A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art 9780231526784

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION: The Dewey Effect
ONE: The Pop Effect
TWO: The Sontag Effect
THREE: The Richter Effect
FOUR: The Salcedo Effect
Notes
Index

Citation preview

A Hunger for Aesthetics

Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts

A HUNGER FOR AESTHETICS Enacting the Demands of Art

Michael Kelly

C O LU M BI A U N I VERSI TY PRE S S N EW YO RK

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2012 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kelly, Michael A hunger for aesthetics : enacting the demands of art / Michael Kelly. pages cm. — (Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-15292-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-52678-4 (e-book) 1. Aesthetics. I. Title. N66.K42 2012 111'.85—dc23 2011047620

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Annabel Manning and Sonia Kelly-Manning, my wife and daughter, have enriched me daily for many years already, whether in a loft in Manhattan, on a farm in Pennsylvania, or now in Charlotte. May there be as many years ahead for our party of three.

But what role can the visual arts play in reexamining one of America’s greatest social failures [New Orleans after Katrina]? “Not much” is the pessimistic conclusion I came to, followed by a close examination of a line of thinking familiar to Blacks, as expressed by my grandmother: “All you have to do in this world is stay Black and die.” This phrase sums up multilayered experiences of suppression, resentment, and rage. I have asked the objects in this book to do one more thing. Instead of sitting very still, “staying Black,” and waiting to die, I have asked each one to take a step beyond its own borders to connect a series of thoughts together related to fluidity and the failure of containment. Kara Walker, After the Deluge

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations xi Preface xiii Acknowledgments xxi INTRODUCTION

The Dewey Effect

1

ONE

The Pop Effect

25

TWO

The Sontag Effect

56

THREE

The Richter Effect

84

FOUR

The Salcedo Effect Notes 175 Index 225

129

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 3.5 Figure 3.6 Figure 3.7 Figure 3.8 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3

Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Confrontation 2 (Gegenüberstellung 2) 88 Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Hanged (Erhängte) 89 Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Funeral (Beerdigung) 94 Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Man Shot Down 1 (Erschossener 1) 104 Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Man Shot Down 2 (Erschossener 2) 105 Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Dead 1 (Tote 1) 111 Gerhard Richter, War Cut 117 Gerhard Richter, War Cut 120–121 Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth 137 Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios 142 Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios 143

Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7

Doris Salcedo, La Casa Viuda I (The Widowed House I) 147 Doris Salcedo, Unland: irreversible witness 151 Doris Salcedo, Unland: the orphan’s tunic 161 Doris Salcedo, Neither 169

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

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PREFACE

. . . aesthetics proves to be not so much obsolete as necessary. Art does not stand in need of an aesthetics that will prescribe norms where it finds itself in difficulty, but rather of an aesthetics that will provide the capacity for reflection, which art on its own is hardly able to achieve. —Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

In 1963, Robert Morris issued a notarized “Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal”: “The Undersigned, Robert Morris, being the maker of the metal construction entitled Litanies, described in the annexed Exhibit A, hereby withdraws from said construction all esthetic quality and content and declares that from the date hereof said construction has no such quality and content.”1 So he appeared to take an anti-aesthetic stance in order to legitimate his early conceptual art, where “stance” implies a rather permanent position on aesthetics, not just a passing attitude, since the withdrawal was prospective.2 Yet in 2008, Morris published the essay “Toward an Ophthalmology of the Aesthetic and an Orthopedics of Seeing,” in which he asks questions that entail a critique of his earlier stance: “Do we just want to think that the aesthetic can be liposuctioned out of art? If so, don’t we have here a misplaced philosophical longing for a testosterone-drenched strategy that could banish the aesthetic?”3 Whereas Morris earlier seemed to think that all aesthetics needed to be withdrawn from his conceptual work in order for it to be considered art, he now says that aesthetics is all-important to art as

“an innate faculty, a capacity concerned with affective responses. Leave it at that.”4 Over the course of forty-five years, a removal of aesthetics has given way to a renewal of aesthetics—or a remowal, as Morris proposes to call it. Why the radical change in Morris’s stance toward aesthetics since the 1960s? Did he change or did aesthetics or both? Is the link between aesthetics and ethics that Morris highlights at the beginning of his recent essay (while referencing philosophers as diverse as Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Charles Peirce) a clue to how we might answer these questions? That is, was the absence of ethics in 1960s aesthetics a reason Morris chose to withdraw aesthetics from his work? And what is the “misplaced philosophical longing” he has in mind, beyond the “testosterone-drenched strategy” he seems to disavow? Might the link to ethics and the longing turn out to be the common ground between his seemingly contradictory statements, rendering them compatible after all? If so, is the apparent anti-aesthetic stance embodied in the “Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal” actually a sign of a hunger for aesthetics, though only after it has been better calibrated to contemporary art and the moral demands it makes on us? Moreover, if Morris’s apparent change of heart is not his alone but is indicative of a more general cultural transformation, what transpired in contemporary art from the 1960s to the present to reveal a hunger for aesthetics underlying the anti-aesthetic stance?5 We can easily generalize from Morris’s case because he, of course, did not originate the anti-aesthetic stance and is not the only one to abandon it.6 For example, Marcel Duchamp reported at the turn of the twentieth century that his choice of ready-mades in the local hardware store and, more important, the concept of the ready-made itself were “never dictated by esthetic delectation,” which is why he is often regarded as the patron of the anti-aesthetic stance.7 Since Duchamp is clearly a pivotal, if controversial, figure in many narratives of modernism and postmodernism alike, his embrace of this stance has helped to sustain it within art over the last century. In 1961, however, when Duchamp was asked why the ready-mades nonetheless looked so beautiful or aesthetic when they first appeared (not just decades later), he reportedly said, “Nobody’s per-

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fect.”8 So even he recognized that aesthetics could not be purged from art after all—though not just because of his imperfections. Aesthetics has outlived other apparent attempts to remove it from art.9 Consider another high moment in the history of the antiaesthetic stance within modernism. In 1952, Barnett Newman allegedly said that aesthetics is “for the birds” when he was speaking at a conference organized by the American Society for Aesthetics and the Woodstock Artists Association, where his fellow speakers included Buckminster Fuller and Suzanne Langer.10 Newman’s specific objection to aesthetics, however, was not that contemporary philosophers could not possibly offer anything insightful or useful to artists because their aesthetic theories were “for the birds.” Rather, he argued that too many philosophers wrongly treated aesthetics as if it were a value-free science, as if they were inspired by the model of ornithology. Had they succeeded, aesthetics truly would have been for the birds. But Newman’s point was that aesthetics should not even attempt to become a science because it would require philosophers to be value neutral, which means they would have to suspend aesthetic judgments about contemporary art. According to Newman, such suspension would be irresponsible—even tragic— because philosophers would leave “the practicing aestheticians, the museum directors and newspaper critics, who daily are making decisions and establishing and disestablishing values,” without the guidance they normally would receive (if indirectly) from aesthetics.11 Without such guidance, the practicing aestheticians’ default judgment of art would be “anything goes,” an anti-art stance that Newman associated with the legacy of Duchamp.12 In effect, aesthetic judgments about contemporary art could not be made responsibly on the scientific model because theoretical aestheticians would have to refrain from making judgments and practicing aestheticians would have no philosophical guidance for making them. Newman’s concern was not only about aesthetic judgment, however. He especially objected to the separation of “scientific” aesthetics from ethics and other sources of value (e.g., politics) constitutive of art and aesthetic experience. In fact, according to Richard Shiff, Newman was outraged at the “lack of moral purpose he believed was plaguing the philosophical aesthetics of his day.”13 Likewise,

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Lisa Saltzman argues that Newman’s critique of aesthetics was simultaneously a call for “a kind of ethics” that would be integral to the new aesthetics he imagined.14 What might this call entail? Is  it related to the ethics Morris envisions? Is it a demand being placed on art or (equally) a demand that art places on us? Is art likewise linked to politics? If so, what impact do the links to ethics and politics have on today’s conception and practice of aesthetics? However Newman might have answered these questions, even asking them confirms his point that the model of value-free science is inappropriate for aesthetics. Newman’s comment on ornithology is thus not an attempt to dismiss aesthetics, as John O’Neill claims, or even “an attack against aesthetics as a branch of philosophy,” as Melissa Ho argues.15 On the contrary, Newman hungered for theoretical aestheticians who would correct some of their common philosophical errors about art (e.g., that it could be construed as independent of ethics), who would be willing to engage contemporary art, and who would provide (indirectly, at least) a more responsible guide for practicing aestheticians and the public as they make aesthetic judgments. To satisfy this hunger, Newman believed it was necessary to abandon the model of the sciences and, instead, to regenerate aesthetics by reinstating its links with ethics (or politics) that were broken when aesthetics aspired to be value-neutral. In terms to be developed here, Newman’s ornithological comment was the enactment of a hunger for aestheticians to become more, rather than less, engaged with contemporary art.16 A similar dynamic in which a hunger for aesthetics unwittingly underlies the anti-aesthetic stance is evident in the influential, contemporary theoretical expression of this stance: the anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983). Hal Foster argues in the preface that the anti-aesthetic marks a denial of “the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm” or autonomous art (i.e., the idea that art is independent on the level of production, experience, or judgment from nonartistic values, interests, practices, and institutions) because “its criticality is largely illusory,” even under the guidance of Theodor Adorno’s attempt to transform art’s autonomy into the basis of its criticality.17 Aesthetics is rejected because it  is thought to be constitutionally committed to the belief in the

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autonomy of art and, for that reason, prevented from providing an effective form of art critique, that is, one that “destructures the order of representations in order to reinscribe them.”18 However, as Robert Kaufman argues in a recent article on the concept of aura and Adorno, “those currents in twentieth-century art and criticism that emphatically celebrate an ‘anti-aesthetic,’ and that one-sidedly indict or eschew auratic aesthetic autonomy . . . , thereby contribute— however unwittingly—to the destruction of genuinely critical response.”19 That is, to reject all interpretations of the autonomy of art is to undermine art critique because it has proven to be impossible, historically as well as conceptually, unless art has had some measure of autonomy. So any proponents of the anti-aesthetic stance motivated by art critique should recognize that their rejections of artistic autonomy and aesthetics actually reflect a hunger for a type of aesthetics that can provide a new model of artistic autonomy for the purpose of critique. If indeed an analysis of the rationale behind the anti-aesthetic stance represented in The Anti-Aesthetic anthology reveals a hunger for aesthetics, then, as Ranciere claims, this kind of analysis turns the arguments of the anti-aesthetic stance on their heads.20 The logic underlying and, in the end, undermining Duchamp’s, Newman’s, Morris’s, and Foster’s iterations of the anti-aesthetic stance is that they all believed (or were mistakenly thought to believe) that their critiques of particular aesthetic theories or concepts entailed a rejection of all aesthetics. To return to the example of Duchamp (or the early Morris), one iteration of the anti-aesthetic stance began as a reasonable critique of theories that judge art in largely perceptual terms and had the aim of opening up the conceptual dimensions of art. But over time, this particular critique was reified and misdirected at all aesthetics because (in part) the word perceptual is easily conflated with the word aesthetic—the rest is familiar Duchampian antiocular history (with which the early Morris is sometimes associated).21 Another reason for this reification is that aesthetics, in being philosophical, is assumed to be committed to static universal claims about art because, traditionally, it has trafficked in concepts (beauty, autonomy, meaning, intentionality, expression, etc.) that often seem static as well as universal, even when

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they are understood to take form and acquire content only in particular historical settings.22 Critiques of aesthetics are often aimed at such universality, which is reasonable because some universal aesthetic claims are indeed problematic, as Ranciere points out, for philosophers sometimes “pass off conceptual prejudices as historical determinations and temporal delimitations as conceptual determination.”23 But what is not reasonable is to assume or, worse, to insist that a critique of any specific universal aesthetic claims entails the abandonment of aesthetics, not just a rejection of static or false universal claims. Foster makes this assumption, in effect, when he announces that the title of The Anti-Aesthetic was intended to signal “that the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question.”24 Artists and theorists alike need to be careful not to reify any critique of aesthetics that is merely the result of disillusionment with a particular aesthetic theory or concept for any of its failures (say, to grasp contemporary art in all its moral-political dimensions). Although critics may be right about certain failures, that is not grounds for a rejection of all aesthetics; it is really a demand for a new kind of aesthetics (say, one that can heed the call of ethics and politics). In the end, despite the popularity (even canonicity) of the antiaesthetic stance, it is untenable for two fundamental reasons. First, to deny aesthetics is to deny art because no work of art can be produced, experienced, or judged without some kind of aesthetics. Aesthetics is critical thinking about the affective, cognitive, moral, political, technological, and other historical conditions constitutive of the production, experience, and judgment of art. Such critical thinking is practical as well as theoretical because it is integral to the set of strategies artists utilize to realize their various goals (effects and affects), as the earlier examples of Duchamp, Newman, and Morris demonstrated. Although these artists represent only a small slice of modern and contemporary art, they are exemplary in their particularity because they recognized, despite adopting the anti-aesthetic stance at times, that aesthetics is integral to art practices. Their exemplarity means that a natural locus for a critique of  the anti-aesthetic stance is art, where we will continue to find examples of artists who defy this stance, not by arguing against it theoretically—though some (like Morris) do—but by adopting

