Brutal aesthetics, p.1
Brutal Aesthetics, page 1
Brutal Aesthetics
Brutal
Aesthetics
Dubuffet Bataille Jorn Paolozzi Oldenburg
Hal Foster
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Bollingen Series XXXV: 67
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Jacket illustration: Asger Jorn, Untitled (Raphael’s Angels), c. 1949. Ink on postcard, 3 ½× 5 ½ inches. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA. Photo courtesy of the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg.
Figure 4.9 reproduced by permission of the Fondazione Torino Musei. It is prohibited to duplicate this image using any method.
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ISBN 978-0-691-20260-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Foster, Hal, author.
Title: Brutal aesthetics : Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg / Hal Foster.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2020] | Series: The A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts ; 2018 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020011054 | ISBN 9780691202600 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Art, Modern—20th century. | Aesthetics, Modern—20th century. | Civilization in art.
Classification: LCC N6490 .F66 2020 | DDC 709.04—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011054
This is the sixty-seventh volume of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, which are delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and organized by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. This volume is based on lectures delivered in 2018. The volumes of lectures constitute Number XXXV in the Bollingen Series, supported by the Bollingen Foundation.
This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University
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The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts have been delivered annually since 1952 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, with the goal of bringing “the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” As publication was always an essential part of the vision for the Mellon Lectures, a relationship was established between the National Gallery and the Bollingen Foundation for a series of books based on the talks. The first book in the series was published in 1953, and since 1967 all lectures have been published by Princeton University Press as part of the Bollingen Series. Now, for the first time, all the books in the series are available in one or more formats, including paperback and e-book, making many volumes that have long been out of print accessible to future generations of readers.
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Contents
Introduction:
Positive Barbarism
1 | Jean Dubuffet and His Brutes
2 | Georges Bataille and His Caves
3 | Asger Jorn and His Creatures
4 | Eduardo Paolozzi and His Hollow Gods
5 | Claes Oldenburg and His Ray Guns
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Photography and Copyright Credits
Brutal
Aesthetics
Introduction:
Positive Barbarism
This book is born of my puzzling over this paradoxical statement by Walter Benjamin: modernism teaches us “how to survive civilization if need be.”1 Although he varies the phrase in a few texts of the early 1930s, he never explains it; apparently it remained a riddle for him too. Given the situation in Europe, the referent of “civilization” seems clear enough; it is the travesty of civilization authored by Fascism and Nazism, civilization turned into its opposite. This is the barbarism, exploited by the dictators that rose in the ruins of World War I, that Benjamin hopes, in a desperate dialectic, to counter. “Barbarism? Yes, indeed. We say this in order to introduce a new, positive concept of barbarism. For what does poverty of experience do for the barbarian? It forces him to start from scratch; to make a new start; to make a little go a long way; to begin with a little and build up further, looking neither left nor right. Among the great creative spirits, there have always been the inexorable ones who begin by clearing a tabula rasa.”2 Yet what kind of modernism teaches us to survive a civilization become barbaric, and what sort of survival could this be?
Benjamin posed the notion of positive barbarism in a short text titled “Experience and Poverty” written in summer 1933 when he was in exile, mostly in Paris but for the moment on Ibiza.3 Hitler had come to power in January, it was the depths of the Depression, and Benjamin was as poor as that Spanish island was then. Hence his title, which should be read as a chiasmus, both the experience of poverty and the poverty of experience.4 Certainly the essay abounds in sudden twists of this nature, especially regarding the question of value, economic and other. In fact the entire text is a parable of paradoxes that we are asked to tease out.
