This is my
Goodreads review
of Johanna Drucker's
Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity.
Feeling horny? Grab this book and flip to page 153. You'll find a photo of Family Romance, a "mixed media" piece comprised of four half-realistic, fully naked mannequins representing mom, dad, bro and sis.
Really need your hands free while you ogle? Break the spine of the book along this page; that way it'll lay flat on the table all by itself. Or, if you live in Southern California, you can head to the Central Library in LA and grab their copy, which has already had its spine broken in precisely this spot and is prone to fall open to precisely this page and this image.
I hesitate to add, " . . . for precisely this purpose," because there is no way I could know for sure what the "purpose" of the spine-breaker was, no way to know if this purpose was shared or how widely, no way to know if there was in fact any purpose at all. Among hundreds of LAPL books I've checked out, dozens have had broken spines. I can't remember another one that had an image of nude children anywhere in it, let alone precisely where the spine was broken; but let's imagine, in a mashup of the Infinite Monkey Theorem with Lacan's Missing Signifier, that there is at least one other book in these particular stacks that would seem, to me, to depict nude children in a semi-realistic manner, and that there is at least one other person in Southern California who would agree with me that this is what it depicts. Were this all to be true, the book I happened to check out wouldn't be special even in this regard. All that would be special about it from my standpoint, perhaps, is that I happened to read some other inscrutable, overlong art-crit book which mentioned this one favorably, my interest was piqued, I swapped one for the other at the circulation desk, and I was unlucky (lucky?) enough to find my latest heist literally falling open to an unusally pungent image before I was able to read a single word. This is all that I ought to be certain of. Nothing I can observe about the book proves anything further.
This has been my inner rationalist speaking. My inner empiricist is not as sanguine. I was a library security guard during the early days of the internet and I found that lots and lots of people go to the library solely to look at things they're not able (or not allowed) to look at otherwise. I was an adolescent male during the very early days of the internet; I am now an adult male who is, I assure you, attracted exclusively to adult women; and I have had anytime access to the post-implosion internet for a long time. I think that the mom and dad of Family Romance aren't going to . . . work for most people like me. I think that this spine did not break itself and that it most likely was broken for the sake of the children.
What has any of this to do with "reviewing" the present book?
The last thing I want is for authors and artists to be held responsible for the ill deeds of nameless, faceless library patrons. If you declared that author and artist here are "complicit" in pedophilia, you would have a certain kind of point, but I don't think you would actually want to live in a world where that kind of reasoning carries the day. I certainly do not want to live in a world where any court of law would buy my story about the broken spine, even as I myself remain convinced of it. What I want is expansive civil liberties and a very high epistemic threshhold for curtailing them. And I want virtual places like this one, where bloated conjectures thrown out of court can be haltingly floated into the public square while all the other armchair art-philosophers reach for their squirtguns and slingshots.
In the padded cell of art-crit, expansive civil liberties are exercised profligately and defended courageously, and there is no shortage of playful conjecture; but I do fear that the prevailing epistemic threshhold is far too low, if there is one at all.
Drucker here practices the kind of criticism that I would be practicing if I, based on my ill-fated trip to the library, labeled Family Romance as a "pedophilic" artwork. There is only one difference: pedophilia is highly stigmatized and harshly punished everywhere a hard copy of this book is likely to show up; whereas "complicity" and its innumerable epiphenomena are mere rhetorical ciphers for art-critters to bicker over endlessly with no expectation of resolution and no fear of consequences for libelous (or just plain idiotic) statements. If an offense is harshly punished, so too false accusations of that offense; and if not, then not.
You object: The book consists almost entirely of laudations, not "accusations." What about that? Laudations can be false, as can accusations; we might suspect certain false laudations and certain false accusations to have common etiologies; conventionally, however, laudations cannot be "libelous." It's certainly possible to construct a farfetched hypothetical wherein what I am calling a false laudation does inflict reputational harm on its mark; but this merely suggests that one person's "laudation" turned out to be another's "accusation." I take that not to be the case here. When it's Positive Vibes Only, we are left without the conventional epistemic safety net that Liberal Democracies have settled upon to deal with false public ascriptions of action and intent. Yes, it feels heavy-handed to say it that way. It feels (and is) heavy-handed to compare freewheeling art criticism to false accuasation of a crime. But the only actual difference is the severity and poignance of the matters at hand. Epistemically and dialogically there is no difference.
