Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue 13. The Forgotten Surrealists: Belgian Surrealism Since 1924 |
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Sweet Dreams. Comptemporary Art and Complicity |
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Author: Jan Baetens Johanna Drucker, Sweet Dreams. Comptemporary Art and Complicity |
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The least one can say of Joahnna Drucker's new book is that it offers a couple of big surprises. First, because the author, most known for her groundbreaking work in the field of modern typography, broadens the scope of her research to the domain of the 'classic' visual arts of painting and sculpture. Second, and this is of course what matters, because the book has the explicit aim to leave behind a certain idea of modernism and postmodernism, an idea that, for the author (a typically modernist artist and thinker herself) has asphyxiated creation itself. This is an important shift in Drucker's work, and the reader who is more familiar with her commitment to avant-garde typography may feel here the first signs of an epistemological earthquake.
In short, Drucker charges modernist and postmodernist art theory (one of the most interesting aspects of this thesis is that it stresses the ideological and aesthetic continuity between both periods, at least if one focuses on their major theoreticians) with dogmatism as well as with unworldliness. Dogmatism, for both modernist and postmodernist thinkers, reject all types of art that do not obey the notion of 'negativity' (a concept that relies heavily on medium-specific theories à la Greenberg and the Adornian critical theory tradition): art is defined in terms of antagonism, and the main victims of such a dogmatism are materiality on the one hand (Drucker brings well to the fore the conceptual 'superego' of modernist and postmodernist theory, and maybe of theory tout court ) and visual pleasure on the other hand (all positive feelings engendered by art being considered petty-bourgeois and therefore despicable). Unworldliness, since the plea for negativity is credited automatically with a political surplus value that its very sociological conditions (art as negativity flourishes best in academic circles and the subsidized art circuits that live in symbiosis with academia) prevent it from doing what it is supposed to do, namely to foster societal change. Yet art that stays far from the madding crowd cannot have any real impact, neither on the audience nor on society in general.
Drucker, undoubtedly, has a point here. The problem is, however, that this point, whatever its importance, is somewhat meager to fill a whole book. If Sweet Dreams had taken the form of a polemical refutation of authors, artists, works and texts, this problem might have been solved, but the attack Drucker is launching against the modernist and postmodernist 'grand narrative' of art as negativity does not exceed the level of general remarks (yes, all the people that deserve to be mentioned are there, but never one finds a close reading of their works and texts, as if we were asked to take immediately for granted the author's dissatisfaction with the way the art system is functioning today). In order to put some meat on the bones of her critique, Drucker puts forward the positive notion of 'complicity', which runs through the book as the sweet and kind opposite of negativity. Complicity, if I understand it adequately, is to be defined in terms of collaboration: with the audience, with the media system, with the various institutions, and finally with society itself. Yet, complicity does not mean for Drucker lack of critical attitude. In a kind of permanent paradox which makes the book very difficult to judge, complicity is also seen as the positive way of practicing the critical function of real art. Thanks to complicity, art becomes less unworldly, it offers positive alternatives to current and stereotyped ways of seeing, and manages therefore us to achieve what 'negativity' fails to do: to make us think in new and different ways.
Sweet Dreams has four chapters, but actually the book is split into two parts. Part one (chapters one to three) offers the theoretical background of the panorama of the contemporary forms of 'complicity' displayed in Part two (chapter four). It is always uncanny to read in the introduction of the book that the reader may skip the first chapters and leap immediately to part two. This is what happens here, and I think it is the symptom of a structural and theoretical flaw of the enterprise. Chapters one and three can indeed be skipped (what Drucker thinks of the regrettable effects of modernist and postmodernist theories is also explained in other parts of the book), whereas chapter four does not really propose a very clear-cut theory of 'complicity'.
What we are offered in Part two is a good survey of what was 'new' in the last decade of the 20 th century, i.e. of the art that no longer obeyed the rules of modernist and postmodernist negativity, but the way this material is presented remains too impressionistic. Fifteen smaller sections present fifteen aspects of complicity, but besides the fact that 15 is always too little or too much (the old semiotician that slumbers in me whispers me that 4 should be the limit of any theoretical taxonomy), the concepts associated with complicity are so vague and so general that one has the impression of drowning in a typically postmodernist 'anything-goes' environment. This does not mean that the survey given by Drucker is not refreshing (although 90 % of the art-work she is commenting seems without any interest, to put it mildly). But Part two is more a sample sheet than a theory, and since Drucker does not reject theory as such, I think she misses a good opportunity to sketch a way out of the old (post)modernist stances on art and society and for this reason the attempt to criticize theory remains rather hollow. |
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