into public consciousness – and presumably to do so
against strong resistances and tendencies toward forgetting, avoidance and
disavowal. Their establishment in public awareness would not at all suffice to
demonstrate that either the Nazi genocide or the catastrophe in Adorno’s larger
sense had actually been worked through and processed; it would indicate only that
the minimal awareness necessary for critical processing was at least in place.
Once the positive images are so established, however, once it can be taken for
granted that most people have been exposed to and carry the trace of such
images, then it is possible to work with them without showing them. The release
of Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard in
1955 was the vehicle of this dissemination and, as such, had a profound impact
not just on public consciousness, but on European artists. It seems in fact to
have opened and stimulated the investigation of negative presentation, as a specifically
visual strategy for evoking and avowing traumatic history. The film’s form itself, alternating and
contrasting archival still and moving images with newly shot color footage of camp
ruins in pastoral landscapes, poses the problem of representation, which
Cayrol’s text then articulates explicitly at several points. If Claude
Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoa is
now recognized as a landmark of negative presentation in film, his ‘fiction of the
real’ probably depends, more than Lanzmann would care to admit, on the impact
of Resnais’ earlier documentary. Lanzmann criticized Resnais’ film for showing
too much, too positively, while the actual genocide of millions, taking place
in gas chambers, are terror scenes of which no film exists and to which no
image could be adequate.[45] Without denying the truth of this, the force of
Lanzmann’s combination of rigorous refusal of documentary images and a
devastating accumulation of testimony is only intensified by our past exposure
to positive images. Indeed, this exposure is necessary if we are to grasp,
through Lanzmann’s work, how inadequate such images must be.
After just a few years, in
which implications of Resnais’ film were evidently absorbed and translated into
an agenda for further research, the investigation of negative presentation as a
means for the visual avowal of traumatic history began in earnest in Paris,
where Nuit et brouillard received
its primary reception. From 1959 on, the dots were connected very quickly
within the group of Nouveaux Réalistes. Issues that previously were of artistic
interest only as problems of form, such as the relation between performance and
trace in mark-making, were revisted under the pressure of a growing awareness
of catastrophic history and its grounding in an ongoing social process. When
Yves Klein returned to figurative painting with his anthropemétries in 1960, he would recover ground
already explored by Robert Rauschenberg, for example in his negative figures
made with floodlit blueprint paper in 1949. But Klein had now seen the shadows
burned onto walls and sidewalks of Hiroshima during the atomic bombing. In
1961, the year after France exploded its own atomic bomb and Resnais’ and
Marguerite Duras’ feature film Hiroshima mon amour opened in cinemas, Klein’s anthropométries made a sharp topical veer toward the real: in the
sequence from People Beginning to Fly to Hiroshima, a
potential of negative presentation has become lucid. History forces the
dialectic of form and content, and figuration after 1945 cannot be what it was
before.
More pertinent here were
the sculptural investigations of Spoerri and Arman. In his tableaux pièges (snare pictures), begun in 1960, Spoerri fixed the
objects found on everyday tabletops, shifted them in situ onto the vertical
plane and hung the result on the wall. In their negative reconstruction of specific
scenes of conviviality and contingency, his pièges
of meals and shared tables in effect turn the trace into historical evidence,
and the assemblage of found objects into forensic exhibit. In 1959,
Arman made his first poubelles
(rubbish bins), boxes and vitrines filled with found garbage and refuse, as
well as his first accumulations,
serial collections of specimens of the same or similar object. As Benjamin
Buchloh’s analysis of these works and their context establishes, Arman’s
cumulative reflections of commodity culture and its garbage transform the
tradition of found object and readymade and announce ‘the end of the utopian
object aesthetic’.[46] Quite clearly, the hope and optimism that Duchamp and
other artists from the early avant-gardes had sometimes invested in
industrialized objects have been objectively liquidated along with the myth of
automatic progress. Readymades are no longer optimistic exactly to the degree
that optimism in general is no longer possible, and this is an objective
problem, as Adorno made clear, that is not alleviated at all by the
reconstructed pseudo-optimism of commodified abundance. With eloquent
precision, Spoerri’s Lunettes noires make the same point.