I'm sure this argument is underwhelming if you serially bake yourself into cakes or sew pillows shaped like buttocks, but I don't know how else to parse the assertion, e.g., that the artwork blessing the cover of the book "plays with the inconceivable unreality of a staged image, daring us to believe in the fantasy it projects." I thought it was a pretty weak dare, hardly bold enough to be worth taking. Similarly, I don't know how else to parse the assertion, mere pages later, that another artist's works inherently "are works of spectacle, made for consumption," that "to characterize this work as a critique . . . would be extremely difficult." Nothing seems to be stopping Drucker from "characterizing" artworks pretty much however she wants. Why not? I am suggesting that no one is going to feel litigious as long as these ascriptions enhance rather than harm their reputation. That explains why the book was able to be published but not why it was able to be written.
For Drucker, media imagery permeates life widely and deeply enough as to permit most any contemporary artwork to be read in light of it, and to ascribe meanings and intents on this basis.
"We are so inhabited by the images of media life and so complicit with their fascination that taking them apart would serve very little function. How does one undo the image according to which the very terms of self and culture are constructed? An impossible task, like perceiving oneself as whole from within the embodied mind. We are fully interpolated subjects."
In this respect she has indeed sold short those more skeptical, "oppositional" semioticians from the golden age of Word Salad, those who simply can't abide such notions as that
"the function of aesthetics is to understand the way thought appears and is preserved in sensible form,"
or that
"reading cultural artifacts for what they conceal and how, as well as for what they reveal, is a crucial analytic instrument in understanding the social production of meaning and symbolic value in cultural systems,"
or that in
"the realm of symbolic discourse...representation constructs our shared, imaginary sense of the real."
If "fully interpolated subjects" can neither "oppose" nor "undo" their self-consitutive image environs, then what possible basis is there for thinking that we can "read" these images for "concealed" or "revealed" content? How on earth are we to simply decode "sensible form" to reveal the "thought" which it "preserves?"
Drucker has no positive account of this; there is only a negative account of the conceits to "oppositional resistance" and "oppositional critique." But the proverbial fish who doesn't know about water is no more able to "read" the water he swims in than to "critique" it. There is nothing even in a VISA logo, e.g., which says any one thing unequivocally, just as there may be nothing in a broken book spine to indicate precisely how or why it was broken; nothing to record the amount of time the book has been open to that page; nothing to record the location of the "reader's" hands while looking at that page; and so on.
Dare I say, also, that with 8 billion people in the world, someone somewhere is not "sharing" in your "imaginary sense of the real." If you want to be sure to find them you can look on the other side of the globe, as McLuhan did, e.g., but nowadays you probably don't have to (just like he predicted). Maybe just start with the public library and work out from there.
(A friend reports that certain algorithms previously thought to yield repetitive results ad infinitum suddenly became unpredictable once sufficient computing power existed to iterate them many billions of times.)
For Drucker, the foremost problem with those ever-oppositional
"aesthetics of negativity"
is that such theories and theorists
"never had a language for form in which material properties and their aesthetic appeal could be appreciated,"
not unless the artwork in question
"served some other "critical" purpose."
But this privileging of some such "purposes" over others is undue. After all,
"moral, political, and critical issues are equally rooted in belief systems that operate on tenets of faith. We've just come to assume that "political" values somehow possess, by their secular quality, a different relation to symbolic formations"
as compared with those more overtly faith-based "beliefs."
Drucker's tack here
"isn't to engage in celebration of religious works but to defamiliarize a habit of thought accustomed to construe the symbolic engagement of art with "politics" as more real than that of its engagement with other belief systems."
In other words,
"modern secularization shifted the values that fine art's autonomy was supposed to serve, not the role it was to play. "
Indeed, this "symbolic engagement" with "politics" or with any other "belief system" can only be as "real" as can symbolic life writ large; hence the "critical" repression of "material properties" and "aesthetic appeal" to save maximum space for oppositional politicking was never as virtuous or as rational as it purported to be.
This point hits its mark squarely enough that the text might have broken off right here, or at any number of other early junctures, and would be better for it. Instead there follows nearly two hundred pages of question-begging laudation, a professorial love letter to "symbolic engagement," signed, YOU'LL ALWAYS BE REAL TO ME. That is the whole problem.
