March 08, 2007
Of all the profoundly influential twentieth-century manfestoes—Surrealist, Dada, Situationist—Jean Beaudrillard's In The Shadow Of The Silent Majorities was perhaps the most proleptic, keenly foreshadowing how the media society would evolve. Reflecting on his death on Tuesday in Paris, it seems nearly 25 years after his seminal publication that in our electronic media society—with endless search possibilities and terabytes of free data storage—we nevertheless stumble constantly with content devoid of meaning and meaning devoid of content. What's that? Baudrillard's seminal work teaches much about our devolution into a (to steal from Guy Debord) society of the spectacle.
Thus I began reading Peter Schjeldahl's review of the Jeff Wall show with some concern, for his subtle tirade against Wall's love of critical theory strikes the reader as both reductionist and tedious. While spouting trendy jargon and regurgitating trite theory of course consistently remains fashionable in art history circles, Wall takes his vast knowledge of theory to an entirely higher dimension in his practice. I initially worried my own review neglected those stunning landscapes and cityscapes that Schjeldahl so admires and markedly prefers to the "erudite" Wall who "imports art-historical and ideological arcana" and to the "director" Wall who "deploys Brechtian alienation effects." I then noted with additional worry my use of the term "alienation effect" in my last two reviews. But I came to understand: Schjeldahl fears the message underlying Wall's most complex works, which we may in homage to the dead lift from Baudrillard's American publisher, Semiotext(e): "In a media society meaning has no meaning anymore, communication merely communicates itself." Schjeldahl in contrast laments that "in theory-drunk circles of the period, any sort of aesthetic appeal could be regarded as a stratagem of 'late capitalist' ideology or some other wrinkle of malign social power." Consequently, so Schjeldahl, "A lot of preachily condescending work resulted, and Wall was not exempt." Well, perhaps. But in particular, Schjeldahl seems vexed, annoyed and peeved by The Storyteller:
Schjeldahl writes: "Six negligently clothed Native Americans lounge under or, on a grassy and wooded slope, beside a highway overpass." Comment: In the North America of 1986 that I recollect, many Native Americans and non-Native Americans (i.e. white, black, Hispanic and Asian) dressed like this. Schjeldahl: "The historical irony—of a tribal custom maintained on expropriated and ruined land—is painfully obvious and, coming from a mandarin white artist, borderline presumptuous." Come again? I recall I wrote simply that Wall rephrases Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863), placing the picnickers of Manet's painting aside a concrete bridge in relative squalor. Here the native people of Western Canada are depicted in an animated scene, one of rapt attention around a pathetic little fire that further underscores the wretchedness of their situation, divorced from modern society that whizzes by unseen on the bridge above.
I guess as a mandarin white observer—who coincidentally revisited several struggling Native American reservations in New Mexico last year—I am likely not qualified enough to comment further on this scene. Schjeldahl: "The self-conscious poses of the characters seem meant to undercut easy interpretation." My take: Generally this can be seen to be the mark of an artistic genius. Schjeldahl admits that "if we detect the odd quotation from a quotational painting by Manet, we may go straight to the head of the class. If you like this type of heady gaming, good luck. It exasperates me." We need not Baudrillard to analyze this ahistorical and obnoxious wheezy gasp, for there are several age-old art history terms for paying homage to virtuoso paintings. So here is a reproduction—the Internet affords us infinite reproductions while the auction houses fetch tens of millions for an original—of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe:
Rather than tediously comparing and contrasting these two works of art, I might instead reproduce paragraph 183 of Debord's Society of the Spectacle, since my initial purpose was to pay homage to the dead: "Culture grew out of the history which abolished the way of life of the old world, but as a separate sphere it is still no more than perceptible intelligence and communication, which remain partial in a partially historical society. It is the sense of a world which hardly makes sense." A world that still, one might note from yesterday's newspaper, has yet to pay billions in reparations to the Native Americans this side of the Canadian border, a world apart from that in these two works of art.
Stated differently, I think Schjeldehl simply seems lazy in his review: "I don't care. I've ceased to buy whatever is being sold by the picture's maker, who seems to be engaged in special pleading as much for his right to manipulate me as for the cause of displaced Indians." But rather than further badger the New Yorker's critic, I'll skip his glib discussion of the rest Wall's of works. Perhaps Schjeldahl would have applauded Christopher Rauschenberg's photographs of Paris vis-a-vis those of Eugène Atget at the International Center of Photography last summer, for Rauschenberg's classical mimesis—his exacting reproductions of the cityscapes of Paris decades later—affords an easy analysis of a latter-day artist paying homage to a great master. What would Baudrillard say about that? He would certainly understand why Schjeldahl "gazed long and raptly at the wonderful textures of spongy grass....I love the look of that mighty overpass and would gladly toss out the figures to behold it without distraction." Baudrillard understood too well how those figures are invisible, having long ago disappeared.
Tags:
atget, Christopher Rauschenberg, guy debord, jean beaudrillard, jeff wall, moma, peter schjeldahl
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Posted on 3/8/2007
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