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xviii

concrete strategies in their work that demand to be understood in aesthetic terms. In implementing their strategies and thereby raising the demand for aesthetics, artists undermine one of the common kinds of justification of the anti-aesthetic stance articulated by theorists, most explicitly by Jean Baudrillard: “I find some justification for speaking as an iconoclast in that art itself has for the most part become iconoclastic.”25 So artists will play central roles here in the critique of the anti-aesthetic stance, for they best demonstrate the hunger for aesthetics today and, in turn, help us to recalibrate the practical as well as theoretical values of aesthetics. Second, an interest in art critique is a rationale shared by many proponents of the varied iterations of the anti-aesthetic stance, but such critique cannot be fully realized without aesthetics; so the full realization of this stance would also be its undoing. Most antiaesthetic theorists would agree that despite the major differences between modernist art (as represented theoretically by Clement Greenberg) and postmodernist art (as represented theoretically by Jean-François Lyotard), critique is a constant between them.26 So critique is historically and conceptually embedded in contemporary (modernist or postmodernist inspired) artistic practices, though the object of critique varies from art itself to society (see the introduction). Now, if aesthetics is understood as critical thinking about art, it is a form of critique and is also integral to contemporary artistic practices. To reject aesthetics by adopting the anti-aesthetic stance is to weaken or undermine art that aspires to be critical, which is clearly self-defeating as long as a major rationale for this stance is critique. As it turns out, the demand for art critique is a hunger for aesthetics. Aesthetics just is the art critique that often has motivated the anti-aesthetic stance, which means a remaining role for this stance is a vigilance to ensure that art critique is indeed carried out effectively in—better, as—aesthetics. In short, to recognize that the anti-aesthetic stance undermines the criticality of art is, in principle, to initiate the regeneration of aesthetics in the name of art critique. If we focus on moral-political art critique in particular, the hunger for aesthetics is even stronger, perhaps surprisingly so. Whereas Newman and Morris insist that ethics is an integral part of aesthetics because it provides purpose(s) for art, anti-aesthetic theorists

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often insist there is a dilemma between aesthetics and ethics/politics in contemporary art. They argue that if art is ever to be critical in any moral or political sense, we first have to withdraw aesthetics from it, on the early Morris model. This alleged dilemma is implicit in the long-standing charge of aestheticization often at the center of the anti-aesthetic stance: art committed to aesthetics can only beautify ethical and political problems for pleasure’s sake alone, which— whatever else it means—implies that art cannot be critical of such problems.27 However, as we have seen (and will see in more depth later), one of the lessons of contemporary art is that this is a false dilemma. Moral-political critique is possible in art only through aesthetics—that is, through critical thinking about the conditions under which artists operate, especially the ethical and political conditions and effects of the artistic strategies they utilize in their work. So moral-political critique requires aesthetics in the form of critical thinking, which is the best possible way to answer the charge of aestheticization. In the interest of art, and ultimately in the interest of the needs that compel us to demand art and that, in turn, make us hunger for aesthetics (see the introduction), it is time to move beyond the domineering anti-aesthetic stance. This does not mean that skepticism about art is no longer appropriate or that art critique no longer has a place. On the contrary, as Bruno Latour rightly emphasizes, once we acknowledge the power of aesthetics, the result will actually be a “revision of the critical spirit” in aesthetics, art theory, and the arts alike.28

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AC KNOW LEDG MENTS

Many people encouraged and inspired me as I worked on this book, whether they agreed with my ideas or not. I delivered parts of it at Vanderbilt University, the University of South Carolina, the University of California at Santa Cruz, University College Cork, the University of California at Berkeley, and at meetings of the American Society for Aesthetics. I’d like to thank all my friends and colleagues who invited me or responded to my talks. Parts of an early version of chapter 3 were published in Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, and Tony O’Connor, eds., Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). I would like to thank the editors for organizing this volume, which stemmed from their 2004 conference at University College Cork, and the publishers for allowing me to include some of that material here. I would especially like to thank Gregg Horowitz for challenging me, as a friend and a philosopher, to be clearer about where my thoughts were taking me and for inviting me to his annual aesthetics and politics conferences at Vanderbilt, where some of those

thoughts originated or developed. I was honored to be a summer resident at the Sterling and Frances Clark Art Institute in 2008, which is when this book began to take shape; so I couldn’t be more grateful to Michael Ann Holly and others for the intellectual stimulation and academic resources the Clark provided. More recently (May 2010), Whitney Davis invited me to be a Scholar in Residence at the Arts Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley, where I was able to organize several symposia on aesthetics and engage in provocative conversations with people regenerating aesthetics in fields as different as film theory and neuroscience, art history and computer science. As an editor of this series, along with Gregg Horowitz, Lydia Goehr always offered her support for this book, as she did for my earlier aesthetics projects when we were colleagues at Columbia. A number of other people offered invaluable comments and criticism on parts of my book as it developed, especially Achim BorchardtHume, Anne Eaton, Charles W. Haxthausen, Daniel Herwitz, and Catherine Soussloff. I also thank my students at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, especially those in my aesthetics or critical theory courses, who recognize the value of aesthetics in art and philosophy alike. I’m appreciative of all those people whose work in aesthetics, art, or art theory has motivated me to identify, clarify, and try to satisfy the hunger for aesthetics within contemporary art.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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A Hunger for Aesthetics

INTRODUCTION: THE DEWEY EFFECT

Aesthetics refers to a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships (which presupposes certain ideas about thought’s effectivity). —Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics

The anti-aesthetic stance may have been productive at times when, for example, it opened up space for conceptualism in contemporary art, as we saw with Robert Morris in the preface. But it is clearly problematic when it is dominant for too long, as has been the case since the 1960s. To some extent, the dominance of the anti-aesthetic stance began to diminish in the 1990s when the contemporary art world renewed its engagement with aesthetics, often under the guise of a return to beauty. But I do not yet share the optimism of James Meyer and Toni Ross, who believe that this reengagement shows “little sign of abating.”1 People committed to the anti-aesthetic stance are simply too well entrenched in the art world, and especially within academia, to welcome aesthetics back without considerable reservations. At the same time, I do find it very promising, if ironic, that the reemergence of aesthetics has occurred within some of the very same disciplines that not long ago were hostile to aesthetics.2 Also, some examples of art that would have been discussed only in anti-aesthetic terms just a few years go are now said to be shaped by aesthetic strategies (as we will see). I welcome these

last developments but prefer to speak of the regeneration of aesthetics because it is undeniable that the central concepts, principles, and strategies in aesthetics need to be recalibrated after being the target—for several decades—of severe, sometimes justified, critiques motivated by a host of philosophical, political, and cultural concerns. The ultimate aim of the regeneration of aesthetics here is to find a third way between the total rejection of aesthetics entailed by the anti-aesthetic stance and the uncritical restoration of the status quo ante implied by some of the recent revivals of aesthetics.3

CRI TI QU E O F ART, CRI TI QU E BY A RT

On the face of it, the regeneration of aesthetics should not be problematic because, as we saw in the preface, modernist and postmodernist artists did not completely escape aesthetics when they aggressively tried to free themselves from it. In Theodor Adorno’s words, even as “aesthetics fell out of fashion, the most advanced artists have sensed the need for it all the more strongly.”4 Barnett Newman and Morris are exemplars of artists in this regard, as their critiques of aesthetics conceal a hunger to regenerate it using their own types of art as inspiration. Likewise, when theorists generalized critiques of particular aesthetic concepts (e.g., meaning, autonomy, beauty) into critiques of all aesthetics, they always appealed to new or recalibrated aesthetic concepts, such as the sublime, the abject, the uncanny, and the like. So their critiques could also reveal a latent hunger for aesthetics, albeit only for a regenerated aesthetics. In the interest of art critique, these artists and theorists seem to want to get beyond conceptions of aesthetics that do not allow for art’s moral-political power—but the result is still aesthetics. Recognizing that aesthetics must be recalibrated as the material conditions of contemporary art and society change, Adorno describes well the challenge aestheticians face: “In the age of the irreconcilability of traditional aesthetics and contemporary art, the philosophical theory of art has no choice but, varying a maxim of Nietzsche’s, by determinate negation to think the categories that are in decline as categories of transition.”5 In this light, the resil-

INTRODUCTION

2

ience of aesthetics when it is confronted with the anti-aesthetic stance takes the form of a self-critique aimed at developing new concepts, principles, and strategies that, if successfully recalibrated, would constitute a regeneration of aesthetics. We should encourage and welcome the transformed truth of the concepts that should emerge from the self-critique of aesthetics because without some recalibrated versions of these or related concepts, art is unintelligible to us, and, moreover, it is ineffective when unintelligible. Art’s efficacy (or effectivity) is inseparable from its intelligibility, which means its efficacy is inseparable from aesthetics, though only if aesthetics renders art intelligible through art critique. So, in the interest of rendering contemporary art more intelligible, we should analyze the hunger for aesthetics instead of uncritically lending credence to the anxiety that its regeneration is merely reactionary.6 Of course, to ensure that the regeneration is not reactionary, we need to ask: “Which aesthetics?” and “Whose aesthetics?”7 Though the answers to these questions are varied and complex, one basic component of any answer is that aesthetics must enable us to critique the varieties of contemporary art, where critique requires first, that we recognize that art makes demands, or claims, on us and then, that we analyze the artistic, moral-political, historical, and philosophical conditions shaping these demands and determining whether they can be satisfied (i.e., realized). Aesthetics will be regenerated, and the hunger for it satisfied, only if it is up to the task of responding to these demands through art critique. Relative to the various contemporary art practices, art critique is the purpose of philosophical aesthetics and the measure of its success, just as a critical understanding of the historical and philosophical conditions of contemporary scientific practices is the purpose and measure of the philosophy of science. The operative idea of art critique here has two distinct, interrelated modes that are practical and theoretical at the same time: critique of art, where art is principally the object of critique; and critique by art, where art is principally the agent of critique. Critique of art: critical thinking about the philosophical and historical conditions making art possible and effective on affective

3 T HE DE W EY E F F E C T

and cognitive levels, conducted mainly by theorists but also by artists so that artistic practices remain self-critical. This mode is where the key aesthetic concepts—such as affect, meaning, autonomy, pleasure, beauty, and the like—need to be recalibrated. The philosophical and historical issues here are varied: ontological (e.g., the human needs that give rise to art and the resulting ontology of works of art); epistemological (e.g., the relationships between art and imagination, knowledge, affect, and cognition); social (e.g., the reciprocal influences between art and various forms of identity: gender, race, ethnicity, class); scientific (e.g., new insights into art arising from evolutionary biology and neuroaesthetics); and religious (e.g., the spiritual needs that are expressed in art). But I will focus on moral-political issues here because they are most relevant to the critique of the anti-aesthetic stance: how is it possible for art to have a critical and sustainable moral-political impact on individuals in society? Critique by art: critical thinking about society, conducted mainly by artists (directly or indirectly) but also by theorists and with the participation, in principle, of the people who experience art. Although the range of social issues critiqued by art is varied as well, I will again focus on moral-political issues (for the same reason as just given). What are the enabling and limiting conditions of art’s moral-political critique of society? What degree and type of autonomy, if any, does art have? If works of art are able to make moralpolitical demands, or claims, on us, what are the best aesthetic strategies for doing so? Finally, what responsibility do artists and the public share for the satisfaction of the moral-political demands that particular artworks make on us? If we pursue both modes of art critique distinctly but concurrently, we will be better able to regenerate aesthetics while also sustaining the main critical and moral-political impulses behind the anti-aesthetic stance. One of the mistakes made by anti-aesthetic theorists has been to overlook the critique of art either because they think it is covered by art alone (in the form of its self-critique) or because they favor critique by art because it makes art morally and politically engaged with society. But neither mode of art critique is

INTRODUCTION

4

effective without the other because the first mode helps to clarify how the second is possible, while the second mode materializes the possibilities envisioned in the first. After anti-aesthetic theorists confine themselves to critique by art, they often argue that it is a failure, leaving them without any mode of art critique, not merely without aesthetics. But even the failure of critique by art should not lead us to abandon aesthetics. Rather, it should lead us to develop a new model of critique by art and to do so in combination with the critique of art, for the latter may help us to understand the failure of the critique by art and its conditions of success going forward. Even if we are convinced that the causes of such failure are beyond the power of contemporary aestheticians or artists because societal conditions at a particular time do not allow art critique to succeed, we still should not abandon aesthetics. On the contrary, such a predicament should inspire us to regenerate aesthetics in new directions in the interest of art critique, though only if we acknowledge that aesthetic concepts, principles, and strategies need to be recalibrated as art and society change. In the process, it is important to note that we, not artists alone, are responsible for realizing the moral-political demands that art makes on us through the two modes of art critique. Finally, although artists (like Newman, Morris, Gerhard Richter, and Doris Salcedo) are perhaps in the best position to appreciate these two modes because their art is impossible without them (or else unintelligible and ineffective), aestheticians are needed equally to articulate and strengthen both modes of art critique so that artistic practice and aesthetic theory are complementary.