I am less convinced that
Arman’s selection and manipulation of found objects under postwar conditions empty
these objects of every kind of charge and aura, as Buchloh’s account in places also
suggests. If we supplement his account by tracing the thread of negative
presentation, as I do here, then the story becomes more complex. Arman’s portraits-robot registered the fact that the invisible charge
connecting individuals to their things exceeds and survives a mere relation of
possession. Individuals can be evoked negatively in a very precise way by the
presentation of things that are linked to them, and Arman shows this in those
‘portraits’ of his dealer and friends that seem merely to sample each one’s garbage.
These jokes in poor taste also look to the stage properties of Beckett’s Fin
de partie, which premiered in
London in April 1957 and was playing in Paris three weeks later: in that dismal
work, Hamm keeps his elderly parents, Nagg and Nell, in two dust bins.[47] Yet,
even the exhibited misery and obsolescence of a subjectivity facing its
historical endgame carries a certain pathos that we, the crippled remnants of
subjectivity still clinging to damaged life, are able to feel and register.
Similarly, as we have seen with the colères and combustions of musical instruments, the destruction of these
very auratic objects, with their fragile wooden bodies and warm patinas,
produces a secondary aura: the flaring halo of a traditional culture that, like
the subject, is in the process of disappearing – and only dimly grasps the objective
ground for its demise. For sheer, shocking antihumanism, the smashing or
burning of violins and pianos is on a par with the burning of books; even as
artistic gestures, all these acts implicitly threaten the body itself with
violence. It is wrong to assume or conclude that there is no pathos at all
generated by culture’s crisis, even if the operative feelings fluctuate
unstably between terror, rage, dismay and shame. It is not a matter of no aura
at all, then, so much as a need to specify exactly what kind of auratic charge
is structured, if even as potential, in Arman’s objects.[48] In this direction,
we must be painfully precise.
It is now established, and
known by those who have taken the trouble to inform themselves, that Auschwitz
and the other Nazi murder factories were the scene of a theft so immense and
systematic that it recalls Marx’s famous account of violent, ‘so-called
original accumulation’ (sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation). At these camps, the victims were not just killed;
their bodies and personal property were plundered without restraint, in ways so
gruesome and appalling that it defies belief. At Auschwitz, where alone a
million victims were murdered, ninety-percent of them Jews, the stolen property
was carefully sorted and stored in special warehouses, sardonically called
‘Canada’ by the prisoners forced to carry out this criminal labor. When the
Nazis evacuated Auschwitz before the advancing Soviet army in January 1945,
they blew up the crematoria and attempted to burn or destroy all obvious
evidence of the genocide. But much evidence still remained, and Soviet
cameramen on scene at the camp’s liberation recorded immense pyramids of sorted
clothes, suitcases, eyeglasses, shaving brushes, everything of any possible
value to the Nazi war economy – even dentures stolen from corpses as the teeth
of victims were ransacked for gold caps and fillings. Nearly an hour of
archival film footage exists, and excerpts were shown as evidence at the War
Crimes Trials in Nuremburg. Excerpts were also utilized for some of the
montages of Nuit et brouillard,
which shows stolen eyeglasses, bowls and clothing. Stills taken from the reels
of moving image may have had a wider circulation that remains unmapped.
Two of Arman’s works in
particular are exact reconstructions, on a much smaller scale, of these
documentary images. La Vie à pleines dents, from 1960, is
a disturbing accumulation of dentures; and Argus extra myope, from 1961, gathers and boxes found spectacles. Both
are negative presentations of the individuals, whose personal belonging these
dentures and eyeglasses actually were. At the same time, by reason of a visual
linkage to history that is far too precise to be dismissed, these works evoke
other people whose dentures and eyeglasses were stolen in the course of their
administered murder. By this second evocation, these works of Arman avow the
Nazi genocide. The artistic potential uncovered and mobilized here, then, is
very clear. This is how visual negative presentation works and how it
‘remembers’: these works avow –
they assert that these evoked people existed but were murdered, and that this
crime was perpetrated. And this avowal is indeed charged with an awful aura.