The thesis of "fully interpolated subjects," somehow able to "read" but not to "oppose," is the thesis that guides Drucker's parsing of not just "millennial aestheticism" but also of seminal abstractionism. In her account,
"Material indices and thematic threads are as inherent in the language of abstraction as they were in realist and figurative modes of image making. ...
"Abstraction is dialogic, and the dialogue was with figurative reference, networked connections to the real context of meaning production."
But this "dialogic" parsing of modernist abstraction as latent or unwitting reference is not quite the chess move she thinks it is. Really it just throws us back on the semantics problem: What exactly is happening with and to "meaning" as it is transacted, now in "dialogue?" What are "intentions" but a subset of "meanings," subject to the same sorts of signal degradation as the rest? And of course the real "political" question (the properly political question) is: How much of "meaning" is politically bankable, and what are we willing to bank on it?
Drucker seems to think that the understanding of all "symbolic engagement" as equally (un)real sounds the death knell for the founding abstractionist ideologies; that the understanding of all contemporary artifacts of "figurative reference" as being necessarily-and-always in "dialogue" with every other such artifact leads inexorably to the conclusion that "the search for universal languages of form" was a fool's errand. Without necessarily wishing to recapitulate those ideologies or that search exactly as they unfolded a century ago, I would ask: what sort of "symbolic engagement" can reasonably and responsibly be read into a Rothko or a Pollock today? We should be willing to stake everything on our answer! We probably never will have to stake anything on it, and we can all be thankful for that! But if we are chilled by the very thought of stakes, we probably have the wrong answer.
If college students taking a final exam were presented some Rothko or Pollock and were railroaded (as many undoubtedly have been, perhaps not in these words) into reasoning their way inductively to arrive at those other, more familiar, more widely-circulating "symbols" the painting in front of them is nowadays in "dialogue" with, to transcribe such bits of this "dialogue" as the voice of God can be made out to articulate during this brief undertaking, and to say as best they can what it is about the work's "form" that enables or necessitates precisely this "dialogue" to manifest itself, what are the boundaries of reason and responsibility within which this exercise ought to be carried out? As my art-school cohort used to say, channelling the "oppositional" true-believers in their midst only to mock them: "What's at stake?" How much should we be willing to bet that any given student's exam will evince precisely that "imaginary sense of the real" which is "shared" rather than some merely "unreal" epiphenomena of individual standpoint?
Drucker's avowed art-loves as portrayed here indeed expand greatly the boundaries of reason and responsibility under which the student might venture to eavesdrop on and attempt to transcribe the "dialogue" among art-images. If exemplifying this expansion of leeway was one of her objectives here, then she has succeeded at least in this.
Family Romance may be an anomaly, but it's not an outlier. Ostensibly if Drucker can offer this work as illustrative of a wider phenomenon called "complicity" then it enjoys full membership in her symbolic world and it is in "dialogue," latently if not manifestly, with such other members as she has experienced. If so, then this furnishes a certain kind of contemporary viewer (my kind, who is left utterly cold by the conceptual turn) with some highly bankable observations and assertions about the whole media-saturated mess.
Start here:
A very traditional musician I sometimes work with claims of John Coltrane's music:
"It won't make you laugh, and it won't make you cry."
The rejoinder of course comes from LeRoi Jones, who reports his cohort's response to the charge that you can't dance to bebop:
"No, YOU can't dance to it."
To find the limits of this kind of ecological relativism, we need to go further; we need consider inlier-anomalies on the order of Family Romance.
So . . .
Can a pedophile whack off to Rothko? Perhaps. But why would he?
He may surprise us:
"No, YOU can't whack off to it."
Or, unsarcastically:
"If you feel nothing for this music, you need a soul transplant. I'll perform it."
(Near paraphrase of something my college wind ensemble conductor actually said to us in rehearsal.)
As always, there's no accounting for taste, except when there is. I have seen people sit on drums and drum on chairs. Neither is routine but both are at least familiar and even expected in certain situations. Construing this as a matter of taste doesn't totally work. When faced with actions themselves, now, as opposed to mere symbolic residues of prior actions, the prospect of "reading" them as somehow in "dialogue" with each other suddenly is much less appealing. We have pretty good Bullshit Detectors for actions; less so for words and thoughts. And we are not even dealing with words and thoughts when we confront some canonical artifact of Drucker's "millennial aestheticism" but with something further yet down the proximate causal chain, hence something even less amenable to folk-psychological Bullshit Detection:
namely,
the "symbolic" aftermath of some action;
the action being the aftermath of some purported cognition;
the cognition being the aftermath of our purported "full interpolation" in and by media;
media being, now, one member larger in number, i.e. x + 1 ;
and the circle of image-life being, finally, ripe for recapitulation, i.e. re-interpolation.