RESTOR I N G AG EN CY I N AESTHETI CS A N D A RT

A regeneration of aesthetics is in order because modern and postmodern art and art theory have transformed aesthetics from being the premier agent of critical thinking about art into being primarily a target of such thinking. This transformation is evident in longstanding fields such as art history that aim to supplement aesthetics with new forms of critique and in the new fields (visual studies,

5 T HE DE W EY E F F E C T

cultural studies, etc.) that were formed in part with the explicit aim of displacing aesthetics, even though they have recently begun to turn back to aesthetics.8 To regenerate aesthetics is to restore its agency as art critique. The regeneration of aesthetics is somewhat complicated by the fact that in the hands of anti-aesthetic theorists, art has likewise been largely the target rather than the agent of critique in recent years— confirming the link between the anti-aesthetic stance and anti-art associated with Marcel Duchamp.9 For example, Rosalind Krauss overextends her critique of the aesthetic concept of universal meaning in art to the point that she argues that art has no meaning or that meaning is simply not the theoretical question to be asking of art. Rather, art is generated by, and even about, the informe that dissolves form from within a work of art: “The formless . . . is not just an erasure of form but an operation to undo form.”10 As form is part of the constellation form/meaning, however, the undoing of form is also the undoing of meaning, as Krauss explicitly states: everything in art (e.g., the signified, the meaning) is first assimilated to form and then the informe undermines it all. In the end, the express purpose of the concept of the informe is to allow art theory to fulfill its postmodernist destiny of “liberating our thinking from the semantic.”11 Based on this, however, a work of art becomes something about which it is virtually impossible to have any theory, not just an aesthetic theory, for what else can be said about art here other than that it undermines any intelligible form and, as Adorno warned, thereby defies any form of intelligibility required for theory? The likely Kraussian response that the only intelligible form of art is precisely the form of its unintelligibility, resulting from the informe, is merely to confirm this point on a metatheoretical level. Though common in postmodern art theory, this type of response is as unsustainable as the anti-aesthetic stance from which it stems because of the iconoclastic conception of art underlying it. As Boris Groys argues, once art theorists shift the focus of theory from the message (signified) to the medium (signifier), they open up “the possibility of strategically deploying iconoclasm as an artistic device” (e.g., the informe) used only “to highlight the materiality of the medium concealed behind any ‘spiritual’ message.”12

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Rather than being used to produce images with new messages (meanings), these iconoclastic devices generate icons of materialism that assert the power of artistic media over any message or meaning. As Susan Sontag observed in the 1960s, modern art seems to be “as much an act of criticism as an act of creation.”13 Or, in Groys’s words: “The image is therefore transfigured into the site for an epiphany of pure matter, abandoning its role as the site for an epiphany of the spirit.”14 As Adorno anticipated, however, the kind of materialism inspiring today’s anti-aesthetic stance (e.g., Krauss’s) is inseparable from iconoclasm: “The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at . . . the absence of images. . . . Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban into secular form [art].”15 At the same time, as Adorno also points out, materialism cannot function effectively—that is, cannot achieve the critique of society that motivates it—without some mode of aesthetics because social reality is unintelligible unless it is given affective form through art or aesthetic experience more generally, for social reality has to be apprehended affectively to be recognized and critiqued. Once again, the anti-aesthetic stance shows itself on its own terms to be as unsustainable as it is tenacious. A further consequence of the latent iconoclasm of the antiaesthetic stance is that it creates the perception that theory (or criticism) now flourishes at art’s expense. As Krauss provocatively— and affirmatively—puts it, the focus of art theory is now on its own method because that is now “what criticism is, seriously, read for.”16 In turn, however, the prioritization of theory over art leads to exaggerated critiques of theory, generating antitheory as the revenge against the anti-aesthetic.17 But then we have exaggerations all the way down, which will lead nowhere if we are trying to understand contemporary art that continues to make demands on us and if we believe that theory’s task is to render these demands intelligible. An alternative response to the anti-aesthetic stance (besides rejecting all theory) is to recognize that aesthetic concepts need to be recalibrated. Take the concept of meaning critiqued by Krauss, for example, and recalibrate it in such a way that, as Jacques Ranciere envisions, we  can understand how art is still able to “transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations.”18

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That is, some concept of artistic meaning is still needed and still possible, and it is the task of aesthetics to recalibrate that concept, among others. To take this task seriously is a clear way to regenerate aesthetics. Consider another example of a potent critique of contemporary art with implicit anti-aesthetic commitments. T. J. Clark argues, “art, in our culture, finds itself more and more at the limits, on the verge of emptiness and silence. So that practitioners have continually been forced to recognize how little space, or representational substance, they are given to work with in the all-consuming world of goods.”19 The globalized markets of late capitalism have little, if any, room for art to engage in social-political (or any other form of) critique. Speaking of Georg W. F. Hegel’s notion of the end of art, however, Clark says that what Hegel did not see “was that the full depth and implication of this [art’s] inability—the inability to go on giving Idea and World sensuous immediacy, of a kind that opened both to the play of practice—would itself prove a persistent, maybe sufficient, subject.”20 The very subject, or content/meaning, of artistic practice from early modernism to the present has allegedly been art’s own inability or deficiency due to social conditions. At best, art is conceived as a placeholder for itself (or its replacement), sustaining negative space until its deficient representational substance can be overcome (or until something else takes its place). But how can a representational practice lacking substance occupy any space, even negative space? By negating its own negation, as Peter Osborne suggests in an essay on Richter’s paintings? But even Osborne concedes that such a strategy only allows artworks to “mark time, the historical time of their production, the time of the crisis of painting.”21 Moreover, he also acknowledges that marking time is a theoretical stance that is not sustainable in/as practice. So it is impossible for artists to sustain art practice(s) under such a conception, though theorists may still be able sustain art theory. In this light, art qua representational practice that represents only its failure to represent is theory rather than practice, which brings us back to Krauss’s point.22 Clark’s art theory is problematic not just because of the placeholder metaphor, though it makes it seem that art will be anemic

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forever, or because of the talk of negative space, which has its own logic, even if not enough to generate art. The more serious problem, as Clark realizes, is that the negation of art has to be determinate to have any content and to be effective. But such determination can come only from the aesthetic strategies enacted by artists, not from the philosophical arguments of theorists. That is, every artistic practice (even conceptual art) involves some type(s) of aesthetic strategies that are the target when art is negated as well as the grounds of determination that complete the negation and, at the same time, allow art to move beyond it. To put it another way, since, according to Clark, art has been negated, artists have to provide the determination needed to complete art’s negation and, where possible, to move beyond it. Morris’s trajectory from aesthetic withdrawal in 1963 to aesthetic reaffirmation in 2008 is a good example of an artist who has come to recognize the role of aesthetics in the determinate negation of art. However, Clark seems unwilling to countenance any role for aesthetics, which means he cannot fully conceptualize the very negation of art that is the logic of his own project. In short, his theory is incomplete without new aesthetic strategies, and only artists can develop them by making artworks that can achieve more than the confirmation of art’s lack of representational substance. Yet the reestablishment of art’s substance is virtually impossible today at the level of artistic practice, according to Clark. He believes that the roots of art’s failure to have any representational substance lie outside art where, because of the logics of modernity and postmodernity, art has no power.23 Art’s autonomy, long praised in modernism and passionately rejected in postmodernism, is merely a symptom of art’s marginalization in contemporary capitalist society rather than a positive achievement that could reestablish its substance—on the contrary, autonomy secures art’s “end.” Though insightful, this theory has negative philosophical implications for art because its resistance to failure now seems to require that its critical power extend beyond itself to the roots of that failure, which Clark seems to think is a crucial part of that which makes art modern, yet art’s autonomy (whether as achievement or as symptom) prevents it

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from engaging in anything more than a placeholder strategy because it has no power in society. So how is any resistance to art’s alleged failure possible within art, since the failure of modernism seems to be owing to the success of modernity because it excludes the satisfaction of certain human needs? At the same time, if aesthetics is confined to a reflection on art’s failure and thus to being a placeholder for a more robust notion of art, aesthetics is not critiquing art’s impasse: its inability to represent anything other than its inability to represent. In this light, the only option left to aesthetics seems to be resignation, expressed as mourning, because artists cannot represent anything of substance or engage in critique.24 This mourning is so much reflected in aesthetics that, according to Ranciere, “ ‘aesthetics’ has become, in the last twenty years, the privileged site where the tradition of critical thinking has metamorphosed into deliberation on mourning.”25 The mourning in aesthetics for art has become so pronounced that contemporary artists are caught in a double bind, powerfully described by Bruno Latour: artists are compelled by social as well as more personal experiences to make works of art, yet at the same time they are confronted by the seemingly undeniable fact, given the dominance of the anti-aesthetic stance, that “there is no longer any legitimate way of making” art in today’s society.26 In effect, the anti-aesthetic stance is the discursive certification of art’s socially determined delegitimatization. Latour describes an unsustainable predicament for artists—and no less for theorists. So why, other than faute de mieux, would artists or theorists ever be attracted to the anti-aesthetic stance if it creates or exacerbates this predicament? As we can hardly negotiate contemporary society without needing to understand art, this is not just a theoretical question confined to the art world. On the contrary, it is also a very urgent moral and political matter, as the 2002 Iconoclash exhibition and text demonstrate, because so many contemporary political, scientific, and religious debates are mediated by images, whether in art or in other media, as Judith Butler also now argues.27 Just picture the political effect of the Abu Ghraib images (to be discussed later) without turning to aesthetics to critique and understand their effects. At the same time, although anti-aesthetic theo-

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rists see themselves as able to prevent art from falling over the edge into the “emptiness and silence” described by Clark, theorists cannot save artistic practices that have no representational substance because theory cannot supply the missing substance, any more than scientific theory could do so if scientific practices were bankrupt. If theorists cannot save art, they can at best be the messengers announcing that art is demanding to be saved—leading again to the theme of mourning in art theory until art’s impasse can be broken.28 One way to break the impasse, and to heed the demand for art critique, is for aesthetics to take contemporary artistic practices as its guide, much the way philosophers of science take scientific practices as their guide. Only contemporary artists can demonstrate whether art has the representational substance that anti-aesthetic theorists claim it lacks. This is a hopeful strategy because even Clark says art is only on the “verge” of emptiness and silence. In turn, if aesthetics is understood as critical thinking about art and critique remains central in art, aesthetics is clearly a necessary part of art’s enactment of its substance. Adorno may be right that aesthetics is always dragging its concepts behind contemporary art, but people who quote him on this point tend to forget that he is also right to insist that art needs aesthetics and, moreover, that aesthetics is up to the task of critiquing and comprehending contemporary art. Let me be clear about what starting with contemporary artistic practices to regenerate aesthetics does and does not entail. It does not mean simply to regenerate aesthetics according to the selfunderstandings of artists (whether they express themselves autobiographically or theoretically). Rather, it means acknowledging that artists develop aesthetic strategies that, among other effects, enact certain modes of art critique. In turn, we need to recognize that these modes of art critique have moral and political implications because, for example, they help us to imagine forms of subjectivity and types of action that allow us to imagine new social relations. Of course, whether those actions and relations become part of social reality is beyond the responsibility (or power) of artists alone. Langston Hughes was inspired when he called poets our dream keepers, but he also understood that they alone are not responsible

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for realizing these dreams. Such responsibility lies with all of us. By making such responsibility an urgent moral-political issue, artists can elicit critical reflection on who needs to take responsibility and how, if possible, that responsibility can be carried out. I do not mean to suggest that all contemporary art is moralpolitical, though it is true in at least a general sense that most art is affected by or has effects on the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Although there are many kinds of art besides those that have explicit or even implicit moral-political aims or effects, I discuss only moral-political works of art here because, paradoxically, they best express the hunger for aesthetics that I am trying to address. Just as it has been in the interest of such works that the anti-aesthetic stance has taken hold in contemporary art, art theory, and aesthetics, it is likewise with the help of such works that this stance can best be challenged. Once aesthetics is again on firmer ground, it should also be better able to help us understand other types of art. And finally, the call for a regenerated aesthetics is not an appeal to a counterfactual account of art, nor is it an idealistic wish that there be morally and politically effective artists in today’s world or that such artists would emerge if only theory could first articulate and defend this wish. Rather, this is a materialist call to aestheticians to explain the kinds of moral-political power that contemporary artists are already realizing in their work. There are examples of contemporary art enacting the moral-political power that theorists committed to the anti-aesthetic stance still insist art can no longer have. Moreover, some of the contemporary artists supported by antiaesthetic theorists (e.g., Richter and Salcedo) enact the very power that these same theorists continue to deny is possible. Similarly, there are many examples of photographs and other images outside art that also enact the kind of moral-political power thought to be impossible. The counterevidence is there for them—and for all—to see. The success of the regeneration of aesthetics hangs on this evidence of art’s moral-political power.