Buchloh notes these echoes
of Nuit et brouillard and
concludes: ‘In their extreme forms, Arman’s accumulations and poubelles cross the threshold to become memory images of the first historical
instances of industrialized death.’[49] But he hesitates to assign any
interpretive primacy to this avowal or to explore the implications further. The
‘inevitably limitless choice of Arman’s object aesthetic’ points Buchloh rather
to the new conditions for subject formation – the enforced identification with
‘sign exchange value’.[50] Taking all of Arman’s production into account, these
two works and perhaps a handful of others that articulate a similarly precise
avowal do seem to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume and randomness of the
artist’s accumulations. This far, Buchloh’s point must be taken. Yet, it must
also be said that the relation of these few works to Arman’s total output also,
and crucially, mirrors and avows the position of industrial murder within the
general, global logic of capitalist accumulation: it is there, actually, before
our eyes, visible but not necessarily seen – a poorly understood potential or
latency that we may well miss in the flux and flood of commodified life and
spectacular culture. Buchloh’s claim, that a ‘dialectic of silence and
exposure’ (or ‘of disavowal and spectularization’) forms the historical
framework of postwar art, is unquestionably correct.[51] But in Arman’s case, we
can see that it is by negative presentation that his work is able to avow the
full catastrophe, in Adorno’s sense.
It is necessary at this
point to insist that this efficacy of negative presentation does not depend on
artistic intention. These visual linkages to history are irrefutably objective.
Coded into these works are potentials for precise evocation and avowal that, as
soon as they are activated, produce effects – including the hit Adorno called ‘shudder’.[52]
This holds true even if these linkages were produced unconsciously – even if
Arman was utterly blind to what he had done. Nevertheless, a few other works by
this artist indicate that he in fact was quite lucid about it. Tuez-les
tous, Dieu reconnaître les Siens,
from 1961, is an accumulation of household insecticide pumps. The prominent
brand-names of some – Fly-Tox, Flit, Projex – testify to the commodification
even of poison. Here we have to remember Clov, in Beckett’s Fin de partie, who, discovering a flea has gotten inside his
pants, doses his own genitals with poison. As Adorno noted, the scene is one of
several in this work that point to the endgame of human domination of nature,
which was always self-repressive and carried latently within it a reversal of
the instinct for survival. Moreover, insecticide is historically entangled in
the pre-history of Zyklon-B, the toxin used in the Nazi gas chambers: ‘Insecticide,
which pointed toward the death camps from the very beginning, becomes the
end-product of the domination of nature, which now abolishes itself.’[53]
Arman’s title is a line imputed to the Abbot of Cîteaux, the Church official who
commanded the massacre of the inhabitants of Béziers, in the south of France,
in 1209, during the Albigensian Crusade. It expresses the moment in the
escalation of administered violence when the jump is made to whole categories
of people, all the members of which are to be targeted and killed
indiscriminately. After Auschwitz, racializing translations of the slogan
continue to circulate; one in English (‘Kill them all and let God sort ’em out’)
seems to have been popular among US soldiers in Vietnam and, passing through
the proxy wars of the South African apartheid regime a decade or so later, to
have become a badge of mercenary culture.[54] To point quickly in passing to
two more accumulations: Le village des damnés, from 1962, packs dolls of children into a glass
vitrine as tightly as those deported to the camps were packed into cattle cars;
Birth control, from 1963,
echoes this, but this time the dolls are packed in a hinged cardboard box that
evokes the suitcases of the deported.
One more aspect of the
Nazi genocide must be attested before this constellation of references can
throw its negative light on Plight.
The makers of Nuit et brouillard
produced a German-language version, with Paul Celan’s translation of Cayrol’s
text. Nacht und Nebel opened in
German cinemas in late 1956, and in April 1957 was broadcast on German
television.[55] In the sequences treating the Nazi plunder of victims, Resnais’
film takes note of the fact that the victims’ hair was shaven, collected in
depots, and eventually turned into ‘cloth’ or textile (tissu). Several images show a pyramid of human hair, and
another shows what is presumably raw human hair, in a column-like form wrapped in
paper. The paper is marked: K[onzentrations].L[ager]. Au[schwitz] Kg 22. The
voice-over for this sequence tells us ‘Rien que des cheveux de femme… A
quinze pfennigs le kilo…On en fait du tissu.’ (Nothing but women’s hair… at fifteen pfennigs a kilo… it’s used to
make textile). What the hair was turned into, actually, was felt. At Auschwitz,
Soviet cameramen filmed the seven tons of human hair that was packed for
shipment to German factories, where, other captured documents entered into the
record at Nuremburg revealed, the hair of the victims was routinely turned into
felt. In these sequences, which last more than a minute, we see 293 column-like
sacks of hair, laid on their sides in two stacks, end to end. The sacks are
roughly the size of the 284 felt columns used by Beuys to line the walls of Plight. The Soviet film footage was reissued in 1985, for
the fortieth anniversary of the war’s end. In the same year, Lanzmann released Shoa and Beuys opened Plight in London.[56] In the Pompidou catalog, the full
title of Beuys’ work, which presumably reflects the artist’s retrospective
alteration of the dating, is: Plight 1956-1985.
