Noah Berlatsky: "Artists Write: The Last Shall Be First"

Proximity continues its Arts Theory Column, edited by Mark Staff Brandl, with an essay by Noah Berlatsky: "The Last Shall Be First."

Most traditional economic theory is built around the concept of scarcity -- the idea that there's not enough stuff to go around. In The Accursed Share (1946), famed theorist Georges Bataille inverts this; life, he says, is characterized, not by too little, but by too much. Life is excess -- it pushes onto every bleak rock, every cranny; it spends itself in profligate sexual activity and in the ultimate profligacy of death. And it throws out unneeded economic activity; too much fat, too many children, too much grain in the stores, too many bodies in the street, too much creative energy shaking its collective tuchas on the YouTube videos.

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For Bataille, it is the business of life and of society to consume this "accursed share". The paradigmatic way to do this is through sacrifice; the burning of goods -- or, better, of lives -- with no recompense. Through sacrifice, Bataille argues, the blasphemous impulse to turn other creatures, other lives, into productive things, is reversed, acknowledged as false and evil. To respect the universe, abundance must be spent, not horded. The Aztecs, in burning men, honored life.

The bloody Aztec rituals were paradigmatic; the North American Indian custom of potlatch, on the other hand, was, for Bataille, a sinister travesty. In the potlatch, an Indian would give a valuable gift to a rival to demonstrate his own wealth and power. In response, a rival would have to give an even greater gift. This could go on and on, back and forth, and whoever ended by giving the greatest gift would show himself superior. Thus, squander was not in fact squander -- the winner did not lose his gift, but instead traded it for prestige, or rank. Bataille thus notes contemptuously that potlatch "attempts to grasp that which it wished to be ungraspable, to use that whose utility it denied." By turning sacrifice into rank, Bataille believed, potlatch turns, not a part, but the whole of the universe to a servile thing.

...in the modern day, the avatar of Bataille's twisted potlatch is none other than the artist, in all his or her needy, self-deluding, miserly profligacy



Potlatch as such is now practiced in only a handful of places, and (to be remorselessly PC) one has to wonder whether Bataille's anthropological account really did the custom justice. Still, if Native Americans don't exactly recognize Bataille's potlatch, others, I think would. Who, after all, profligately spends time, energy, and resources in a remorseless quest for status and rank? Who grasps the sacred and turns it to the profane ends of thingness? Who wastes, not in the name of a sublime nothing, but in the pursuit of a soiled, excess something?

The answer is clear enough: in the modern day, the avatar of Bataille's twisted potlatch is none other than the artist, in all his or her needy, self-deluding, miserly profligacy. The artist hunkers down with her or his materials, practicing, practicing, practicing, wasting life in the pursuit of an entirely useless form--and for what? Why to be noticed, admired, proclaimed a genius--in short, for rank. True, some artists, the least debased, seek, not some subcultural caché, but simply money. They are guilty only of the typical human failing; the desire to turn bits of life into things; to treat the sacred as a business proposition. Beyoncé and Rod Stewart are no more despicable than, say, Bill Gates, or your average carpenter. But by far the vast majority of artists forswear (relatively) healthy capitalism for the putrid wallowing in essences; they desire to turn life itself "authenticity" into a bludgeon with which to beat their rivals. The Aztecs tore out hearts to offer to the Sun God; artists pour out heart and soul and offer it to Pitchfork reviewers.

That is not to say that all artists are inevitably defiled. On the contrary, if any contemporary figure attains to Bataille's ideal of pure sacrifice it is one particular kind of artist--that is, the failed artist. Note that by "failed" here, I do not mean the artist who has missed commercial success, but has underground cred or aesthetic bonafides, or who is discovered and lionized after his death. On the contrary. When I say "failed" I mean "failed." I mean an artist who profligately, copiously, obsessively works on creating objects that are, literally--by everyone and forever--unwanted. Creators of tuneless songs that never achieve dissonance; of ugly canvases too self-conscious to be outsider art; of doggerel verse too banal for even the high school literary magazine--in them, the excess of the universe is annihilated. Genius, love, life--are exchanged for neither lucre, nor cred, nor beauty, but are instead simply thrown away. Failed art is permanently wasted, and it is therefore sacred. Squatting amidst the gross outpouring of sublimity, the ugly, the thumb-fingered, the clichéd piece of crap, is alone sacred.

Proximity magazine here.