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THE POP, SONTAG , RI CHTER, AN D SALC E D O E F F E C T S

An important step in the effort to counterbalance today’s antiaesthetic stance is to challenge the claim that aesthetics is incapable of critiquing contemporary art, particularly when moral-political issues are involved. This claim is made on the belief that aesthetics is an autonomous practice committed to universal concepts (meaning, beauty, intentionality, expression, and the like), whereas contemporary art enacts new culturally particular sensibilities, often with a problematic relationship to any kind of universality. In this scenario, aesthetics represents the timeless tradition against which contemporary art asserts itself as the present not just in the present— hence contemporary art’s internalization of the anti-aesthetic stance, as we saw with the early Morris example. Moreover, the history of modern philosophy seems to be working against aesthetics on this score, if we invoke Hegel’s famous “owl of Minerva,” which spreads its wings only at dusk after a shape of contemporary art has grown old (i.e., no longer contemporary) and revealed its universality. The predicament here seems to be that if aestheticians attempt to critique contemporary art, they should expect to do so without the owl’s help, without wisdom—hardly an encouragement to regenerate aesthetics. However, Hegel himself added an all-important twist, barely a page later in his Philosophy of Right, that philosophers must understand the universal in their own time rather than fashion an ideal to replace it. If we accept the Hegelian challenge, though not the Hegelian idea of the universal, there is a normative expectation embedded in aesthetics that philosophers must engage in contemporary art critique. The stakes here are high: if aestheticians cannot critique contemporary art, Newman would be right after all that aesthetics is for the birds, and mourning might indeed be the only thing aesthetics would have to offer. With Morris’s dramatic 1963 removal of aesthetics silently in the background, I begin making a case for the regeneration of aesthetics by analyzing how several philosophers—Sontag, Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Umberto Eco—actively critiqued contemporary art, especially Pop art as it emerged in the 1960s, ironically just when Morris’s removal was taking place. I call the legacy of these

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philosophers’ engagement with contemporary art at that time the Pop Effect (chapter 1). If this effect is accepted as the true legacy of 1960s art for today’s aestheticians, and if we appreciate the irony of Morris’s dismissal of aesthetics for not engaging contemporary art just as aesthetics began to do so, then we should be better able to recognize and satisfy the hunger for aesthetics that is unwittingly driving the anti-aesthetic stance. Although clearly there were other art forms or movements in the 1960s besides Pop, and although Pop does not signify a unified art style or movement, it is a good example for my purposes because it is the contemporary art that a number of philosophers (even beyond the four I discuss) first felt compelled to respond to, setting the stage for the rest of the decade when minimalism and conceptual art, to take just two later examples, also posed important philosophical challenges.29 A reason for analyzing Pop art rather than more contemporary art is that it is important to analyze art that is temporally close enough to be contemporary yet distant enough that we can ascertain whether aesthetics was successful in critiquing it. If aestheticians indeed succeeded enough in the case of Pop, which in turn remains central for our current conception of contemporary art, they should be able to reestablish their credentials as legitimate agents of contemporary art critique. That is, if aesthetics was sufficiently successful with Pop, it should be acknowledged as being able to critique art that is even more contemporary, which is discussed in the chapters that follow. Despite the success of these four philosophers in engaging contemporary art in the early 1960s, however, all but Sontag mostly neglected or failed to engage the ethics and politics of Pop art. Since ethics and politics were very much constitutive of art at that time, to elide them was to miss something about the art, which seems to be a major reason for these philosophers’ exclusion from historical accounts of 1960s art (with the relative exception of Sontag). The “miss” here is not merely on the interpretive level (criticism) but, more philosophically, at the ontological level, where the very conception of art is at issue. Of the four philosophers I discuss in chapter 1, Sontag understands the significance of ethics and politics for art, but her critique of 1960s art is not ontological, at least in any systematic or sustained way. Unfortunately, while Danto, Cavell,

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and Eco explicitly present ontological arguments about contemporary art yet seem to overlook or undervalue its ethics and politics, Sontag seems to understand the ethics and politics of 1960s art but does not fully appreciate just how significant they are for the ontology of art. It is as if she took the “contemporary” expressed through the ethics and politics of early 1960s art so seriously that she lost sight of its ontology, as if the recognition of art’s contemporaneity implied the abandonment of its ontology, as if ontology cannot be historical. By contrast, Danto struggled with art’s contemporaneity and historicity because he recognized their problematic implications for the ontology of art. In the end, however, he tries to indemnify art’s ontology against history as a solution to that struggle. In the discussion to follow, with an eye to giving art’s ontology, contemporaneity, and history their due, we will indirectly examine the links between them enacted in our affective experiences of the ethics and politics of contemporary art. To take an example of Sontag’s tendency to weigh art’s contemporaneity over its ontology, she understands the ontology of photography solely in terms of its contemporary forms and conditions in the 1960s and 1970s. While examining the role of photography in the moral-political critique of society at that time, she concludes in On Photography (1975) that photography fails to have moralpolitical efficacy at any time. This conclusion, if not derived from an anti-aesthetic stance, became its iconic expression for several decades. You could hardly study art or art theory in the United States in the late 1970s through the early twenty-first century without encountering Sontag’s argument about the moral-political impotence of contemporary photography and, by extension, all art. In 2003, however, Sontag published Regarding the Pain of Others, in which she revisits and repudiates the main conclusion of On Photography just as forcefully as she originally defended it.30 I call the significance of this repudiation for aesthetics the Sontag Effect and try to explain its positive implications for the regeneration of aesthetics. To do so, it is necessary to discuss photography because Sontag argues that all contemporary art “aspires to the condition of photography,” and Krauss claims that photography is historically, if not constitutively, anti-aesthetic: “photography opened the closed unities

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of the older aesthetic discourse [the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of its author, and the individuality of self-expression] to the severest possible scrutiny, turning them inside out.”31 Combining these two influential claims, many theorists besides Sontag and Krauss could conclude that all contemporary art aspires to the antiaesthetic. As it turns out, however, Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others provides a basis for forestalling this conclusion and challenging photography’s alleged role in perpetuating the anti-aesthetic stance. Ultimately, Sontag acknowledges aesthetics as a means for photographers to achieve and sustain moral-political power in their work, whether as art or not. So the contrast between Sontag’s two texts—On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others—is the focus of chapter 2. Following Sontag, I examine photographs that have moral-political power, mainly in connection with terrorism, war, and other sources of suffering. Although not all photography representing suffering, violence, and death is art, and although politics does not always involve suffering, violence, or death (or vice versa), my focus is on photographs that represent these matters because they are often the preferred type of images of theorists committed to the anti-aesthetic stance. To pursue the issue of contemporary photography’s and contemporary art’s moral-political efficacy beyond Sontag, I discuss some examples of contemporary art in more depth. Of all the contemporary artists I could discuss, Richter and Salcedo are exemplary because many anti-aesthetic theorists believe that they embody and justify the anti-aesthetic stance. I devote separate chapters to each artist because, contra these theorists, Richter and Salcedo resist and undermine the anti-aesthetic stance. Moreover, to explain their art is to acknowledge and account for their aesthetic strategies that, ironically, are designed to achieve the art critique that inspired the anti-aesthetic stance in the first place. These artists are engaged in the very type of moral-political issues that anti-aesthetic theorists still believe contemporary artists can no longer handle critically. For the sake of the regeneration of aesthetics, not just moral-political art, we need to demonstrate that this belief is mistaken. Richter and Salcedo deliberately and convincingly provide significant evidence for such demonstration.

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To begin with, I analyze Richter’s Baader-Meinhof painting series—entitled October 18, 1977 (chapter 3). Granted, these paintings have received considerable attention from many critics, pro and con, since they were first exhibited in 1989. But I am convinced they have not been understood adequately because Richter’s paintings are too often seen through the eyes of anti-aesthetic theorists who insist that they mainly mourn the impossibility of contemporary history painting, or any other genre of painting attempting to engage moral-political issues. As such, Richter’s art is often seen as the embodiment of the anti-aesthetic stance. To make a case that his paintings reflect more than the mourning of their own medium, I analyze their profound effect on Astrid Proll, a former member of the Baader-Meinhof Group who claims that Richter’s paintings allowed her for the first time to approach photographs of the BaaderMeinhof history and to come to terms with that history—which I call the Richter Effect. How can this effect be explained, especially when it is extended to those who were not as directly involved in the Baader-Meinhof history? If the Richter Effect is extended to other viewers, does that mean that they are sympathizing with terrorists, as Richter has been accused of doing? Also, how can the explanation of the Richter Effect contribute to the regeneration of aesthetics? I do not intend to put all these issues on Richter’s back. Yet, although no one artist can establish new possibilities for painting that anti-aesthetic art theorists think contemporary material conditions do not allow, it is enough for Richter to resist the antiaesthetic stance just once for its firm grip on contemporary art (and hence on art theory and aesthetics) to be loosened. To add a second, more recent, example of Richter’s work, I also discuss his War Cut (2004), an art book reflecting critically on the launching of the Iraq War by the United States in March 2003. Here we have another case of an artist critically engaging contemporary politics in a way that anti-aesthetic theorists argue is no longer possible—the Richter Effect again. Once we have two clear examples demonstrating that those theorists are mistaken about an artist whom they wholeheartedly support, we can see more concretely what it means for aesthetics to follow the lead of an artist and to proceed on that basis to regenerate aesthetics.

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In chapter 4, I focus on Salcedo because her work concerns a variety of political issues: violence in Colombia, immigrants in Europe, detention centers around the world, and other examples of suffering experienced by people because of social injustice (i.e., humans inflicting suffering on other humans). How does Salcedo’s artwork enact such suffering? If it succeeds in doing so, is that enough to deem it politically and morally effective—the Salcedo Effect? How can she avoid the criticism, raised in a classic fashion by the early Sontag, that suffering enacted in art is merely being aestheticized for the viewers’ pleasure in a way that, in turn, victimizes for a second time the people suffering? Although Salcedo’s work is often discussed using anti-aesthetic language—she sometimes appeals to it as well— can this language account for her effectiveness as a critic of social injustice? As is the case with Richter, Salcedo’s aesthetic strategies provide answers to all these questions. Sontag has a significant role in all four chapters and provides important conceptual links among them because I agree with Bonnie Marranca’s recent comment that “no matter what the era, Sontag was always our contemporary” over the last five decades.32 As we have seen, she is sometimes associated with the anti-aesthetic stance. She once said, for example, “There is no such thing as an ‘aesthetic’ work of art”—a perfect anti-aesthetic slogan—and she complained in On Photography about what Sonya Sayres calls the treachery or burden of aesthetics.33 But these comments ultimately point to a hunger for a regenerated aesthetics, one that incorporates the sensuous and affective dimensions of art, along with its broader moral-political roles. To say the least, Sontag has a conflicted, but also nuanced and self-reflective, view of aesthetics that is evident already in her early, influential essay “Against Interpretation” (1964).34 For even though the title suggests the logic of total negation similar to that which generates the anti-aesthetic, Sontag is very clear that she does not reject all interpretation.35 Rather, she has a very specific notion of interpretation in mind: not the broad Nietzschean idea that there are no facts, only interpretations, which she accepts qualitatively, but the narrower notion of “a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain ‘rules’ of interpretation,” what she later called a “reductive way of accounting for art”

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according to its meaning without regard for its formal dimensions or functions.36 For example, in speaking of the film Last Year at Marienbad (1961; Alain Resnais, director; Alain Robbe-Grillet, writer), Sontag argues that interpretation focused on a film’s meaning or content “indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.”37 In this light, some types of interpretation seem to be anti-art. Sontag proposes instead that we look at “the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions to certain problems of cinematic form.”38 She wants more attention paid to art’s form—that is, its aesthetics. So not only is Sontag’s argument against interpretation not to be associated with the anti-aesthetic, it is actually an argument for aesthetics, another instance of a hunger for aesthetics being mistaken for a critique of it.39 More specifically, starting with chapter 1, Sontag is one of the philosophical critics discussed in the account of the Pop Effect because she critiqued 1960s art as it was emerging. In doing so, she made it clear that her principal interest was not just to render “the particular judgment about the particular work of art” but “to expose and clarify the assumptions underlying certain judgments and tastes.”40 She thereby demonstrated that philosophy was central to the critique of contemporary art at the time and, subsequently, she helped to shape the development of contemporary art theory and aesthetics—or, at least, she may now begin to shape it. The topic in chapter 2 is the Sontag Effect, so she is clearly a main figure at that point. Although Sontag is not discussed explicitly in chapter 3, her claims that all contemporary art aspires to the condition of photography and that photography in turn changes our conceptions(s) of art are reflected in Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings because they are based on photographs and compel us to rethink our idea of contemporary art. Also, in On Photography, Sontag strongly criticizes the compassion generated by art that enacts political events because she argues, among other points, that this emotion is difficult to sustain. Since I argue that Richter’s paintings generate compassion as well as grief, I have to answer her objection. Fortunately, Sontag becomes my ally because she comes to believe that compassion is needed in art and argues convincingly that it is possible and

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sustainable. If Sontag does not have a strong presence in chapter 4, whose focus is the Salcedo Effect, it is only because she has become less thematic as her impact has deepened. By creating art that elicits compassion and has moral-political power, Salcedo demonstrates in practice that which Sontag imagines is possible in her Regarding the Pain of Others. Not only do the aesthetic strategies enacted in Salcedo’s work not hinder such “regarding,” they make it morally and politically effective. In following the lead of contemporary artists engaging in moralpolitical critique, we see that they can indeed achieve some of the effects that anti-aesthetic theorists still claim are no longer possible. Of particular concern here are both the moral-political effects of art and, because of this, its critical role in society. Throughout, I want to keep the following encouraging, though somber, statement from Richter in mind: “Our state of impotence [in the face of historic catastrophes] hasn’t changed much—or, to put it another way, it’s not only the perils that have grown; the possibilities of doing something about them have grown too.”41 Artists are the agents of these possibilities, while aestheticians have the task of ensuring that artistic agency is no longer hampered by the anti-aesthetic stance. Aesthetics and art can thereby regenerate one another.