The Avowal of Plight
We now have all we need to
understand what this work is and how it does what it does. Beuys took a long
time to attain this synthesis, which in its quiet, restrained precision and
power is unequalled by anything else in his output. In the interval before: the
Eichmann Trial (1961-2), the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (1963-5), the German
student movement and global uprisings of 1968, the trauma of the RAF. And
several decades of playing the art game: haranguing from chalkboards, melting
fat, wearing felt, wrapping pianos with it. By 1985, he was ready, whether or
not he had full and lucid consciousness of what he pulled together there. In constructing
a sculptural afterimage to enclose this space, Beuys in effect ‘snared’ the
sacks in the hair room at Auschwitz and flipped them up from the horizontal to
the vertical, just as Spoerri did with his pièges. In standing ranks, the felt columns now evoke the
victims by negative presentation – this time through the inescapable
specificity of an irrefutable material linkage. The thermometer, we can now
see, evokes the crematoria and lies on the staff board and piano like a
crushing weight or pressure that holds it closed and keeps it silent.
We now have an avowal of
the catastrophe that, at the same time, allegorizes art’s predicament after
Auschwitz, just as Adorno theorizes it. Music, the medium of raw feeling and
deep consolation, will not be adequate before the facts of what happened; art
will have to shut up. Or rather, because not even silence gets us out of the
circle, art will have to go on, bearing its shame and the challenge to break
radically with its affirmative tradition. Only in silence can the name of the
catastrophe be spoken, but still it must be spoken – if only through the
dissonance of a negative, hermetic installation. This one, here, now, puts the
spectator under the surveillance of a community of evoked victims, ranked along
the walls, as if along fences of barbed wire. The title confirms the
interpretation and takes its place within it: if the avowed trauma was that
than which no worse can be conceived, it remains, in its urgent legacy for us,
a situation of extreme danger and difficulty. Even the secondary meaning of
‘plight’ piles on, as a question that, given the tendencies of the social
process, we must leave open: the situation imposes on us a duty and promise, but
only insofar as we can still claim at all to be autonomous, ethical, political
subjects. Maybe, in the trial and moment of truth, we earn that designation,
maybe we do not. In this work, there is no trace of confident posturing,
jester’s tricks, or the weird dancing of shamans. The work draws no conclusions
about our capacity either to fathom the horror or save ourselves from it. It
simply avows: that happened and
so it is. The disturbance of this work – attested by the punches and kicks of
spectators, imprinted into the columns of the second room – leads through the
dead-end, to the shudder of the after-Auschwitz sublime.
To have said this is not
to have said everything. One would like to say more, and should. Avowal is a
moment only – of and in a social process that churns on in defiance of all
avowals. What we do with our avowals, where we go with them and how we put them
to work, with others, is another, more political matter. The sublime, in
itself, is not self-rescue, any more than it ever was. We may think Plight, as synthesis and culmination, came rather late in
the dialectic of avowal and avoidance. But the irony, if that is what we must
call it, lies elsewhere: in Plight’s
reception, which long managed to avoid what the work avows, and in the social factum
brutum that all the accelerated
proliferation of remembrance in art and official culture since has not resulted
in any global public lucidity about the social process. Its powers of terror,
far from being arrested, have only continued to grow. Rememoration is not
always, not automatically, counter-memory. It is no longer 1985.
This essay is forthcoming in 2014 in Nordic Journal of Aesthetics; a German translation will appear in 2013 in Beuys-Brock-Vostell:
Three Positions of Performativity, eds. Wilfried Dörstel, Eckardt Gillen,
Franz van der Grinten, and Peter Weibel, in association with the exhibition of
the same name at ZKM/Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe.
Notes:
[1] Dissemination is a
process rather than a sudden event of universal transmission achieved with
perfect success, once and for all, upon first exhibition or publication.