Benjamin begins with a fable about gold. On his deathbed an old man tells his sons of a treasure buried in their vineyard. They dig for it everywhere but find nothing; yet, with the soil thus turned, the vineyard soon bears a great crop of grapes, and they learn that “the blessing lies in hard work and not in gold.” This is experience that produces wisdom (Erfahrung) as distinct from experience that supplies information (Erlebnis), and it can be “passed on” in tales like this one (etymologically “tradition” means “to pass on”). However, according to Benjamin, such experience, such passing on, is now impoverished: “Who still meets people who really know how to tell a story?”5 This old kind of knowledge is collective—a good thing for Benjamin—but he does not admit that it is also patriarchal. Moreover, as is often the case in critical theory, Benjamin projects a legendary past when subjectivity and society were somehow integral in order to cast modernity as a fall from such grace. And here he keys this breakup to the trauma of World War I: “Many people returned from the front in silence. Not richer but poorer in communicable experience.” For Benjamin the wise speech of the old father has succumbed to the stunned muteness of the young soldier. “A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape on which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.”6
Benjamin describes the fall in a litany of reversals: moral experience is undermined by corruption, economic experience undercut by inflation, physical experience undone by hunger.7 Then, in the major turn in the text, he embraces this poverty, and so bids farewell to the very tradition of experience that was lamented only a moment before. It is this transvaluation (Nietzsche is on his mind as well as Marx) that enables Benjamin to advocate for modernist artists, writers, and architects who are able “to start from scratch.” However, his list of such “constructors” is unexpected: he mentions artists such as the Cubists and Paul Klee, writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Paul Scheerbart, and architects such as Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier— odd couples all. Even though Benjamin knew of the Russian Constructivists from his visit to Moscow in winter 1926–27, he does not invoke exemplary figures like Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. Clearly his concern is with the situation in Western Europe, one that was shipwrecked, not post-revolutionary.8 (figs. 0.1, 0.2)
Apart from impoverished experience, what unites his different constructors? For one thing they all “reject the traditional, solemn, noble image of man.” For Benjamin this image enfolds a bourgeois subjectivity, a deep psychology, which they discard as outmoded. For example, Klee designs his figures schematically, as though on a “drawing board”; “they have no inwardness, and that is what makes them barbaric.” At stake here, then, is not a visionary order to be engineered so much as a bare life to be endured, not “the new man” of utopian modernists like the Constructivists so much as “the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present.
0.1 PAUL KLEE, Fleeing Ghost, 1929. Oil on canvas, 35 ¼ × 25 inches. The Art Institute of Chicago.
0.2 EL LISSITZKY, The New Man, from Figurines: The Three-Dimensional Design of the Electro-Mechanical Show “Victory over the Sun,” 1920–21, published 1923. Lithograph, 21 × 17 ⅞ inches. The Museum of Modern Art.
For Benjamin modern architecture is most forthright in its rejection of interiority as inwardness. Although he acknowledges the utopian dimension of glass architecture as advanced by Scheerbart and others, here the material signifies transparency, which he pits against the opacity of the bourgeois interior stuffed with private mementoes. “Objects made of glass have no ‘aura’,” Benjamin avers. “Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of possession.”11 In short, modern architects such as Walter Gropius “create rooms in which it is hard to leave traces.” And yet not everything is coldly objective in his account. In fact, at this point Benjamin offers a wildly dialectical appraisal of technology: even as it has produced “a force field of destructive torrents,” it has also released a fantastic array of creative possibilities. Like the nineteenth-century caricaturist J. J. Grandville (another Benjamin favorite), fantastical writers like Scheerbart explore “how our telescopes, our airplanes, our rockets can transform human beings. . . into completely new, lovable, and interesting creatures.”12
This transformative imagination is also at work in mass culture, especially in early Disney films. “The existence of Mickey Mouse is such a dream for contemporary man,” Benjamin claims. “His life is full of miracles—miracles that not only surpass the wonders of technology but make fun of them.” In his account Mickey cartoons are so popular because they offer “tremendous relief” to Europeans buffeted by catastrophic war, intensive industrialization, and economic disaster. Magically in these animations “a car is no heavier than a straw hat and the fruit on the tree becomes round as quickly as a hot-air balloon.” It is thus not only modernist artists like Klee who teach us “how to survive”; so too do cartoon characters like Mickey, and nowhere more so than in early films such as Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie (both 1928). With only a few words of squeaky dialogue, each movie is a symphony of onomatopoeic barbarisms in which almost everything becomes an object or an instrument of magical transformation. (fig. 0.3) Yet in a prior fragment on Mickey Benjamin makes a darker point about such metamorphosis: “Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being.”13 And further: “Here we see for the first time that it is to have one’s arm, even one’s body stolen,” and still endure. It is then that Benjamin delivers his initial version of the key line: “In these films mankind makes preparations to survive civilization.”14
There is more to say about his extraordinary sketch of a positive barbarism, but perhaps this is enough for me to present my thesis for this book. Like everyone else, Benjamin thought that the worst had come with World War I, with “the tiny, fragile human body” caught “in a force field of destructive torrents.” But the worst had not come; it did not arrive until the mass deaths of World War II, the Holocaust, and the hydrogen bomb. Only then did the positive barbarism that Benjamin glimpsed in modernist art, architecture, and literature become a necessity. Only then were artists and writers truly forced “to start from scratch, to make a new start, to make a little go a long way.” Yet, in these extreme circumstances, what means could they hope to find? What ground could they claim with any conviction? What but the most basic and the most brutal?15
0.3 Walt Disney Studio, Steamboat Willie, 1928.
I am concerned with the turn, from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely, as manifest in the work of the Frenchmen Jean Dubuffet and Georges Bataille, the Dane Asger Jorn, the Italian-Scot Eduardo Paolozzi, and the Swedish-American Claes Oldenburg. Each of these figures proposes a different version of brutal aesthetics, one that pares art down or reveals it to be already bare, so that they might begin again after the compound devastations of the time. To what ends exactly? Why does Dubuffet invent the category of art brut? What does Bataille seek in the cave paintings at Lascaux? Why does Jorn populate his Cobra canvases with denatured figures? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous assemblages of industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake cheap products from urban scrap?