Artists Write: IDEAS DON'T MATTER: "How Literary Ideas Subvert and Vitiate Art" by John Link

Artists Write: Thinking While Making Things is the column of art theoretical writings by practicing artists, edited by Mark Staff Brandl, in Proximity magazine. This issue, Number 5, features "Ideas Don't Matter: How Literary Ideas Subvert and Vitiate Art" by John Link.

IDEAS DON'T MATTER: How Literary Ideas Subvert and Vitiate Art by John Link

The dirty little mandate of our "anything goes" art scene is that "everything" must revolve around ideas, must ultimately emulate some sort of literature. The connection between visual art and the literal can be obvious or it can be contrived or it can be plain silly, just as long as it is "there."

The literal need not be creative. Witness the great success of the Wim Delvoye's artwork Cloaca, tied not to poetry or other lofty forms of verbiage, but to the lowly documentary, though it purported to document the rather intellectual question of "bioethics."

Cloaca was exhibited in 2002 at the New Museum in NYC. The museum described it as a performative event "for bringing art and science closer together, by inviting us to examine the ways in which we think of our bodies as machines, at the same moment in our cultural evolution where the separation between real and virtual has grown tenuous ... a metaphor for a society that privileges the cerebral over the corporeal, exulting in the latter only when it can be packaged into a kind of perfection."

What form did this perfectly packaged idea take? "Cloaca was an elaborate installation of laboratory glassware, electric pumps, gauges, and plastic tubing, which must be kept running at all hours of the day and night in order to function properly ... requiring regular infusions of chemicals and enzymes to keep the digestive system functioning, as well as a constant internal temperature regulated by computer."

Not too clear about what all this bioethical stuff means? Now that everyone is obsessed with outcomes, wonder what this thing does? It shits, that's what. About 5 inches at a time. Like a potty trained baby, it delivered the expected product every day at the designated hour, from a spigot that vaguely resembled those found at Dairy Queen, to the applause of the gathered crowd if the delivery took place during days the exhibition was open. Each ceremony was terminated when a museum employee removed the artistic outcome from the exhibition area. The resultant turds sold for $1,000 each.

With all due respect to the prestige bestowed by having a show at the New Museum, an alien from Mars might say Cloaca looked like an elaborate high school science project mistaken as "new" artistic revelation. Is the New Museum too young to remember that Experiments in Art and Technology claimed this territory for "advanced" art in the middle of the last century? More to the point, what if Cloaca had been displayed as an untitled and unexplained abstract contraption? The enlightened class may be enchanted with ideas, but they still can't think for themselves; they require help from a narrative.

Serious art is seriously malicious: emerging art makes fools out of the greatest possible number of art experts. Its natural prey is found in those who form large and complacent groups secure in the belief they know what's what. Today that group is certain that ideas are the core of art.

In the late 19th century the French Academy turned out to be the vulgarians when they were finally destroyed by the best art of their time. Their domination of the art system of that day did not protect them from art's malice. Today's vulgarians hold high positions in our museums, galleries and publications, not at all unlike the members of the discredited Academy. Curiously, these powerful "taste makers" celebrate the same avant-gardism the Academy hated, as if that will protect them from the Academy's fate. But like their Academy predecessors, they have developed a high degree of comfort with mutually-held ideas and avoid the difficulties of looking for real innovation.

Genuine innovation evolves slowly and painfully, without leaving footprints that conform to commonly accepted rules, and therefore remains invisible to those who embrace such conventional wisdom. Today, that's because such academicians have tied themselves to the rule of ideas and take comfort in the certainty that satisfying this dictate can provide. However, beauty sheds rules, sheds criteria, sheds standards, sheds anything a priori to itself, including ideas and truth. It exists to be seen, felt, and absorbed, not ruminated upon. It is tied to materials, not ideas, and looks retro to those who assume (wrongly) that ideas were the essential ingredient of avant-gardist art when it was still a living force in the evolution of ambitious art.


John Link was born in 1942 and lives in Michigan. His work includes painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and digital media; it is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institute, Oregon State University, Golden State University, Clorox Company, Arthur Anderson & Co, California College of Arts and Crafts, Osaka University of the Arts, and Mitsubishi International Corporation. Articles about him have appeared in the Miami Herald, San Francisco Examiner, New Art Examiner, Los Angeles Times, Digital Video, Chicago Tribune, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He has written for Arts, New Art Examiner, Digital Video, New Work, American Craft, and Dialogue. He taught art and art history for 39 years, starting at Southern Illinois University and continued at Virginia Tech and Western Michigan University. He was department head at the two last institutions.