Of course x was so large to begin with that adding 1 to it is quantitatively negligible; but in the "dialogical" realm the humongousness of x means that we get a humongous dialogue payout, 2x + 1 , simply by entering one new art-image into dialogue with all those which preexist it. As easy as it is to create an image, to account for its entry-into-dialogue is pragmatically impossible. It jus' ain't gonna happen. So, the purported "fullness" of our own "interpolation" by media is not matched by a corresponding ability to parse the fullness of dialogue. We can hardly catch a glimpse at it at all, let alone harness it as an "analytic instrument." That's crazy talk!
Hence the latent pedophilic aspect of Family Romance is just that: it remains dialogically latent, not manifest, even after it has in fact been manifested, now in deed rather than mere word, thought, or image, at least once, somewhere; and even after some third party has publicly noted the fact. Yet in this deed there is, somehow, no "complicity" of artist or author, even though their actions did, in a manner of speaking, make the later actions of the spine-breaker possible. How tf can that be?
Mainly it's because there is (for now) a prevailing social and legal norm of "free expression" in the location where all of this transpired; and if you've read this book and/or are reading this far into my "review," then this norm almost certainly prevails in your Current Location as well. The norm of Free Expression (particularly the legal norm!) is quite inconvenient for the aesthetic Intentionalist: the enshrinement of free expression stands as monument to the realization (learnt the hard way!) that seemingly simple "intentions" transmitted "symbolically" can be (and probably will be) badly misparsed by at least a few recipients. Common sense turns out to be uncommon. Beyond that, the only remaining defense is convention. Only convention per se prevents us from labeling, say, a monochrome painting or atonal string quartet as "pedophilic"; but mere convention turns out not to be reliable enough either, not when the offense is severe and the consequences of an accusation being false are as severe as those of it being true. So, there is the pragmatic compromise of so-called Free Expression: we resolve to "protect" expression from the (mis)uses and (mis)parsings of unsensible, unconventional auditors; this so that expressors will not simply be cowed into silence or banality by the actions of the least competent actors. But this norm is profoundly anti-intentionalist. This norm suggests that we would far rather see the ascriptions of intention chilled than to see expression itself chilled. This norm fails to permit of distinction between latent and manifest "dialogue"; it ackowledges public actions only; and this opens a backdoor for the unsensible among us to do the expressing rather than the parsing. It permits libel to travel under cover of art. The uncommonness of sense and the flimsiness of convention are left untouched by a regime of Free Expression. Perversity cannot be elided, it can only be rechanneled. We don't get fewer problems this way, or even different problems; what we get is the same problem (senselessness), always "latent" and now "manifested," now as the (initial) making of images rather than the (later) parsing of them.
Family Romance can be banished as an outlier case only by pathologizing a certain class of unconventional subjects, or by excluding such perverse sexual desires from the class of "thoughts" which can "appear in sensible form," or perhaps by banishing all sexual and sensual desire to the outlier realm of "low" or "base" instincts as against the "higher" potentialities of human "cultural systems." Failing all of that, it's hard to imagine a more apt case of the chain of signifiers coming unclasped than in the juxtaposition of the unaroused, mildly unnerved normie with the terrified but ecstatic pedophile. And I think it's just as obvious that media saturation, permeation and homogenization are more apt to "produce" the "meaning" of pedophilia than to "produce" the phenomenon of pedophilia itself. There have always been pedophiles and there always will be. Presumably drums and chairs are almost (but not quite) as old as pedophilia; presumably, if you are in need of both drum and chair but can locate only one or the other, you have an obvious workaround; but if you are sexually attracted only to precisely the kind of person you're not allowed to have, then it seems you will have much more trouble redirecting your desires simply for the sake of social cohesion. These are very different sorts of problems, but the ephemeral "dialogue" of every image with every other image has a way of flattening out the differences that really matter. So too under a regime of expansive civil liberties, the freedom to drum on a chair and the freedom to imagize the human body are mere interchangeable instances of protected "expression." Their implied equivalence tesifies to our Liberalism; but if we think they are pragmatically or ecologically equivalent, then we don't deserve to be the objects of our own tolerance.
