Bill Brown

Art, Administration, and the Poetics of Perpetuation

Those heralds of modernism Baudelaire and Poe were as artists the first technocrats of art.

-Theodor Adorno.

The gist of Jean Baudrillard’s The Conspiracy of Art (2005) can be gleaned from reports of his recent speaking tour, during which, as the New Yorker put it, he’s been scandalizing audiences “with the grandiloquent sweep of his gnomic pronouncements and his post-Marxian pessimism.” The scandal amounts to yet another collapse within (or of) the cultural order—the erasure of some last, faint line dividing aesthetic form from reality. “The art scene,” he proclaimed in Manhattan this past November, is an “obscene mask for the reality that all the world is trans-aestheticized. We have no more to do with art as such, as an exceptional form.” Diminished into “aesthetic value,” art “joins with reality, it joins with the banality of reality.” We thus witness “the very end of art.”[i]

These days, it’s never easy to know whether Baudrillard’s own banalities are, in a phrase, really for real; whether his own account of current “reality” simply enacts the scandal it means to describe; whether his obsessive attention to art doesn’t belie its soi-disant disappearance; and whether this isn’t (really) just one more way of proclaiming the (really passé) disappearance of the real. But you might accept much of his assertion while nonetheless imagining, more energetically, that the described occasion asks that art figure out (that it refigure) what art, reality, and the relation between them might be.[ii] You might imagine (within the grid of before and after, now and then) that among the remains of the cultural catastrophe there’s life yet—in some m.o. that is the will-to-ultramodernism.

Of course, the occasion (the “end of art”), far from prompting a frisson of novelty, has the feel of routine—of some compulsive repetition of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics or of Arthur Danto’s “end of the story” of Western art.[iii] Isn’t this (really) the next blip within modernism’s long durée—the perpetual fort/da by which art violates the very boundaries it asserts? The art world, after all, is a world where some “negation of the negation” always enables the obsolete an apparent return (while sustaining a “complicity which excludes the layperson”).[iv] It is a system whereby art stabilizes its perpetuity through a destabilizing process that allows it to make and remake the distinctions on which it depends . . . such as that between, say, art (“real art”) and reality. Art never needs Baudrillard to be belligerent about its own origins and ends.

“Despite its undeniable reality,” Niklas Luhmann argued (as he described the system of art among the systems of our ongoing modernity), art “constitutes another reality”; it “splits the world” into the real and the imaginary; and “the function of art concerns the meaning of this split.” [v] Why not say, instead, that the meaning of art concerns the function of this split—which is to say its organizational utility. Such a claim could amount to arguing that the meaning of art lies in its administration—its capacity to manage (formally or thematically, politically or ontologically) its distinction (from whatever art isn’t, from whatever isn’t art). My more particularizing intimation will be that distinct art (art which seeks to distinguish itself rather than the art which seeks to erode all such distinction) persists as the imaginary institution of some other temporality. It persists to perform the nonsynchrony of the now.

Whereas Luhmann isolates the system of art (in order to study the dynamics of its apparent self-isolation), Baudrillard really focuses on the world as such, on the ways that this world—“trans-aestheticized”—has become suffused with artistic effect, the ways that aesthetic sensation has become the basis of our mass-mediated daily lives. “Art has thoroughly entered reality. It is in museums and galleries, but also in trash, on walls, in the street. . . . [O]ur dominant culture [is] the vast enterprise of museographic reproduction of reality, the vast enterprise of aesthetic storage, re-simulation and aesthetic reprinting of all the forms that surround us.”[vi] The irony, then (within the long durée of modernism), resides in the fact that while the historical avant-garde may have been trying (c. 1917) to erode art’s autonomy, to break down the distinction between art and reality, reality seems to have gotten there first.[vii] Indeed, by 1917, the new marketing industry in the U.S. was already on its way to achieving a regime of “commodity aesthetics” (as it came to be called), anticipating that moment when “aesthetic production” would become integral to “commodity production.”[viii] Then again, insofar as the concept of art’s autonomy (Kant) developed alongside the emergence of modern consumer culture (say Josiah Wedgwood), it is as though aesthetics as such burgeoned in response to a newly trans-aestheticizing world.[ix]

This helps to explain neither the fantasy of art’s extinction nor some fact of art’s distinction. But it helps to explain the force with which art has worked (and often continues to work) to distinguish itself—traditionally, within the modernist routine, as the antagonist of mass culture. Nonetheless, as Beatriz Colomina (among others) has documented, the International Style (for instance) was “a myth sustained by the strategic deployment of mass culture advertising techniques,” a myth offering itself “for mass consumption in the form of multiple, relatively affordable, designer objects that were part of it: rugs, chairs, lamps, table, appliances, and so on.” [x] Wasn’t modernism meant to trans-aestheticize everyday life? Not only did MOMA exhibit Tupperware in 1956 as an instantiation of modern design; the products also became both iconically modernist and (via the Tupperware party) iconically middlebrow.[xi] It’s nothing if not predictable, then, that Ikea now serves as the current resource for satisfying our modernist nostalgia (v. John Photos, Ikea,1-5). Modernism names a longing that modernism sought both to enact and evade: the end of art—its realization—in a trans-aestheticized world.