[2] See my 'Joseph Beuys
and the After-Auschwitz Sublime' in Gene Ray, ed., Joseph Beuys: Mapping the
Legacy (New York: D.A.P. and The
John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 2001), pp. 59-61; and revised in Ray, Terror
and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 37-8.
[3] The London configuration is
the main focus here. I do not take into account later alterations, such as clear plexiglass barriers lining the entrance passageway, introduced into the Paris version at the Centre Georges Pompidou, or damage inflicted by spectators.
[4] As far as I am aware,
Beuys is not suspected of any direct participation in the Nazi genocide. How
much he may have known about it, from within the Nazi war machine, is less
clear and more open to controversy, but in the absence of irrefutable evidence
remains unknowable.
[5] John Cage, Silence (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1973),
pp. 13-4.
[6] Ibid., p. 17.
[7] Ibid., p. 47.
[8] Cage’s name appears
only once, in passing, in Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie, but there Adorno aligns him with Beckett’s
reduction of meaning to the absence of any redeeming meaning: ‘Schlüsselphänomene
mögen auch gewisse musikalische Gebilde wie das Klavierkonzert von Cage sein,
die als Gesetz unerbittliche Zufälligkeit sich auferlegen und dadurch etwas wie
Sinn: den Ausdruck von Entsetzen empfangen.’ (‘Key phenomena may include
musical constructions, such as the piano concert of Cage, which by imposing relentless
chance on themselves as law thereby attain something like meaning: the
expression of horror.’ Ästhetische Theorie [1970], eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 231; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 154. Here and throughout, English
renderings of Adorno are my modifications of the standard translations.
[10] What a shock it must
have been, for example, when the full extent of the Nazi genocide was revealed,
to have remembered his 1942 work for prepared piano, titled In the Name of
the Holocaust, after Joyce’s pun
from Finnegans Wake (‘In the
name of the Holy Ghost.’). Such an accident might fuel anyone’s reflection on
the relation of culture and chance. But for Cage the sensitive American,
Hiroshima was probably the more traumatic detonation.
[11] In that year,
Cage began studies of Zen with D.T. Suzuki and of Indian philosophy with Gita
Sarabhai.
[12] Born in Korea,
Paik finished a thesis on Schoenberg at the University of Tokyo in 1956.
Afterwards in Europe, he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne before
meeting Cage in Darmstadt in 1958.
[13] Contrast this with
Cage’s most extreme embrace of indeterminacy, 0’0”,
performable by anyone in any manner, composed in the same year.
[14] See Douglas Kahn,
‘The Latest: Fluxus and Music’, in Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, In
the Spirit of Fluxus (Minneapolis,
MN: Walker Art Center, 1993), pp. 100-121; on Beuys and Fluxus, see Joan
Rothfuss, ‘Joseph Beuys: Echoes in America’, in Ray, ed., Joseph Beuys:
Mapping the Legacy, pp. 37-53.
[15] For other readings of
these tendencies in postwar art history, see Paul Schimmel and Russell
Ferguson, eds., Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979
(New York: Thames and Hudson,
1998).
[16] Spoerri, like Paul Celan and Isidore Isou a Rumanian Jew displaced by the Nazi terror, is probably the most complex and interesting of the Nouveaux Réalistes. By his own account, he fled with his mother and siblings to Switzerland in 1942, his father,
Isaac Feinstein, having been murdered by the Nazis in 1940. See Spoerri's interview with Freddy De Vree in Daniel Spoerri: Detrompe-l'oeil (Antwerp: Ronny Van de Velde, 2000), no pagination. Cf. Susanne Neuburger, ed., Nouveau Réalisme (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, 2005), p. 198; and Anekdotomania: Daniel Spoerri über Daniel Spoerri (Basel: Museum Jean Tinguey Basel and Hatje Cantz Verlag), p. 290.
[17] Adorno, Negative
Dialektik [1966] (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1975), p. 355: ‘das perennierende Leiden’; Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995) p.
362. Cf. the variant, ‘das perennierende Unheil’, in ‘Kulturkritik und
Gesellschaft’ [1951], in Prismen (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 16; ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1992), p. 25. Both mark the legacy of misery unfolding from the
division of labor, ‘die tödliche Spaltung der Gesellschaft’, ‘Kulturkritik und
Gesellschaft’, p. 15; ‘the deadly splitting of society’, ‘Cultural Criticism
and Society’, p. 24. Pertinently,
the separation of spirit (Geist)
from manual labor is the necessary condition and primal scene of all autonomous
art and culture.