THE DEW EY EFFECT

There are human needs outside art that drive the history of art and, in turn, the history of aesthetics. In Adorno’s words: “The concrete historical situation of art registers concrete demands. Aesthetics begins with reflection on them: only through them does a perspective open on what art is.”42 To clarify the role of such needs or demands in the regeneration of aesthetics, especially in connection with moral-political art, let me paraphrase John Dewey, a philosopher relevant to most discussions of aesthetics. Art is, among other things (pleasure, revelry, play, etc.), the enactment of human needs through sensuous forms that are apprehended on affective and cognitive levels before (or as) the underlying needs are recognized and satisfied. That is, art as enactment combines the moral-political de-

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mand for the apprehension of our needs by others with the moralpolitical demand for the recognition and satisfaction of these needs by others. This combination of moral and political demands involving apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction is what I call the Dewey Effect. In Dewey’s own words: “Every need, say hunger for fresh air or food, is a lack that denotes at least a temporary absence of adequate adjustment with surroundings. But it is also a demand, a reaching out into the environment to make good the lack and to restore adjustment by building at least a temporary equilibrium. . . . These biological commonplaces are something more than that: they reach to the roots of the aesthetic in experience.”43 But what does biology have to do with art and the regeneration of aesthetics understood as art critique? If “hunger” is understood as the complex, evolving, and historical set of human needs, desires, hopes, fears, pleasures, pains, and the like, and if “environment” is understood in social-political as well as natural terms, then we can easily see that our relationships with our environment are replete with examples of “temporary absence of adequate adjustment.” Dewey believes such absence can be experienced best, if not only, when it is enacted through artistic form that enables us to separate this type of experience from the general amorphous flow of everyday experience—hence Dewey’s title, Art as Experience, which serves as a condensed expression of his aesthetic theory. Art is the enactment in public of our response to an absence of adjustment with our environment after it has left its affective and cognitive imprint on us, which means that art here is as much effect as cause—in Dewey’s language, an “undergoing” before a “doing.” In turn, art as enactment provides in nascent form at least the demand for future restoration of an equilibrium with our environment—that is, the imagined elimination of the absence of adequate adjustment. So art as enactment is also a “doing” in response to an “undergoing.” Or, in the language of trauma, which emerges at times throughout the discussions that follow, art as enactment is a symptomatic manifestation of suffering that is otherwise too overwhelming to be experienced affectively, let alone to be rendered intelligible cognitively. In Elizabeth V. Spelman’s words, although suffering is an ineradicable part of the human condition, it is also part

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of our condition to “attempt to give form to suffering—be it our own, that of those close to us, or that of strangers near and far.”44 Art provides the forms of (or for) our affective and cognitive experience of suffering, while aesthetics is the critique of these affective and cognitive forms against the social-political and ontological background of suffering (as well as other dimensions of human life). Just as hunger generates art, art in turn generates a hunger for aesthetics. Art as enactment means that hunger is given affective and cognitive artistic form that enacts the moral-political demand that the hunger be apprehended and recognized publicly (objectively) so it is not merely an internal (subjective) affect or idea. In turn, the artistic form demands, but also helps to engender, a moral-political commitment to satisfy the hunger once (or as) we apprehend and recognize it, thereby avoiding the criticism, in principle, that art is merely the aestheticization of hunger (i.e., aesthetic pleasure created at the expense of those in hunger). At the same time, by enacting the moralpolitical demands for apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction, art implicates audiences for they (not artists alone) bear the responsibility for meeting them. To be sure, acceptance of this responsibility is not guaranteed because even a person’s having compassion for somebody else’s suffering does not necessarily imply any obligation to alleviate that suffering. For example, most people apprehend that more than 40 million individuals in the United States lack health-care insurance and that these same individuals are suffering, and many also recognize that some of this suffering is causally due to a lack of access to adequate health-care. Despite such apprehension and recognition, however, many of these people still believe that they do not have any moral-political obligation to take action to alleviate the suffering of the uninsured by providing them with healthcare insurance. Nonetheless, we can still attempt to narrow, if not close, the gap between apprehension and eventual satisfaction of human hunger if the moral-political demands originally placed on art after hunger affects us are transformed into moral-political demands made by art. A main goal of aesthetics today (as the two-mode model of art critique outlined earlier) is to explain how the transformation of demands on art to demands by art is already a reality in some con-

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temporary art. In this light, aesthetics is the critical analysis of artistic form in relation to the underlying hunger that generates an enactment that, in turn, demands apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction of that hunger. Although we can understand art as enactment only by understanding the hunger that art enacts, we understand hunger only through its enactment in art. So we have a circle running between hunger and art. Aesthetics operates mainly in this circle, which is broken only when these demands are satisfied because the satisfaction can take place only outside the art world— that is, in society. Just as there is transitivity from our hunger to art and, in turn, to aesthetics, we regenerate aesthetics with the hope that this transitivity is possible in reverse as well.45 On this generally Deweyan view of aesthetics, it is hard to imagine why it would ever be necessary for anybody to flee from aesthetics to make and understand contemporary art or why anybody would be attracted to the anti-aesthetic stance. As we have seen, however, the flight from aesthetics has already occurred. Even though the return flight may be in progress, we cannot take its success for granted. One way to ensure its success is to ask: How can we counter the ubiquitous anti-aesthetic claim that contemporary art is incapable of having or sustaining any moral-political power in society? The answer is that contemporary art defies this claim and, so, hungers for aesthetics. Aesthetics will be regenerated if it enables us to apprehend, recognize, and satisfy this hunger.

23 T HE DE W EY E F F E C T

1 THE POP EFFECT

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for . . . organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended. Indeed, in response to this new function (more felt than clearly articulated), artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, materials, and methods. —Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility”

Contemporary artists since 1960, at least, have been very theoretical and self-critical, or, as Susan Sontag claims in the epigraph, they are now “self-conscious aestheticians.” This means that aesthetics is deeply embedded in artistic practices, making it a partner in the production of contemporary art and “new modes of sensibility.” So we should expect aesthetics to be an ally in our efforts to understand contemporary art, whether historically or theoretically. In this light, the prevalence of the anti-aesthetic stance in the practice and theory of contemporary art is especially puzzling. Making this puzzle even starker, the current stage of the anti-aesthetic stance emerged precisely when aestheticians began to critique contemporary art in unprecedented ways. For example, Robert Morris’s “Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal” appeared in 1963, just when a number of philosophers were recognizing the philosophical significance of contemporary art and had even begun to transform aesthetics so that it could grasp art in its contemporaneity, that is, grasp how contemporary art is distinctive not just historically, but conceptually.

PO P ART AN D AESTHETI CS

Ironically, a promising, if nascent, collaboration between aesthetics and contemporary art was emerging just as the anti-aesthetic stance (re)asserted itself. This means that it is strategically important to the effort to counterbalance or dislodge the anti-aesthetic stance today that we reexamine the 1960s when this collaboration failed to take root, not only because that period is a significant chapter in the history of the drive within modern philosophical aesthetics (since at least Georg W. F. Hegel) to grasp the contemporaneity of art, but also because this reexamination will help us to identify conceptual strategies to reinvigorate this drive, whether the strategies come from the paths taken or not taken by aestheticians. To this end, I will focus on the critical reception of the emergence of American Pop art in the early 1960s (mostly East Coast) by four philosophers—Sontag, Stanley Cavell, Arthur C. Danto, and Umberto Eco—who realized that Pop required them to transform aesthetics and who, largely because of their transformative efforts, continue to be influential in aesthetics today.1 I call this influence the Pop Effect on aesthetics, though it is really the cumulative effect of modern art on aesthetics. Though “Pop” may be a difficult art-historical development to pinpoint with any confidence, I think the impact of Pop on shaping contemporary aesthetics is not unclear, at least on a normative level, and is thus a more manageable phenomenon. That impact is my focus. Another reason Pop art is particularly relevant here is that Pop artists sometimes spoke in anti-aesthetic terms—and critics and theorists used such terms to speak on their behalf—because they resisted existing aesthetic theories while defying traditional art forms. By embracing popular, industrial, and commercial art and by being willing to treat mass culture as art, too, Pop art clearly signaled a break from aesthetic theories developed mainly, if not only, in response to the “fine arts.” As Lawrence Alloway puts it, Pop developed “more in line with history and sociology [development of mass culture] than with traditional art criticism and aesthetics. In London and New York, artists . . . revealed a new sensibility to the presence of images from mass communications and to objects from mass production

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assimilable within the work of art.”2 If Pop embodies the antiaesthetic stance in this sense, it would seem all the more unlikely that aestheticians could critique it, except perhaps to return the favor of an outright rejection. However, as it turns out, the break from aesthetics was not as total as it first seemed, as we saw in the preface in the cases of Marcel Duchamp, Barnett Newman, and Morris. The same is true in the case of Pop, for when Alloway says that Pop (among other art movements of the post–World War II period) was an “alternative to an aesthetic that isolated visual art from life and from the other arts,” he had in mind only a notion of aesthetics derived “from the eighteenth-century separation of the arts from one another,” which with few exceptions excluded popular or mass culture.3 But philosophers in the 1960s realized, in part by following the lead of artists, that this kind of separated, medium-centric aesthetics was no longer appropriate, even though it may have been to some extent perpetuated by modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg. The urgency to understand the aesthetics of Pop and its artistic practices compelled philosophers such as Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco to overcome the apparent impossibility of a philosophical critique of contemporary art because, as they recognized at the time, nothing less than the future of aesthetics was at stake. This makes Pop a pivotal first chapter in the regeneration of aesthetics because to revisit Pop critically is to challenge a potentially canonical embodiment of the anti-aesthetic stance in contemporary art history and theory. The reason Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco are exemplary here is that they realized that Pop was a development within art (whether continuous with modernism or a break from it) that aesthetic theory at the time could not understand or explain because most aestheticians had not yet fully appreciated the philosophical significance of the history of modernism and were thus ill-prepared to comprehend 1960s art. Cavell captures the problem succinctly: “I believe it is true to say that modernist art—roughly, the art of one’s own generation— has not become a problem for the philosophy contemporary with it (in England and America anyway).”4 As we will see, however, several philosophers, including Cavell, believed they had a philosophical responsibility to critique contemporary art, starting with Pop art in

27 T H E P O P E F F E C T

the early 1960s. In Cavell’s prophetic words, “aesthetics stands to art or to criticism as the philosophy of, say, physics stands to physics; for no one, I take it, could claim competence at the philosophy of physics who was not immediately concerned with the physics current in his time.”5 In 1964, Sontag confirmed this normative and methodological commitment of philosophy to grasp the contemporaneity of art: “Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending or justifying art which becomes particularly . . . insensitive to contemporary needs and practices.”6 If aestheticians at that time had been able to realize this commitment fully, the recent iteration of the anti-aesthetic stance may never have gotten off the ground (or taken root in that period). Looking to the present, if we renew and sustain this commitment now, the anti-aesthetic stance should have less currency, less traction. More specifically, what Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco recognized in the 1960s was that Pop art was a recalcitrant new “fact” that appeared in galleries in England, the United States, and around the world, seemingly out of nowhere. The philosophers’ main options were either to explain the fact away using existing aesthetic theory, thereby being, as Sontag said, “insensitive to contemporary needs and practices,” or to transform theory with the aim of explaining the fact (even if they did not look favorably on Pop). It may be true that the dominance of the twentieth-century positivist paradigm of philosophy as science prevented aesthetics from responding adequately to modernism because it was expected to be a science about a set of phenomena—artistic practices, works of art, and affective experiences—that routinely defy science (as Newman argued when he railed against aestheticians who unwittingly adopted ornithology as their model, as we saw in the introduction). Yet some aestheticians learned several discipline-formative lessons from the philosophy of science without any longer aspiring to make aesthetics into a science. They learned—especially from the models of science developed by Karl Popper, R. N. Hanson, Nelson Goodman, and Thomas Kuhn—that aesthetic theory needed to be substantially transformed if new facts incommensurate with existing theory demanded such transformation.7 So rejecting Pop was not an option, any more than rejecting new facts would be acceptable in the sciences. For example,

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28

as Danto says in response to Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, no existing aesthetic theory could explain this work as art, yet there was no denying it was art.8 Warhol’s work thus presented a serious theoretical challenge to aesthetics to explain the new fact, even if that meant starting aesthetics anew. In turn, these four philosophers learned that being receptive to new facts in art means not only being open to the contemporaneity of art, but also being attuned to the historicity and futurity of art because art’s contemporaneity is intelligible only against the background of its historicity and in anticipation of its future. In this light, the emergence of Pop was a test determining whether aestheticians were capable of critiquing contemporary art in its historical and philosophical variety, complexity, and temporality— without imposing any grand or metanarrative—so that it would no longer be seen as appearing out of nowhere or, worse, heading nowhere. I think these four aestheticians, among others, largely passed this test and thereby embody the Pop Effect, which should be the normative legacy of Pop within aesthetics, especially with an eye to its regeneration.9 Despite the potential of the Pop Effect within contemporary aesthetics, however, philosophers have not received any substantial credit for their critique of Pop art, at least not in the recent arthistorical accounts of that period, of which there have been many, since 1960s art is now a significant object of research.10 For example, Thomas Crow hardly mentions any philosophers in The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent.11 This omission is puzzling because he enumerates many historical conditions, events, and factors outside the art world that he believes shaped the art of the 1960s and must be part of any narrative explanation of it.12 Two important, welcome exceptions to the exclusion of philosophers in recent historical accounts of Pop art are Sarah Doris’s Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture and Sylvia Harrison’s Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism.13 Doris discusses Sontag, particularly the essays “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” (1964) and “One Culture and the New Sensibility” (1965). By contrast, I focus on Sontag’s earlier “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition” (1962) because I want to demonstrate that she critiqued Pop as it first emerged. At the same time, Danto has only a minor

29 T H E P O P E F F E C T

role in Doris’s analysis, and, problematically, he is portrayed as an institutional theorist of art, which is precisely what he has worked explicitly for decades to prove he is not.14 For her part, Harrison’s account features Sontag, on the belief that her criticism is “of the utmost importance to the theorization of pop during the sixties” because she “attempted to meet critical challenges posed by key issues of pop.”15 I fully agree with Harrison, but whereas she places Sontag under the category of “Cultural Critics,” despite the presence of a category of “Philosophical Critics,” I regard Sontag as a philosopher because that was part of her academic training and, moreover, that is how we can best clarify and appreciate her enduring normative contributions to contemporary aesthetics. Despite Doris’s and Harrison’s exceptions, the relative omission of philosophers from contemporary accounts of 1960s art, although not explicitly a result of the anti-aesthetic stance, are symptomatic of it and thus need to be addressed because they perpetuate an inaccurate, normative model of aesthetics as being disengaged—in principle, not just in fact—from contemporary art. With the aim of correcting this model because it is inaccurate and, moreover, because it underwrites the anti-aesthetic stance by isolating aesthetics from contemporary art, I examine how Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco critiqued 1960s art as Pop emerged. Since my focus is on the general approaches these philosophers took to 1960s art, it is not possible to discuss many individual Pop artworks with the kind of aesthetic, moral, and political specificity that will be evident in the following chapters. The aim here is first to open up discursive space for philosophical reflection on the contemporaneity of contemporary art through the work of four philosophers who critiqued 1960s art. Let me be clear that I am proposing that we follow only the examples of Sontag’s, Cavell’s, Danto’s, and Eco’s acts of critiquing 1960s art, not the specific theoretical models or substantive content of what they offer through their critiques. For example, readers (then and now) might agree or disagree with Danto’s interpretation of Warhol’s Brillo Box as unveiling an essentialist definition of art. Either way, I hope they will recognize the more important issue for our purposes: because the Warhol art that Danto critiqued was first exhibited (April 1964) only a few months before his essay “The

THE POP EFFECT

30

Artworld” first appeared (October 1964), it is clear that he was willing and able to critique contemporary art philosophically. But my point here is more general than Danto. Just as moral philosophers argue that “ought” implies “can,” meaning that it is a mistake to expect humans to act in a particular ethical way if they cannot act in that way under any circumstances, it would be a mistake to argue that aestheticians should critique contemporary art if they simply cannot do so, as those dedicated to the anti-aesthetic stance allege. Fortunately, Sontag’s, Cavell’s, Danto’s, and Eco’s critiques of 1960s art demonstrate that aestheticians can indeed critique contemporary art, making it possible to claim—even insist—that philosophers today should and can do so.