This dialectic of modernism’s distance from and proximity to mass culture might be said to perpetuate the hyperpresence of Edgar Alan Poe (v. David Coyle, Big Poe), who looms just behind, right behind, the modernist revenant, the return of the barely repressed modernist endeavor. For Poe “stands simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the much-acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres,” connected with “juvenile tastes,” demeaned by the likes of Eliot and, before him, Henry James.[xii] Preternaturally, Poe performs the act of standing his ground astraddle dividing lines (between art and reality, art and the world, art and kitsch) that he could not even see.

***

What sophistry allows you to read that the meaning of art resides in its administration? Surely, whatever art is, it’s not administration. Our appreciation of art (indeed, let’s face it, our recognition of art) may indeed depend on institutions, and thus on the administrative work sustaining them. (Against the grain of the Foucauldian fashion for demonizing institutions—the fashion that energized the museal melodramas of the recent past—Mary Douglas’s How Institutions Think drew attention, not least, to the ways that institutions allow us to think).[xiii] But the proper administration of art must never confuse itself with artistic creation. The dangling computer cables, the staplers, memos, wastepaper baskets, pink receipts—these are the wads of daily life against which art assumes form, as form.

And yet, suspending art’s administration in medias res (Administrative Offices, HPAC) makes it clear that things, even in the midst of things, can assume, say, artistic proportion. The invitation to stop and to look, to stop and stare, prompts something like the photographic process whereby temporal rupture, the shot, brings space into a new register of visibility, released from the histories they nonetheless register. There, the all-but-empty vases, the shelves of folders (red and yellow, black and green), the stuff within and without a pencil holder—these clusters reassume their form as aesthetic form, distinct from the circuits of communication that they tirelessly support (v. Cream Co., Found Images, hpac). Transfixed, these objects have been transformed into things.[xiv] Accompanying the art of administration, here is the art in administration. It is the art that conceives a psychodynamic continuum, from, say, the involuntary accretions of administrative life to the obsessively accumulated ephemera that emerge as some thing else (v. Jasen James, Foil Pile) to the stacked collection of gold soap to anyone’s collection of Picasso (v. Michael Kiresuk / Marie Krane Bergman, Gold Soap Picasso).

Moreover, the office suspended in medias res might be said to mirror the historical importance of Cream Co. (Chicago): the drama of the artist’s dissolution into supporting networks—a drama that remains inseparable from the administrator’s role in sustaining collective production while preserving the authority of the author-function (to code that production as art within the modernist continuum). Beside the funk and frenzy of the Warholian factory (and what Baudrillard celebrates as the finitude, there, of art’s self-defeat [43-49]), Cream Co. (Chicago) radically reverts to the manufactory, reasserting the relevance of the human hand within reproduction, restaging homo faber (and the manual production of creation) within the theater of our digital age.[xv] All but needless to say, the very existence of such a modernist manufactory attests to the incompleteness of modernism.

Somewhere there Poe resides as a somewhat genius loci, pervading spirit and guiding deity, the first technocrat of art explaining his “modus operandi” as a philosophy of composition, dismissing any faith in “ecstatic intuition,” drawing attention to the “cautious selections and rejections,” “the painful erasures and interpolations,” the calculations underwriting “creation”—in short the administration of affective production .[xvi] The story of art, by Poe’s light, is a tale of ratiocination. Just as he represented, for Adorno, the way art “achieves opposition” to society “only through identification with that against which it remonstrates,”[xvii] so he continues to represent the rationalization whereby art effects sensation.

Fact or fantasy, Poe’s technocratic aspirations square with his infatuation with technology. Baudelaire demeaned and despised the photographic industry, the popularity of photography, and photography’s supposed claims to truth. But his beloved precursor Poe (repeatedly daguerreotyped) was enthralled by the medium, convinced that this “most extraordinary invention of modern science,” this transformation of the camera obscura (v. Michael Kiresuk, found image-camera obscura), disclosed “a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. The variations of shade, and the gradations of both linear and aerial perspective are those of truth itself in the supremeness of its perfection."[xviii]