[18] See Adorno,
‘Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit’ [1959], in Eingriffe: Neun
kritische Modelle (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1963), p. 139; ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, in Critical
Models: Interventions and Catchwords,
trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 98.
[19] Adorno, Negative
Dialektik, p. 355: ‘Völkermord ist
die absolute Integration.’ Negative Dialectics, p. 362.
[20] Part of Adorno’s
critical provocation is to insist that, essentially, Auschwitz is an absolute
threat that exceeds its historic specificity. Auschwitz qua appearance-form (Erscheinungsform), to use Adorno’s Hegelian idiom, was driven by
toxic and anti-Semitic fantasies of racial purity that took hold, with official
promotion, in Germany, within a highly specific conjuncture of history.
Auschwitz qua essence (Wesen),
however, is the genocidal potential of social tendencies toward integration and
administration. Behind the murder of Jews by Nazis, the logic of modernity
itself is unfolding.
[21] To clarify this was a
main aim of my Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory; see in particular chapters one and eleven (of the
revised soft-cover edition), as well as my further elaborations in ‘Hits: From
Trauma and the Sublime to Radical Critique’, Third Text 97, vol. 23, no. 2 (2009): 135-149.
[22] As Adorno puts it,
the ‘threat of total catastrophe’ (‘der… Drohung der totalen Katastrophe’) has become ‘allgegenwärtigen’ – omnipresent, ubiquitous, saturating the
contemporary. Ästhetische Theorie,
p. 362; Aesthetic Theory, pp.
243-4.
[23] Adorno, Negative
Dialektik, p. 324: ‘Keine
Universalgeschichte führt vom Wilden zur Humanität, sehr wohl eine von der
Steinschleuder zur Megabombe.’ Negative Dialectics, p. 320.
[24] Adorno, Ästhetische
Theorie, p. 16: ‘Der
Doppelcharakter der Kunst als autonom und als fait social teilt ohne Unterlaß
der Zone ihrer Autonomie mit sich.’ Aesthetic Theory, p. 5.
[25] Adorno, ‘Cultural
Criticism and Society’, p. 26; ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, p. 17: ‘alle
Kultur am Schuldzusammenhang der Gesellschaft teilhat’.
[26] Max Horkheimer and
Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente [1944] (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2003), pp.
128-176; Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 94-136.
[27] Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory, p. 1; Ästhetische
Theorie, p. 9: ‘nicht einmal ihr
Existenzrecht’.
[28] Adorno, ‘Cultural
Criticism and Society’, p. 34; ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, p. 31: ‘[N]ach
Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die
Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu
schreiben.’
[29] In ‘Engagement’
[1962], in Noten zur Literatur,
pp. 422-3; in English as ‘Commitment’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 87-8; Negative Dialektik [1966], pp. 355-6; Negative Dialectics, p. 362; ‘Ist die Kunst heiter?’ [1967] in Noten
zur Literatur, pp. 603-4; ‘Is Art
Lighthearted?’ in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, p. 251; and ‘Kunst und die Künste’ [1967] in Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 10.1, p. 454; ‘Art
and the Arts’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A
Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 387.
[30] Both ‘Gedicht’ and ‘Gedichte’ are to be read here as synecdoche for all the
arts, in the same way that “Auschwitz” stands for the Nazi genocide.
[31] Adorno, Negative
Dialectics, pp. 366-7; Negative
Dialektik, pp. 359-60: ‘Alle
Kultur nach Auschwitz, samt der dringlichen Kritik daran, ist Müll. Indem sie
sich restaurierte nach dem, was in ihrer Landschaft ohne Widerstand sich
zutrug, ist sie gänzlich zu der Ideologie geworden, die sie potentiell war,
seitdem sie, in Opposition zur materiellen Existenz, dieser das Licht
einzuhauchen sich anmaßte, das die Trennung des Geistes von körperlicher Arbeit
ihr vorenthielt. Wer für Erhaltung der radikal schuldigen und schäbigen Kultur
plädiert, macht sich zum Helfershelfer, während, wer der Kultur sich
verweigert, unmittelbar die Barbarei befördert, als welche die Kultur sich
enthüllte. Nicht einmal Schweigen kommt aus dem Zirkel heraus.’ Cf. Adorno’s
gloss on ‘Schuld’ (guilt) in Ästhetische Theorie, pp. 347-8; Aesthetic Theory, pp. 234-5.