THE PLI G HT O F THE PU BLI C

Crow’s The Rise of the Sixties is a good focus for an analysis of the nascent collaboration between aesthetics and contemporary art in the 1960s because his aim—not unlike Sontag’s, Cavell’s, Danto’s, and Eco’s at the time—is to provide a new narrative, or explanatory “framework of understanding,” of the art created during (and since) the 1960s. Such a framework inevitably involves aesthetics as well as art history because it is a normative as well as historical enterprise. So aesthetics will have to be brought into this framework, even if Crow is not inclined to do so.16 The conceptual core of Crow’s new narrative is his account of the “plight of the public” in the reception and legacy of 1960s art.17 He thereby unwittingly highlights the centrality of aesthetics at the time because this plight involves aesthetics in its origins, content, and resolution. Look, for example, at how Crow describes the plight of “ordinary viewers” experiencing Pop art for the first time: “hoping for coherence and beauty in their imaginative experiences, [they] confronted instead works of art declared to exist in arrangements of bare texts and unremarkable photographs, in industrial fabrication revealing no evidence of the artist’s hand, in mundane commercial products merely transferred from shopping mall to gallery, or in ephemeral and confrontational performances in which main-

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stream moral values are deliberately travestied.”18 The “plight” here is owing to the fact that the general public’s aesthetic expectations about art—the norms of “coherence and beauty in their imaginative experiences”—were not met in the 1960s; in fact, they seemed to be deliberately undermined by artists, setting up a confrontation that Crow believes is endemic in Pop (and in contemporary art to this day) and that, as Peter Sloterdijk observes, brings iconoclasm (and the anti-aesthetic) into the picture: “Whoever scandalizes the public [and thus destroys the collaboration between the producing and receiving sides of artistic activity] admits to progressive iconoclasm.”19 The issue of aesthetic norms—often articulated using an anti-aesthetic discourse—is at heart an issue not merely of interpretation or taste, but of understanding, and thus it is an implicit invitation to aestheticians to participate in the discussion of 1960s art because their task is the critical understanding of art’s normativity—which, as we’ll see, is precisely what some of them did. But before examining what aestheticians did, we need to ask: Who was “the public”—or, more accurately, the various publics—and which aesthetic (and also moral) norms were they conflicted about? Crow’s talk of the “plight of the public” is, of course, directly tied to Leo Steinberg’s 1960 lecture “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public,” published in 1962, yet his understanding of the public is very different from Steinberg’s.20 Whereas Crow’s public is largely external to the art world, though some people were also part of the gallery and museum audience, Steinberg’s public is more internal, comprising first and foremost artists and critics, confirming “a general rule that wherever there appears an art that is truly new and original, the men who denounce it first and loudest are artists.”21 Steinberg cites the following classic examples of the antiaesthetic stance within the art world: the people who kept Courbet and Manet out of the late-nineteenth-century salons were all painters; Signac was outraged by Matisse’s The Joy of Life (1906), commenting that he “seems to have gone to the dogs”; and Matisse was in turn outraged only one year later by Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), swearing “that he would ‘sink Picasso’ and make him regret his hoax.”22 Yet the most profound example that Steinberg provides of the public’s internal plight is his own, very negative

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reaction to Jasper Johns’s Target with Four Faces (1955), which he first saw in a New York gallery in 1958 (along with Johns’s paintings of numbers, letters, and the American flag). Though Steinberg’s reaction was one of an insider, he described himself as a philistine, namely, as one who by definition is excluded from the inner circle of art and culture. So, even while making his case for the internal public plight, Steinberg tellingly appeals to the language of the external plight, suggesting that the two publics are deeply intertwined. To take yet another example from the same period, Crow reports that it was another art faculty member, not the general public, who burned one of Edward Ruscha’s early paintings that was hanging on the walls at the Chouinard Art Institute (Los Angeles) in 1962. Later, in a 1965 interview (with John Coplans) when Ruscha discusses his art book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, he echoes this point about the clash of publics, each with its own sense of aesthetics: ruscha: Reactions are very varied; for example, some people are outraged. I showed the first book to a gasoline station attendant. He was amused. Some think it’s great, others are at a loss. coplans: What kind of people say it’s great—those familiar with modern art? ruscha: No, not at all.23

The clear implication of this example is that the people most involved with contemporary art were the ones who rejected Ruscha’s work, though they were supposed to appreciate what is new and important in it, while the general public, represented here by the gas station attendant, embraced Ruscha’s art (if amusedly), though it was expected to reject such art, at least according to Crow. If Steinberg’s account is accurate, we are left asking: Whose aesthetic norms were challenged by 1960s art? To whom is the anti-aesthetic stance of Pop addressed? Were the norms external or internal to 1960s art? In analyzing these normative issues, do we have to choose between Crow’s and Steinberg’s external and internal accounts of the plight of the public, or is it more constructive to explain how they shape each other and, in turn, help to constitute the aesthetics of 1960s art? Moreover, how would answers to these questions

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help us to achieve a better understanding of the place of aesthetics in the production, reception, and legacy of 1960s art? To answer these questions, consider first how critics and artists responded to Pop art as it emerged. That is, since Crow believes the plight of the public is endemic in 1960s art (and in all contemporary art), it is important to determine whether his historical claim is accurate. Did the public have an iconoclastic reaction to Pop because it seemed, among other things, anti-aesthetic? If so, which public(s) exactly? As it turns out, a number of theorists and critics writing during the 1960s do not confirm Crow’s analysis of the public’s response to Pop and, on the issue of the internal and external senses of the public’s plight, most support Steinberg’s internal perspective. For example, art critic Max Kozloff acknowledged in the 1960s that there was a potential for fraud present in Pop art because it just did not seem serious, especially when measured against abstract expressionism, its major immediate predecessor in art that was often seen as reflecting conceptions of “modern man,” a rather serious trope.24 If a common response to abstract expressionism was “I could have done it,” the comparable response to Pop art might have been “Actually, I already did it,” since much of Pop art was derived from popular, commercial, and public images and signs, such as those in advertising, comics, and mass consumer culture (e.g., Disney’s Mickey Mouse or Campbell’s soup can).25 But Kozloff also insisted that Pop artists, such as Warhol, were aware of the fraud potential of their work and attempted to disarm it by trying to “undeceive the viewer.”26 The imagery characteristic of Pop is consistent with this effort because it was, by definition, already popular, though not (yet) qua art. Since the title of his own article on this subject is “ ‘Pop’ Culture, Metaphysical Disgust, and the New Vulgarians,” it is clear that Kozloff recognizes that the “frank admission of chicanery” among Pop artists does not necessarily succeed in becoming honest.27 The reference to vulgarity is intended to capture the normative sense of disgust or shock (affects of iconoclasm) that the American middle class was supposed to experience when they initially saw Pop art. According to critic Brian O’Doherty, however, that disgust played itself out in high modernism, in abstract expressionism in particu-

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lar, when the avant-garde shocked the American middle class in the 1940s and 1950s. He argues that the tables were turned with the advent of Pop: the middle class began to shock the avant-garde or, in Eco’s words, the avant-garde and kitsch took revenge on each other.28 Greenberg—critic, theorist, and key author of the avantgarde versus kitsch discourse—is a perfect example of an avantgardist shocked in this way, and his shock is further evidence of the internal plight discussed by Steinberg. In fact, Greenberg’s resistance to Pop was tied to the fact that the general public embraced it almost from the very start because he believed that their embrace was a symptom of Pop’s fundamental aesthetic weakness: it was “rather easy stuff” that only “pretended to be fresh.”29 In the end, it seems that Crow overstates the plight of the external public, at least concerning Pop art. Other critics and artists of the time provide even more evidence of Crow’s apparent overstatement about the public’s response to the aesthetics of Pop. For example, critic Sidney Tillim argued that it was an exaggeration even in the 1960s to say that Pop was “violently opposed”; rather, it was almost an immediate success, at least among the general public, with the critics of Pop again being internal, “complacent members of the art world.”30 Peter Selz, who organized and moderated the well-known 1962 panel on Pop at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, announced on that occasion, “interest in Pop art has spread quickly not only from 77th Street to 57th Street [in Manhattan] but indeed from coast to coast.”31 In addition, it is not just that an existing, external public embraced Pop art while the public internal to the art world rejected it. It is also the case that a new internal public was created by Pop; that is, people once external to the art world were suddenly central players in it.32 For example, in a review of the 1960 exhibit New Mediums—New Forms, the curator, Thomas Hess, began by describing Pop art in considerable detail: “free-standing works and reliefs made of sponge, wood pegs, tacks, a smashed fender, folded paper, ping-pong balls, playing cards, a stuffed chicken, a cut-out bird, tar, garter-belts, coffee grounds, a railroad tie, Styrofoam, polyesters, corrugate, pillows, an electro-magnet—rubbish and valuables, ‘garlic and sapphires in

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the mud.’ ”33 Compare this list of materials to Crow’s earlier description of how the art public’s normative aesthetic expectations about art were not met because, instead of coherent objects of beauty, viewers experienced unremarkable photographs, industrial fabrications, and the like. By contrast, Hess argues that such work was motivated by dissatisfaction with the basic limits of art, as you would expect from a new art movement, but limits that were not only aesthetic but also moral-political in kind. The artists were looking to resist “the aristocracy of art” and reconnect with a public kept at arm’s length by abstract expressionists and other artists of the time: “You are invited to touch and move things, open hinged doors, . . . to be a participant . . . in a game with art.”34 This invitation was expressed through aesthetics, albeit a new type of aesthetic—Pop, as described earlier by Hess and representing what Tillim called a “subversive form of reconciliation with society on the one hand, with subject matter on the other, or at least indicating a repressed desire for both.”35 Moreover, Hess argues, this new aesthetic also introduced a new ethical-political relationship between artists and their public(s): “the human (i.e., ethical) quality of the audience will directly affect and modify the aesthetic quality of the work. Art becomes an event and its audience response is a function of art’s equation.”36 So instead of the confrontational relationship between Pop and its public regarding their respective normative expectations about art, as portrayed by Crow, Hess describes how the public is invited into this new work and becomes an active participant in a new experience made possible by art and generative of new moral-political as well as aesthetic norms (something Newman and Morris welcomed, in principle, even if they had different norms in mind). If the public was shocked at all, it was simply because they did not expect to be invited to participate in art, especially at a normative (i.e., aesthetic and moral-political) level. In a similar vein, Alloway spoke of the “great audience” associated with Pop: “It is no longer sufficient to define culture solely as something that a minority guards for the few. . . . Our definition of culture is being stretched beyond the fine arts limits imposed on it by Renaissance theory, and refers now, increasingly, to the whole complex of human activities. Within this

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definition, rejection of mass produced art is not, as critics think, a defense of culture but an attack on it.”37 With this last claim, the cultural-critical burden officially shifted to Greenberg and the other critics who in their attacks on Pop were now said to be attacking culture—which is perhaps exactly what they meant to do, for the “culture” that Pop mirrored is one that Greenberg famously regarded as kitsch. But the locus and content of culture had changed, whereas the high modernists such as Greenberg did not change. According to Steven Henry Madoff, Pop art “garnered its authority as much from public attention as from critical praise.”38 The new artists, collectors, and critics constituted new communities, thereby creating a general public that did not suffer the plight described by Crow. So, if there was any public plight regarding the aesthetics of Pop art, it seems that it was internal rather than external, which means that Steinberg’s account seems to be more accurate than Crow’s. Yet the public’s plight is not so simple, as if we could choose between Steinberg’s and Crow’s accounts of it. If the internal plight reflects the logic of artistic development and if the external plight reflects the reception of art once it has developed, the internal and external plights are dialectically related since the reception affects the logic and the logic is determined, in part, by the reception. If we are to understand the aesthetics of Pop art and, in turn, the Pop Effect on aesthetics, we need an explanation of how these publics reciprocally shape one another through discussions of aesthetics. In pursuit of such explanation, we would do better to view the early public reception of Pop art in new aesthetic terms, rather than through the anti-aesthetic discourse, and at the same time in terms of new moral, political, and cultural relationships imagined beyond the modernist art world. Enter Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco, for they provide explanations of 1960s art that help to connect the internal and external public plights and, through such connection, contribute to a better understanding of Pop art and its legacy. In effect, they take up the challenge presented by Newman and the early Morris— that philosophers provide a theoretical aesthetics that could guide all the varied, even competing publics’ thinking about contemporary art.