“To begin again” is an oxymoron, and the contradiction shows in these projects. My figures aim for a foundational approach, only to find an equivocal one; they claim a clean slate, only to discover an overwritten one. Like Robinson Crusoe (whom Dubuffet and Oldenburg adopt as a persona), each washes up on an island of his own devising, only to find that it is less safe terrain than treacherous ground. There tricky questions will soon confront us: How could Dubuffet imagine an art that is “unscathed” by culture? What did Bataille hope to unlock in “the enigma” of prehistoric representations of animal and man? Why did Jorn picture political crises in the form of “human animals”? How did Paolozzi pick out a path to survival in the destruction all around him? And why did Oldenburg stake his desire for metamorphosis in junk?
My group includes two philosophers, Benjamin and Bataille, two painters, Dubuffet and Jorn, and two sculptors, Paolozzi and Oldenburg, yet they range over these disciplines in ways that transform them significantly. All the artists are also innovative writers: one object of positive barbarism is language, which they treat as both a tool and a target (their texts are full of invented terms, mangled words, and other linguistic barbarisms).16 And some venture into philosophy or suggest that art already qualifies as such (painting can be a vehicle for philosophy, Dubuffet argued, and Oldenburg suggests the same for sculpture). Several of my figures are connected personally as well. Dubuffet alone was acquainted with Bataille, whom he read, and friendly with Jorn, about whom he wrote (Jorn returned the favor), and he influenced Paolozzi, who studied his art brut collection in Paris, as well as Oldenburg, who did the same in Chicago (Dubuffet was a role model for both artists).17 More important is this commonality: each figure proposes a different ground for brutal aesthetics.
In the first instance this ground is a positing of a beyond or a before to official culture. Thus for Dubuffet art brut falls outside the history of art, while for Bataille cave painting precedes it. Both thus claim a zero degree of art, one free of basic conventions of making and viewing; for them art brut and cave painting even undercut “the primordial convention” that art is “made to be beheld.”18 However, what appears as an ur-beginning can open on to a mise-en-abyme. Perhaps this goes with the territory: most of my figures are riddled by questions of origin—the origin of art and representation, of humanity and sexuality, of law and sovereignty—that are contradictory or at least enigmatic in nature. And sometimes in the face of these riddles they propose extreme notions, such as the brut in Dubuffet or the transgressive in Bataille, that qualify as limit concepts, that is, as ideas that point to a place where thought cannot go (for reasons ideological or historical or both). Sometimes, too, these limit concepts deliver them into double binds. Dubuffet projects various others as alien to culture, such as the child and the insane, only then to acculturate them; and Bataille thrills to transgression, only then to acknowledge that it serves to rein-scribe the law. Often, to borrow a Bataillean term, these projects are “impossible,” and yet this impossibility holds an interest of its own.19
0.4 JEAN DUBUFFET, Le prince charmant (Prince Charming), 1946. Oil and mixed media on canvas. Private collection.
In the second instance (which is the first in order of practice) my artists seek a ground in brute materiality. (fig. 0.4) For example, Dubuffet mixes in dirt, pebbles, and asphalt in his haute pâte paintings, while Oldenburg stuffs kapok into muslin and vinyl to make his soft sculptures. In doing so Dubuffet erodes the basic distinction of figure and field in painting, while Oldenburg counters the fundamental expectation that sculpture be vertical and stable. Often this partial undoing of the object induces a partial undoing of the subject (both artist and viewer), and sometimes this operation is cast in terms of regression. Dubuffet was greeted as a cacaïste, Oldenburg described his early sculpture as “shit art,” and Paolozzi saw his object-making as a “mud language.” But this regression is not necessarily a reduction. According to Freud, the infant does not distinguish much between a turd, a penis, a baby, and a gift; that is, the anal zone is a site of symbolic transformation, and so it is often in brutal aesthetics as well.20 This is to suggest that sheer materiality and semiotic metamorphosis are not opposed in this art. In fact just the opposite obtains: Dubuffet, Jorn, Paolozzi, and Oldenburg all show us how a substance can motivate a sign and how a sign can transform a substance.21 (fig. 0.5)