[32] I of course am not
claiming these artists were all struggling readers of Adorno. The dissemination
of Adorno’s texts may have played a role, but cannot explain everything. It is
the social process, unfolding as history that bears down on all, which both
Adorno and artists responded to, in whatever ways they could.
[33] Adorno’s case against
Brecht is stimulating, but not without serious problems. I examine these in
‘Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments: Brecht and Adorno on Representing
Capitalism’, Historical Materialism,
vol. 18, no. 3 (2010): 3-24.
[34] Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory, p. 243; Ästhetische Theorie, p. 360: ‘Praktische Wirkung üben Kunstwerke
allenfalls in einer kaum dingfest zu machenden Veränderung des Bewusstseins
aus, nicht indem sie haranguieren.’
[35] See my Terror
and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory, chapter one; and my summary discussion in 'Hits: From Trauma and the
Sublime to Radical Critique.'
[36] Adorno, ‘Commitment’,
p. 90; ‘Engagement’, p. 426: ‘Kafkas Prosa, Becketts Stücke oder der wahrhaft
ungeheuerliche Roman Der Namenlose üben eine Wirkung aus, der gegenüber die
offiziell engagierten Dichtungen wie Kinderspiel sich ausnehmen; sie erregen
die Angst, welche der Existentialismus nur beredet. Als Demontagen des Scheins
sprengen sie die Kunst von innen her, welche das proklamierte Engagement von
außen, und darum nur zum Schein, unterjocht. Ihr Unausweichliches nötigt zu
jener Änderung der Verhaltensweise, welche die engagierten Werke bloß
verlangen. Wen einmal Kafkas Räder überfuhren, dem ist der Friede mit der Welt
ebenso verloren wie die Möglichkeit, bei dem Urteil sich zu bescheiden, der
Weltlauf sie schlecht: das bestätigende Moment ist weggeätzt, das der
resignierten Feststellung von der Übermacht des Bösen innewohnt.’
[37] Adorno, Ästhetische
Theorie, p. 364: ‘Erschütterung,
dem üblichen Erlebnisbegriff schroff entgegengesetzt, ist keine partikulare
Befriedigung des Ichs, der Lust nicht ähnlich. Eher ist sie ein Memento der
Liquidation des Ichs, das als erschüttertes der eigenen Beschränktheit und
Endlichkeit innewird.’ Aesthetic Theory, p. 245: ‘Shudder, starkly opposed to the usual concept of
experience, is no particular satisfaction of the ego, is not similar to desire.
Rather, it is a memento of the liquidation of the ego, which, shaken to the
core, becomes aware of its own limitedness and finitude.’ At this point, Adorno’s
rewriting of the sublime intersects with Jacques Lacan’s rewriting of Freud’s
theory of trauma in the 1964 Seminar, published as Les quatre concepts
fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), pp. 63-75, in
English as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 53-64.
[38] Immanuel Kant, Kritik
der Urteilskraft, Werkausgabe, vol. 10, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 201.
[39] Adorno, ‘Commitment’,
p. 90; ‘Engagement’, p. 425: ‘die Abstraktheit des Gesetzes, das objektiv in
der Gesellschaft waltet.’
[40] Adorno, ‘Trying to
Understand Endgame’, in Notes
to Literature, vol. 1, trans.
Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 260;
‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu Verstehen’, in Noten zur Literatur, p. 303: ‘es keine Nährpillen mehr gebe’.
[41] Adorno, Negative
Dialectics, p. 380. Negative
Dialektik, p. 373: ‘Beckett hat
auf die Situation des Konzentrationslagers, die er nicht nennt, als läge über
ihr Bilderverbot, so reagiert, wie es allein ansteht. Was ist, sei wie das
Konzentrationslager.’
[42] Adorno, ‘Trying to
Understand Endgame’, p. 249;
‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu Verstehen’, p. 290: ‘Schweigend nur ist der Name des
Unheils auszusprechen.’
[43] See the
correspondence between the two, published with an introduction by Joachim Seng
in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter,
no. 8 (2003).