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SO NTAG , CAVELL, DANTO, EC O

As members of the general/external public and in some cases (e.g., Sontag) as members of the art/internal public, Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco responded to 1960s art by identifying and analyzing the dialectic of the public’s internal and external plight about the aesthetics of Pop and its moral-political implications. The inclusion of their analyses supports Crow’s historical and normative framework in a significant way, which makes his omission of these philosophers even more striking. The analyses also provide a way to reconcile Crow’s and Steinberg’s accounts of the plight of the public, as these philosophers are mostly external to the art world, at least initially, yet they make a case for the internal plight. In the end, the philosophers explain how these two plights shape one another dialectically and, at the same time, determine the legacy of Pop art for aesthetics by demonstrating that some philosophers at the time were to a certain extent able to critique the contemporaneity of Pop art. To start with a philosophically trained critic whom Crow does mention, Sontag’s 1962 account of the plight of the audience attending Happenings sounds similar to Crow’s framework: the dramatic spine of the Happening “is its treatment (this is the only word for it) of the audience. The event seems designed to tease and abuse the audience” and, ideally, “to stir the modern audience from its cozy emotional anesthesia.”39 Her example is Allan Kaprow’s A Spring Happening (March 1961), for which “the spectators were confined inside a long box-like structure resembling a cattle car; peepholes had been bored in the wooden walls of this enclosure through which the spectators could strain to see the events taking place outside; when the Happening was over, the walls collapsed, and the spectators were driven out by someone operating a power lawnmower.”40 The audience was drawn—pulled—into the Happenings only to be driven—pushed—out while being treated in either case (like the performers themselves) as “material objects” no different from all the “stuff” used in the performance.41 The method not only—consistent with the anti-aesthetic stance—unsettled the presumed conventionality of the audience, thereby destroying conventional aesthetic

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norms, but also—now in sharp contrast with the anti-aesthetic— created “new meanings or counter-meanings through radical juxtaposition” akin to the surrealist collage principle.42 Thus, the aggression displayed toward the audience had a constructive aim, that of introducing an idea to take shape in the future rather than providing an actual set of meanings for the audience to take home with them. Given the surrealist lineage here, especially if we adopt Sontag’s understanding of surrealism as not just a particular art movement but an aesthetic sensibility cutting across all contemporary art, the Happenings are very much part of a new aesthetic tradition within the arts, even though the artists at the time may have presented themselves as being against all tradition. Sontag’s contribution here is to have recognized all the subtleties of this new art in the early 1960s and its implications for contemporary aesthetics. Such Happenings clearly exemplify what Crow calls the “confrontational performances” of 1960s art that caused the plight of the contemporary audience. But the point of introducing Sontag here is not to suggest that Crow does not know this Kaprow example or her analysis of it.43 Rather, the point is that a philosophercritic was analyzing the public’s aesthetic plight as it first became a theoretical object of reflection as well as a historical reality. This fact would seem to strengthen Crow’s own account. At the same time, however, Sontag claims that the public’s plight is a problem internal to the structure of the Happenings, not just a matter of how the audience responded to them because they were designed to tease, abuse, and stir the audience. This point would seem to support Steinberg rather than Crow. Yet the artists’ aesthetic technique of confronting the public is an iconoclastic artifact of the internalization of the public’s iconoclastic resistance to new art. That is, what seems like an internal plight is actually the effect of an external plight: artists internalized the public’s anti-aesthetic reception of previous contemporary art and anticipated further negative reception by, as Crow puts it, determining the place of the audience in advance.44 The plight of the public thereby becomes reflected in the internal aesthetic structure of the Happenings as a reactive anticipation. In turn, this plight is reflected in critical and theoretical discussions of Pop because, as Sontag says in her discussion of Camp, a related

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phenomenon of the 1960s, “To name a sensibility, to draw its contours, and to recount its history requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.”45 Ironically, it is precisely because Sontag was strongly offended by Camp that she wanted to write about it; it is also why she could write about it because the offense gave her the detachment that critical reflection requires. According to Sontag, this same phenomenon is at play in the public’s responses to Happenings: they were simultaneously drawn to and skeptical of the Happenings and Pop art. In the end, Sontag’s philosophical analysis of these examples of emblematic 1960s art reveals the complementarity between the internal and external plights of the public, albeit in a way that sustains both plights and highlights the contemporaneity of 1960s art. While explaining how and why these plights are complementary, Sontag provides a substantial example of a philosopher’s critique of 1960s art just as Pop was emerging. If Crow’s ultimate goal was to provide a historical framework for the 1960s so we can recognize both kinds of plight, Sontag provides a sound philosophical basis for doing so. A second example of a philosopher’s critique of 1960s art, which also involves the plight of the public, is Cavell’s “Music Decomposed” (1967), in which he discusses the problem of the audience for new music that he later links to Pop. He argues that composers have lost their audience: “the procedures and problems it now seems necessary to composers to employ and confront to make a work of art at all themselves insure [sic] that their work will not be comprehensible to an audience.”46 This predicament is the result of “internal, and apparently irreversible, developments within [composers’] own artistic procedures.”47 In the absence of an audience, composers speak to one another, often in the form of manifestos common throughout the history of modernism.48 The new music they developed among themselves came to be seen as “difficult” by the public because only those who were involved in the composers’ (and musicians’) conversations were able to understand it. This experience of difficulty makes the public skeptical of the new music to the point that they begin to wonder whether it is fraudulent, that is, whether it is even art. Cavell infers from such observations that “the possibil-

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ity of fraudulence, and even more so the experience of fraudulence, is endemic in the experience of contemporary music; that its full impact, even its immediate relevance, depends on a willingness to trust the object, knowing that the time spent with its difficulties may be betrayed.”49 In other words, the public was unable to understand new music and thus had to trust the artists, not only regarding the meaning or purpose of their art, but also even regarding the more basic question of whether it was art in the first place—hence the threat of fraudulence. Yet because the public was at a distance from the musicians by being excluded from their discussion as the music was being (de)composed, there was no ground for trust. The distance between the musicians and the public both necessitated trust to bridge the gap between them and, at the same time, made it difficult to establish trust. As a result, according to Cavell, the threat of fraudulence went unabated because the trust that was needed to quell the threat was as painfully absent as it was urgently needed. Much of what Cavell argues about new music has more in common with what Greenberg argues about abstract expressionism than with what Crow says about Pop art because the public (initially) rejected new music and abstract expressionism, yet, as we have seen, other publics embraced Pop art. More important here, however, is that we cannot understand the diverse public responses to the aesthetics of Pop unless we see that they are determined, in part, by earlier receptions of abstract expressionism. The public(s) found abstract expressionism and new music difficult because the artistic quality in each case was elusive, and artists (whether painters or musicians) internalized that difficulty by setting out to make difficult art. In Cavell’s eyes, the threat of fraudulence endemic in new music takes on a visual manifestation in Pop art. Specifically, the threat emerges in the form of the provocative question “Is it art?” which he says Pop enacts, though the question was first raised in relation to new music (or, in Greenberg’s case, in relation to abstract expressionism).50 Cavell is not satisfied with the answer that time will tell how to answer this question philosophically, because it is not clear what time could tell us if we do not look at the underlying aesthetic problem of the dangers of fraudulence and of trust.

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Instead of trying to resolve this problem, Cavell inscribes an ontological form of the problem—essential fraudulence—into the heart of his conception of art and thus into his aesthetic theory. That which is true of new music becomes true of all contemporary art. In effect, the threat of fraudulence is elevated to an ontological condition for contemporary art, starting more emphatically with Pop. Although Cavell seems to agree with Greenberg that Pop was easy and thus not quality art, his philosophical point is that Pop owed its existence, qua art, to the threat of fraudulence established by new music and abstract expressionism. Those who raised the “Is it art?” question when they experienced Pop art may have thought it was a way of saying that it could not possibly be art. For Cavell, however, this very question is rather an indication of the ontological condition that established Pop as art—ontologically, regardless of what Cavell, Greenberg, or the internal or external public thought of Pop on the level of taste (criticism). In short, the plight of the public(s) that concerns Crow is ontologically transformed by Cavell into the specter of fraudulence in new music, in Pop art, and, by extension, in all contemporary art.51 In carrying out this ontological strategy, Cavell believes that he articulates a principal condition that explains how Pop art was possible. Just as Sontag did earlier, Cavell provides philosophical reinforcement for Crow’s narrative of 1960s art. Additional philosophical support for Crow’s narrative, as well as for Cavell’s concern about fraudulence in Pop art, is provided by Danto through the Testadura character in “The Artworld.”52 Testadura is a plain speaker and noted philistine who perceives the beds included in Pop artworks by Robert Rauschenberg and Claus Oldenburg as real beds and thereby mistakes art for reality. Despite his innocence (and even ignorance), however, Testadura is actually on to something because the artistic beds he mistakes for real were meant to be real, according to Danto. In this light, Testadura has not made a mistake after all; rather, he has perceived indirectly what Pop art is about—the sameness and difference between art and reality, as well as between high art and popular culture. Yet can this be right? If the beds are intended to be real, which means they are intended to be the beds Testadura, in his simplicity, perceives them to be, what makes them art when the beds by themselves are not?

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For Danto, these works ask, through the mediation of Testadura: What makes Rauschenberg’s and Oldenburg’s works art when they are substantially identical with objects (beds) that clearly are not art? In effect, Danto is asking the same question Cavell characterized as the “Is it art?” issue embodied in Pop art. So Danto seems to internalize Cavell’s concern about the threat of fraudulence in contemporary art: if Testadura is Danto’s straw man, he is also Cavell’s house skeptic. In contrast to Cavell, however, Danto tries to resolve the threat of fraudulence (to placate or educate Testadura) by providing (later) an essentialist definition of art that shows us once and for all how to answer the “Is it art?” question: a work of art has meaning and embodies (rather than represents or symbolizes) its meaning, whereas the work’s indiscernible twin in the real world has no meaning or else does not embody its meaning.53 My principal interest here, however, is not in Danto’s definition of art per se, which I have discussed elsewhere.54 Rather, my interest lies in the Testadura character’s embodiment of the threat of fraudulence that Cavell believes is internal to art and in Danto’s definition having been developed as a philosophical response to this threat as it appeared in Pop art. In Cavell’s terms, Testadura is right to doubt contemporary artworks and to challenge their status as art because his doubt is immanent to the works themselves, not merely the result of the philistinism reflected in his perceptual understanding of art, as Danto argues. At the same time, Testadura represents Crow’s public—those for whom contemporary art remains unintelligible, at least without the help of critics or others who give voice to what Danto calls the “atmosphere of theory,” a way to explain that what makes something art—embodied meaning—is beyond the visual or perceptual realm. Once the connection is made between Testadura and Cavell, this external public plight becomes internalized in philosophical aesthetics. Whether the threat or plight is resolved later is less important than this internalization because, either way, it transforms contemporary aesthetics—the public plight is now an ontological fixture of art, which is precisely what Crow and Cavell already argued, though in different ways. Thus, though Crow’s argument is historical while Cavell’s and Danto’s are philosophical, they complement one another. For

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example, if contrary to Crow the public embraced rather than rejected Pop art, their embrace was nonetheless accompanied by a threat of fraudulence. But the “Is it art?” ontological question expressive of this threat came to constitute as art the very “thing” whose art status was in question. Even if the threat was historically an artifact of the difficulty of abstract expressionism, new music, and other forms of high modernist art, it emerged from this history as an ontological condition, or so Cavell and Danto argue in their distinct ways. On the heels of the public’s initial rejection and later acceptance of abstract expressionism, the public’s relatively quick acceptance of Pop art was a symptom of the deeper conceptual transformation of art, which Danto explicitly called back then a “victory of ontology.”55 At the same time, if anything unsettles Cavell’s ontological condition (threat of fraudulence) and Crow’s historical claim (plight of the public), it is not the historical evidence provided by the critics and artists who denied there was such a thing. For that evidence assumes the ontological condition but answers it with critical and artistic confidence: we, the critics and artists, know what art is, and so does the public. We need not decide between Cavell’s and Danto’s theories to appreciate that their critiques of 1960s art make it clear that aesthetics can indeed critique contemporary art and grasp its contemporaneity, expressed by Cavell and Danto with new ontologies of art. What is important for us to appreciate here is that Crow’s historical account of 1960s art is supported by philosophical arguments more than by empirical evidence provided by artists, critics, and other art historians, though those same philosophical arguments are in turn meant to explain the evidence, even when it is conflicting. This is again why it is striking that Crow does not discuss any philosophers, particularly those who turn out to be his allies. Moreover, this implicit alliance or collaboration may help Crow respond to the empiricalhistorical evidence against his account of the public’s external plight because he now has philosophical arguments on his side that can, in turn, render the empirical evidence more intelligible and coherent. At the same time, perhaps the plight becomes less evident or visible on an external level once it has been internalized (by Sontag and Cavell) and even less so once it has been ontologized (by

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Cavell and Danto). That is, these philosophers help to explain how the external plight remains even though it has become internalized, ontologized, and even rendered invisible. In any case, we cannot fully understand all these developments leading up to and constituting 1960s art without the help of philosophers who recognized how this art not only challenged existing aesthetic theories but also inspired new, transformed aesthetic theories. In addition to Cavell’s skepticism and Danto’s essentialism, there is yet another way for aestheticians to critique 1960s art—Eco’s aesthetics of the “open work.” He is a good contrast here because in discussing some of the same art critiqued by the other philosophers, he makes different observations and, moreover, draws different philosophical conclusions. Where Cavell sees the threat of fraudulence in new music, Eco sees the creative potential of ambiguity and openness; where Danto sees art struggling throughout modernism to capture its essence in the form of a philosophical definition, Eco sees the open work of modern and contemporary art defying definition and essence; and where Crow sees the plight of the public, Eco embraces the opportunity for greater public participation in art. As a whole, Eco is much more similar to Sontag in seeming to be attuned to the needs and practices of contemporary art, perhaps because they both are (or were) also practicing artists. Eco opens his essay “The Poetics of the Open Work” (1962/1989) with some of the same examples of new, or modern, music that Cavell discusses in “Music Decomposed” (e.g., Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck XI). The mark of new music, according to Eco, is the autonomy, or openness, given to the individual performers. Such openness was not simply at the level of interpretation, in the sense that any composition could be interpreted in different ways by conductors and performers. Rather, the openness is internal to the structure of the work because it is composed with the expectation that it will be completed by the performers, not simply interpreted by them. So the work is unfinished or incomplete as well as open. This is a positive development, according to Eco, because artists have recognized the openness at the experiential and interpretive levels and internalized it, “recasting the work so as to expose it to the maximum possible ‘opening,’ ” and thereby making

