31 July 2009: "WTF is ‘art’?"

This post is about G.G. Allin. Here we are presented with the customary Carlesian complex of interwoven themes: the role of the artist in capitalist society, the evolution of media forms and how that shapes the public sphere, the nature of art itself and its parameters, metaphor vs. metonymy, the parasitical relationship of art to life, performativity and its natural boundaries, libido and its destructive potential with regard to civilization, scatology as epistemology. It begins with Carles rejecting the role of the artist: "A lot of people tell me ‘Carles, ur an artist’ but I have to tell them, ‘I’m not an artist. I’m a blog.’" Unlike blogging, making art has become a mere alibi for unrestrained self-expression devoid of theoretical content. Art has been reduced to diary-keeping:

Feel overwhelmed by ‘art.’ As we continue to move forward in time, there are just more&more ways 2 express yourself–more tools, more ways 2 communicate, and more metaphors to be showcased. Kinda makes u wonder what is ‘art’ and what is ‘just being alive.’

In other words, Carles, echoing the Frankfurt school philosophers, is complaining about art having lost its critical function. In his essay "Art and Mass Culture" Max Horkheimer writes:

The gradual dissolution of the family, the transformation of personal life into leisure and of leisure into routines supervised to the last detail, into the pleasures of the ball park and the movie, the best seller and the radio, has brought about the disappearance of the inner life. Long before culture was replaced by these manipulated pleasures, it had already assumed an escapist character. Men had fled into a private conceptual world and rearranged their thoughts when the time was ripe for rearranging reality. The inner life and the ideal had become conservative factors. But with the loss of his ability to take this kind of refuge -- an ability that thrives neither in slums nor in modern settlements -- man has lost his power to conceive a world different from that in which he lives. This other world was that of art.

Faced with an art that has lost its power to criticize and represent an alternate (or, as Carles would say, an "alt") ideal, Carles theorizes instead a kind of post-art that supersedes any mimetic or critical functions.

It’s kinda weird how art is supposed to ‘represent life’, and challenge u to think about some aspect of humanity/society is ‘kinda fucked up.’ I am not sure why people think expression is so important.

Carles seems to be advocating an art that moves beyond expression, and perhaps beyond abstract expressionism, to a different artistic mode, but he also accepts that this pursuit of transgression, of new ground for art to colonize, inevitably turns atavistic, degenerating into the most primitive forms of human interaction. His imaginary artist reaches the impasse where his pursuit of authenticity culminates in a polymorphously perverse infantile regression: "Just want to ‘jack off’ and ’shit’ on objects, but not because I want it to be ‘art’, but because I sincerely have the desire to ‘tug off’ and ‘defecate’ on stuff." The artist can no longer distinguish his creative impulses from his masturbatory or excretory ones, "art" and "shit" have become synonymous at the symbolic and literal levels. This solves the dilemma that had made conventional art history so meaningless to Carles: "I never went to Art History class during undergrad, and actually failed because of my poor attendance. Maybe if I had attended, I would have a better eye for ‘what is art’ and what is ‘bullshit.’" But of course Carles knew all along that there is no difference; no refinement of the beholder's aesthetic can lead to a tenable differentiation at this particular juncture in art's decline.

The only guarantor of artistic authenticity, once the artist has reached this level of disaffection, is his own ejaculate or feces, personal products that are uncontaminated with symbolic ideas which make reference to the work of others and hence become derivative. No artist of the late 20th century epitomized this conundrum more than Kevin "G.G." Allin, whose performances were frequently sanctified in the eyes of his admirers by the spilling of his own fluids.

So the pursuit of purity or originality is an unsustainable course for the development of art -- G.G. Allin, after all, is dead. Carles then consdiers a different kind of post-art: the possibly of wedding the aesthetic impulse to the commercial context of capitalism, in keeping with the way in which digitization has made once intangible ideas into commodified, tradable "memes": "Not sure how ‘the internet’ has changed art. It seems like u shouldn’t try to make ‘art’ n e more, maybe we should just focus on ‘designing and branding streams of memes.’" The process of branding itself becomes the substance of artistic practice -- artists will work with the tools of marketing, rather than with paint or pencil. The artistic product will not be a discrete work but the evocation of influence qua influence. In this way, the pejorative connotations of selling out the idea art to corporate design are sublated; corporate art frees the artist of the inhibitions of his own ego, design becomes a medium for pure craft, unpolluted by the mediocrity of ideas that fail by being too original.