[44] Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory, p. 322; Ästhetische
Theorie, p. 477: ‘Im bedeutendsten
Repräsentanten hermitischer Dichtung der zeitgenössischen deutschen Lyrik, Paul
Celan, hat der Erfahrungsgehalt des Hermetischen sich umgekehrt. Diese Lyrik
ist durchdrungen von der Scham der Kunst angesichts des wie der Erfahrung so
der Sublimierung sich entziehenden Leids. Celans Gedichte wollen das äußerste
Entsetzen durch Verschweigen sagen.’
[45] See Raye Farr, ‘Some
Reflections on Claude Lanzmann’s Approach to the Examination of the Holocaust’,
in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman, eds. Holocaust and the Moving Image:
Representations in Film and Television since 1933 (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp.
161-167.
[46] Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, ‘From Yves Klein’s Le Vide
to Arman’s Le Plein’, in
Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and
American Art from 1955 to 1975
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 270.
[47] This seminal work was
written in French and translated by Beckett into English; a German edition,
however, translated by Elmar Tophoven with Beckett’s approval, appeared even
before the English: Fin de partie
(Les Editions de Minuit, 1957); Endspiel (Suhrkamp, 1957); Endgame
(Grove, 1958). Adorno met and had long discussions with Beckett in Paris in
1958; he had already seen a production of Endspiel in Vienna. The dedication of Adorno’s essay on Endspiel reads, in English: ‘To S.B., in memory of Paris,
Fall 1958.’ On the dustbins, Adorno comments: ‘Beckett’s trashcans are emblems
of the culture reconstructed after Auschwitz.’ ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, pp. 266-7; ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen’,
p. 322: ‘Becketts Mülleimer sind Embleme der nach Auschwitz wiederaufgebauten
Kultur.’ On Adorno’s meetings with Beckett, see Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno:
A Biography, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), pp. 356-60. On the early
production history of Fin de partie,
see Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp. 458-66.
[48] Walter Benjamin
taught that aura is a charge or effect of distance grounded in various kinds of
authority – that invested in singular artworks, authentic experience or
returning ‘lost time’. We may belong to the era of reproducibility, degraded
experience and enfeebled memory, but even withered subjects can still suffer
trauma. Traumatic history, evoked and avowed by negative presentation, would
very emphatically have claim to a requisite authority.
[49] Buchloh, ‘From Yves
Klein’s Le Vide to Arman’s Le
Plein’, p. 274. Indeed, as a
footnote (19, p. 283) to his discussion at this point indicates, he went to the
trouble of confirming, in an interview with Arman, that the artist ‘saw the
film upon its release and remembers its having a profound impact on him’.
[50] Ibid., p. 272-4.
[51] Ibid., p. 259.
[52] This is to say
that only in reception does the
subjective decisively reappear: only in specific spectators can such linkages
be activated and effects produced. All the factors conditioning the encounter
between spectator and artwork (namely the shaping of subjective disposition by
the objective social process) then come into play. With regard to production, artistic intention is not necessarily fully
conscious and cannot always be verified. Nor are moments of attained lucidity
necessarily permanent. How such
potentials were installed in specific works is finally not as important as the
fact, which we can verify, that
they are installed there. With
Beuys, too, this is the case.
[53] Adorno, ‘Trying
to Understand Endgame’, p. 270;
‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen’, p. 315: ‘Das Insektenvertilgungsmittel,
das vom Anbeginn auf die Vernichtungslager hinauswollte, wird sum Endprodukt
der Naturbeherrschung, die sich selbst erledigt.’
[54] The slogan was
openly promoted in the pages of Soldier of Fortune, a magazine found on the racks of retail bookstore
chains, and even today T-shirts bearing it can be purchased online from
Amazon.com.
[55] On the German
version and its reception, see Ewout van der Knaap, ‘Enlightening Procedures: Nacht
und Nebel in Germany’, in van der
Knaap, ed., Uncovering the Holocaust: The International Reception of Night
and Fog (London and New York:
Wallflower Press), pp. 46-85.
[56] The footage
filmed by Aleksander Woroncow at Auschwitz in 1945 was reissued by Irmgard von
zur Mühlen, with added voice-over commentary and a new interview with Woroncow,
as Die Befreiung von Auschwitz
(1985). The film has been available on DVD since 2005.
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