Truth lay in the verity of the sun’s own act. Just as Niépce had designated his inaugural work heliographie, so Poe thought of daguerreotypy as “photogenic drawing” (with photogeny itself signifying, via the Greek, “sun painting”). The reinvention of the (literalized) heliograph (v. Bill Gerhard) channels time (exposure) into spatial form even as the involuntary heliograph records the deforming, reforming potency of the sun (v. Leah Finch, Faded Sheet). The effort to transform the contingencies of nature into permanent form (and to render duration statically) completes art’s effort to record the formal and material fragility of the organic (v. Howard Fonda, Tree). But of course what we call nature provides, in the inorganic, the most compelling case of durability. Whether the famous are monumentalized as statues (with appropriate inscriptions) or miniaturized as anonymous white pebbles, their durability assumes new material form—although at the whim of the creative subject and in the absence of any piety (v. Sasha Earle Height Chart: Famous Writers).

If there is some “conspiracy of art,” you might say it conspires against mortality, as against the pace of our quotidian lives, as against (in fact) administration to the degree that administration (producing the deadline for these words) remains perpetually beholden to what Cornelius Castoriadis called “identitary time,” reified and measurable, the time of the calendar, the time on the clock. [xix] The grandiosity and sublimity of Michael Heizer’s earth works—which, let’s face it, recapitulate the grandiosity and sublimity of Frederic Church’s landscapes—differentiate themselves bin the massively technocratic assertion of an intimacy with the unhuman history of earth. The task of Cream Co. (Chicago) is to see how administration can produce its temporal alternative, how it can organize a different sensation of time, how it can distinguish art from reality within a temporal grid that nonetheless measures the effects of temporal reality. The task is to stage the simultaneity of distinct temporalities: represented time (the record of natural growth and decay), enacted time (the history of the work’s manufacture), phenomenological time (the spectatorial experience), and art’s allotemporality—that other time, the time that is not our time (v. Marie Krane Bergman, (like October).

The philosopher who most clearly describes the temporal work of art did so, unsurprisingly, just before the advent of what gets called postmodernism. Arguing that the function of inanimate objects as such is to “stabiliz[e] human life,” Hannah Arendt concluded her discussion of homo faber by addressing works of art, “thought things,” as she called them. Convinced of art’s durability, of the fact that it ”is almost untouched by the corroding effect of natural processes,” she could claim that “nowhere else” does the “thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal being” (168).[xx] Cream Co. produces a history of art that is the history of the administration (the production and organization) of visualized space within which another temporal order might be realized, where some other time might be thought—or felt, however fleetingly.


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[i] Larissa MacFarquhar, “Baudrillard on Tour,” New Yorker, Nov. 28, 2005, p. 62.

[ii] Meanwhile, as the touring Baudrillard proclaims the end of art, seated academics have recognized a pronounced effort, within “the academy,” to “recover the value of aesthetic experience for artistic, cultural, and social analysis,” as Pamela Matthews and David McWhirter put it, in “Exile’s Return? Aesthetics Now,” their introduction to the essays collected in Aesthetic Subjects (ed. Matthews and McWhirter [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003], pp. xiii-xxviii. Quotation from p. xiv.) They efficiently review the renewed interest in aesthetics, circa 1995 to 2002, with reference to Elaine Scarry, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Michael Clark, and Isobel Armstrong among others who have encouraged us (very variously) to rethink the category of the aesthetic. They begin their introduction with a 1998 headline from the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Beauty is Back” (xiii), and they close by asserting the need for a language that will allow us to articulate “aesthetic experience and value,” albeit a language that recognizes and represents art’s “rich sociality” and “capacity for critique” rather than simply striving to preserve its autonomy (xxxvi). This concern with the aesthetic responds to three or so decades during which the aesthetic (and aesthetics) had been debunked or denounced as a mode of sustaining bourgeois sociality and regulating modern subjectivity.

[iii] Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 47.

[iv] Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 109.

[v] Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p.142.

[vi] Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, trans. Ames Hodges (Cambridge, mass.: MIT, 2005), p. 105.

[vii] Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984);

[viii] W.F. Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans. Fritz Haug (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1986). Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 4.

[ix] On the promotional strategies of Wedgwood, see Andrew Wernick, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology, and Symbolic Expression (London: Sage, 1991).

[x] Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 209-211.

[xi] Alison J. Clarke, Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999).

[xii] Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 2-3.

[xiii] Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), p. 92.

[xiv] Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. Brown (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 4-6.

[xv] See Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), ch. 14; and see Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

[xvi] Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition," Graham's Magazine, April 1846, pp. 163-167.

[xvii] Thedor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 133.

[xviii] Edgar Allan Poe, "The Daguerreotype," Alexander's Weekly Messenger, 15 January 1840, p. 2.

[xix] Conelius Castoriadis, “Time and Creation,” in Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David. E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 38-66.

[xx] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)., pp. 137, 167-169.