I reiterate at this juncture that my objectives here are neither authoritarian nor draconian. I endorse neither the restriction of expression nor the punishment of creators for miscarriages of symbolism. This is my long-settled personal belief, no doubt irrational to some degree and coming before rather than after I began digging through library books in search of rationalizations for it; but I would point out, gently, that the civil libertarian position is the only one that is coherent with the understanding of "symbolic engagement" as chaotic and ephemeral; for at that point, there not only is no sense in attempting to restrict the expression of meaning, there is no way to do it effectively; and in the case of fully "symbolic" communication, there is no hope of rationally teasing out the degrees of responsibilty borne by sender and receiver.
The effort to do so anyway, and to render punishment on this basis, creates a fragility in N.N. Taleb's sense: it banks everything on a near-certainty, it gets along perfectly this way for a very long time, until inevitably it falls into a crevass in the culture's "symbolic dialogue;" there is a catastrophic failure of justice, for which the draconians deny blame: their "symbolic" instruments are backed by libraries full of peer-reviewed publication, and therefore are "the best we've got." They know how to tell what a VISA logo means. In their zeal the draconians fail to understand that you don't want to bank anything important on a chain of signifiers that is missing a link or three. The unitary understanding of "symbolic engagement," i.e. as tractable and direct, is quite coherent with authoritarian and draconian worldviews. Of course it does not unequivocally indicate their presence; nor, ideally, should the prestige of a worldview bear in any way upon empirical inquiries which may bolster or discredit it. But symbolic tractability and authoritarianism are coherent worldviews, as are symbolic ephemerality and libertarianism. That is all.
Even as the ephemeral chaos of symbolic negotiation rages all around me and my half-rational civil libertarianism, there is one latent strand of "dialogue" between heroic-period abstractionism and Family Romance-era conceptualism which seems fully and utterly bankable to me in a way that such things usually are not: even after dispensing with convention and common sense alike, you still have a very hard time coaxing one out of the other, no matter how you try to do it. Merely to be in "dialogue" does not entail any particular ontological commonality, nor any ecological commonality. For Yellow Painting and Family Romance to be in some sense in "dialogue" does not make either any better suited to the uses to which the other is put; and I think we actually can catch a glimpse at uses: we actually can apply our folk-psychological BS detector at least to those "uses" which happen to be "actions," provided (1) we have actually observed them firsthand, and (2) we abide by courtroom canons of admissible evidence. This is quite unlike the symbolic discourse of one image with every other image; we can never actually observe or understand that, and no jury would believe us if we said we had.
An Ecology Of Art pairs much more comfortably with Free Expression than does a Semiotics of Art: ecologically, the maker may be granted their intentions, and the phantom pedo granted theirs; both are merely using some close-at-hand item; it may in fact be the same item without the two becoming mutually implicated in some ephemeral "dialogue" or "negotiation" that neither has assented to or is even aware of. There is no denying that the item and the environment alike afford multiple intentions and uses. Presumably, empirical inquiry at scale would reveal that the pedo's "use" is esoteric while the maker's is endemic; and a consideration of prevailing social norms would show that the pedo's use is highly stigmatized while the maker's use is highly conventional . . . and with Free Expression on our side, we may even, if we are so inclined, question the wisdom of those norms! I have done plenty of that questioning over the years, but in this case I'm happy to leave things as they are!
Admittedly, it's only when we think we already know the answers to these secondary empirical questions that the ecological view of the primary acts of creation and reception is satisfying. I think I already understand perfectly what has happened to my library book; I think I understand, to the extent required, how libraries work and how pedophilia works; the view of the artworld as an "ecology" of "art-users," then, is thereby affirmed by a clearcut case of "use,"
because the fact of use is clearcut.
My ability to place this use in a social scheme of conventional and stigmatized, endemic and esoteric is likewise clearcut, and this is what enables me (it is
all
that enables me)
to believe that "use" has been made and that I can tell what the use has been. Conversely, if you asked me to what "use" the other hundreds of unsoiled, uncreased pages have been put by myriad unknown, unseen library "users," the only rational guess I could offer would be: they have used the book for what I have used it for, which is what libraries generally are used for. That guess is not likely to be wrong, says the pragmatist. But the antifragilist retorts: I'm not banking anything important on it being right. The best symbolic instruments we've got are only good enough for unimportant matters.