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this openness or “structural vitality” into “a positive property of the  work.”56 In turn, the audience is asked to collaborate with composers in “making the composition,” collaborating with composers in “works in movement.”57 So Eco’s concept of openness has three components: the intention of the artist, the structure of the work of art, and the audience. In addition, these components require a supportive or enabling historical context, first among all the arts but also within other arenas of society. Beyond music, Eco finds examples of such works in literature (e.g., James Joyce, Franz Kafka), poetry (e.g., Stéphane Mallarmé), the visual arts (e.g., Alexander Calder), and virtually all of contemporary art: “this is a sign that certain intellectual currents circulate imperceptibly until they are adopted and justified as cultural data.”58 He also finds this openness reflected in contemporary science (e.g., the principle of indeterminacy in physics), as well as in philosophical accounts of perception (e.g., Maurice Merleau-Ponty) and logic (multivalued logics). So whereas some might view this openness as evidence of a cultural crisis, Eco sees “these poetic systems, in harmony with modern science, as expressing the positive possibility of thought and action made available to an individual who is open to the continuous renewal of his life patterns and cognitive processes.”59 In turn, Eco insists that this openness be reflected in aesthetic theory rather than be resisted by it (as may be the case in Cavell’s skepticism) or be neutralized (as may be the result in Danto’s essentialism). As Sontag also argues, when artists regularly change the ground rules determining what constitutes a work of art, they are not saying what art  is—not pointing to its essence—but rather “what art need not be”—signaling its openness toward other artistic possibilities through the enactment of new aesthetic strategies.60 Openness just is “the fundamental possibility of the contemporary artist or consumer,”61 which implies that contemporary art is whatever it becomes because of its openness on all three levels—authorial intent, the work’s structure, and audience participation—and because of its historical context. In short, Eco sees the aesthetics of 1960s art setting in motion “a new cycle of relations between the artist and his audience, a new mechanism of aesthetic perception, a different status

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for the artistic product in contemporary society.”62 However, although openness makes contemporary art possible ontologically, it alone does not determine all that it will become. Art is ontologically open to various historical determinations, and its ontology is thus historicized.63 Although Eco does articulate an ontology of contemporary artworks, it is different from Cavell’s (and Danto’s) because his ontology is derived from a positive critique of the experience of contemporary art. For example, he takes the presence of the openness of such art as an invitation to reflect philosophically on it: “it invites us to consider why the contemporary artist feels the need to work in this kind of direction, to try to work out what historical evolution of aesthetic sensibility led up to it and which factors in modern culture reinforced it. We are then in a position to surmise how these experiences should be viewed in the spectrum of a theoretical aesthetics.”64 In a later essay on Pop, Eco clarifies the notion of “theoretical” aesthetics by saying that the “What is Pop?” question cannot be answered (only) sociologically in terms of high art versus low art, the notion of Camp, and the like, though these issues are important to the complete historical narrative explanation of Pop and its legacy. We also need a philosophical account of Pop, by which he means an analysis of the mechanics of signification, such as reproduction, retranslation, and the like. Though Eco himself may not have engaged in a full-scale analysis of this type in the case of Pop, he has done so in cases of other contemporary art, more often literature or music than the visual arts. Moreover, he has helped to outline a philosophical methodology for such a narrative as a complement to the art-historical narratives that Crow developed. That is, Eco’s philosophical concept of openness complements historical explanation and analysis because, again, openness is nothing without historical determinations. On this important score, his openness seems more calibrated to art (and art history) than Cavell’s skepticism and Danto’s essentialism, and, again, Eco seems more attuned to Sontag’s critical approach. Following Eco’s lead, the starting point of a philosophical analysis of the contemporaneity of 1960s aesthetics should be the

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contemporaneity of the practices of 1960s art, whether musical, visual, literary, or in any other medium. For example, Anna Dezeuze says in her recent discussion of 1960s art that she “starts from” Eco’s notion of the open work because, in part, his aesthetic theory is “reflective” rather than “prescriptive.”65 Just as Sontag realized that 1960s art is tied to a new sensibility, and just as Cavell and Danto developed their respective aesthetic theories in response to contemporary art, Eco sees that to understand such art is to understand its open sensibility, which should then be reflected in aesthetic theory. The openness that he proposes extends beyond the art world more generally to the moral-political and cultural factors that contribute to the formation of the new sensibility that, in turn, shapes the contemporaneity of 1960s art and aesthetics. What moves us outside art, to start with, is the involvement of the audience that is itself beyond the art world: as we saw earlier, it includes gas station attendants, new kinds of art collectors, and whoever else in the larger public has had the opportunity to interact with contemporary art and, in so doing, to complete it. So the public continues to be a central player in our understanding of the contemporaneity of contemporary art, but they are no longer in a primarily adversarial role as if they were merely suffering under a plight. Moreover, it is through the public that the moral-political dimensions of contemporary art become more explicit because audiences raise moral-political questions about art and art makes moral-political demands on them, as we will see in subsequent chapters. When this happens, art, morality, and politics are interdependent, and aesthetics must find a way to articulate and explain this interdependence. Eco’s aesthetic concept of openness has the virtue of making such articulation and explanation possible, even if he does not explicitly provide any. He confirms that aesthetics is needed to critique contemporary art and, more concretely, that aestheticians are willing and able to provide such critique. This confirmation makes the regeneration of aesthetics possible by introducing and sustaining a new normative model of aesthetics in relation to contemporary art—the Pop Effect.

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AESTHETI CS, ETHI CS, PO LI TI C S

When Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco critiqued 1960s art, and even to be in a position to do so, they first had to recognize that such critique compelled them to rethink some of the traditional philosophical assumptions about art (its essence, meaning, and aesthetic norms). By contrast, other philosophers did not accept 1960s art (Pop in particular) precisely because it challenged their conceptions of art. They responded by defending the status quo, which was generally modernism; in doing so, they perpetuated a model of disengaged aestheticians that has lasted up until the present and that needs to be altered if aesthetics is ever to be regenerated. In effect, they lost sight of the contemporaneity of art by being too attached to an earlier, favored conception of art. At the same time, some of the philosophers who did critique 1960s art discovered that their critiques also required them to reconsider certain assumptions about philosophy because the art seemed to defy existing philosophical models of art critique—thus, the engagement with the contemporaneity of art leads to the contemporaneity of aesthetics. Although some of these philosophers were open to such reconsideration, others were not.66 Sometimes the encounter between the contemporaneity of aesthetics and that of art results in an eventual retrenchment by philosophy. For example, Cavell and Danto think that contemporary art blurs the boundary between art and philosophy. If Cavell responds by characterizing the crossed boundaries so that they are permanently eviscerated, Danto wants to reestablish the boundaries in such a way as to indemnify them against future crossings. This is a major philosophical difference: one’s immigration policy is open, the other’s is closed. The difference illustrates—with Sontag and Eco on Cavell’s side on this point—that aestheticians can sometimes inadvertently shut themselves off from the contemporaneity of art that represents a challenge to contemporary aesthetics (even while they appear to remain engaged with that same art). To indemnify aesthetics against its own contemporaneity is to constrain the ability of aesthetics to grasp—and learn from—the contemporaneity of art.

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Other philosophers (besides the four previously discussed) managed to respond to 1960s art by willingly reconsidering traditional beliefs about the aims and methods of philosophy. But then they often did not know what to put in place of those beliefs, which led in some cases to the apparent abandonment of philosophy. For example, Jacques Derrida advocates philosophy as rather than of literature, which, though reminiscent of Cavell’s view, seems mainly deconstructive in its aims.67 If the problem with being overly protective of philosophy in an unwitting effort to safeguard it against its own contemporaneity is that aestheticians are unable to grasp the contemporaneity of contemporary art, the problem with being overly hasty to abandon philosophy while embracing the contemporaneity of art is that it becomes virtually impossible to achieve any philosophical art critique. We cannot grasp art’s contemporaneity philosophically if we remain aloof from art by confining ourselves to philosophy’s contemporaneity, nor can we grasp art’s contemporaneity philosophically if we have abandoned philosophy, even if we have done so in the name of art. By contrast, my aim in analyzing how four aestheticians critiqued contemporary art in the 1960s has been to show that these two untenable options—preserving philosophy but losing art or abandoning philosophy and becoming art—can be avoided. Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco all responded critically and philosophically to 1960s art and developed their aesthetic theories, to a significant degree, on the basis of their responses. I want to emphasize, again, that their accomplishments on this score are more important than any positive or negative assessment we may have of their resulting aesthetic theories. Moreover, it would be a serious mistake to confuse any negative assessment of their specific aesthetic theories for a criticism of aesthetics as a whole. It is precisely this kind of mistake that has generated and perpetuated the anti-aesthetic stance. If aestheticians today are going to grasp art’s contemporaneity, we can and should learn from what these philosophers achieved. By critiquing contemporary art, these philosophers together embody a model for today’s aestheticians: we need to be cognizant of contemporary art, open to the challenges it poses for the contemporaneity of philosophy as well, and make sure that we do not close off philosophy

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from today’s art by virtue of the aesthetic theory we articulate after reflecting on art philosophically. This is not an easy challenge. At least in the case of 1960s art, however, philosophers seemed open to try to meet this challenge. That, I think, is the true legacy of 1960s aesthetics for today’s aestheticians and art theorists alike—the Pop Effect. The question now is whether aesthetics can sustain this effect, which is to grasp its own contemporaneity. To answer whether this effect can be sustained is to ask, without simply appealing to the standard disciplinary preferences and priorities, why the philosophical responses to Pop art have not been a significant part of the art-historical accounts of Pop. As we just witnessed, one of the reasons is that aesthetics encountered art in its contemporaneity, yet then recoiled because that encounter had consequences for aesthetics that were deemed unacceptable or that led to the abandonment of philosophy. But there are other, more concrete reasons. For one, Pop was thought at the time to be antitheoretical and anti-aesthetic, seemingly leaving philosophers out of the historical record. Greenberg was, of course, the prime art theorist during the decades preceding 1960s art, at least in the United States, and his theory was intimately tied to abstract expressionism, which he saw as the logical culmination of the history of modern Western art. When artists began to move beyond abstract expressionism, they believed they needed to reject theory (aesthetics) as well as history (tradition). In the absence of any theoretical alternative to Greenbergian modernism, it is easy to see how art that is not modernist could be construed as antitheoretical and anti-aesthetic. For example, citing the art of Piet Mondrian, Max Ernst, and others up through Yves Klein, Coplans argues, “Practically every movement in the last thirty years [1920s–1950s] has had a strong theoretical basis.”68 In contrast to this European theoretical tradition, Coplans describes American art of the 1960s as “an art of direct response to life rather than to ‘problems’ ”; American “art springs from life, with all its anguish.”69 Among others, Rauschenberg was famously content to operate in the space between art and life, leaving theory out of the equation entirely. However, though 1960s artists seemingly eschew any aesthetic theory of their art, falsely believing their critiques of existing aesthetic theories imply a rejection of all

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aesthetics (hence the anti-aesthetic), they demand a new type of aesthetics at the same time, since all they implicitly point to is some new concept of art enacted in their work, though not yet articulated by any philosophers.70 Like Newman, Morris, and others in the 1950s and 1960s, artists rejected existing aesthetic theories and demanded new ones that would, in effect, make room for their new type of art. This demand is a hunger for aesthetics and, ultimately, the basis for its regeneration. To the criticism that aesthetics is simply not part of the historical record of 1960s art (despite my argument that it could and should be) and so there is no reason for it to be studied by art historians today, I would return to Harrison’s book on Pop. She analyzes how critics responding to Pop art in the 1960s (Alloway, Eric Rosenberg, Steinberg, Barbara Rose, Kozloff, and Sontag) were heavily influenced by various philosophers (especially phenomenologists and pragmatists), though not by those philosophers’ own responses to Pop art because they did not respond to it. There was no discussion of such influence to speak of at that time, so it is not part of the historical record any more than Sontag, Cavell, Danto, or Eco are. Yet she convincingly argues that precisely because these same critics were so influenced by philosophers, they individually and collectively represented “the recognition and establishment of the nature of post-modern features in the critical consciousness governed by Pop during the sixties.”71 In short, her main argument is that 1960s Pop art was the beginning of postmodernism, a future development, though she does not claim that postmodernism was itself part of the 1960s historical record. That is, although she recognizes there was little or no philosophical self-consciousness about postmodernism in the arts in the 1960s, she thinks we can better understand both Pop and postmodernism if we view them as emerging together historically—albeit through the eyes of contemporary theory.72 To be clear, I am not criticizing Harrison; on the contrary, she is engaged in an accepted, legitimate art-historical practice of utilizing contemporary theoretical tools to understand past art not simply as of the past, but as an adumbration of the future and thus a vital

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part of the present. Just as new technologies allow historians to uncover and interpret more archaeological artifacts from the past that help to explain not only the past, but also the present, the theoretical tools employed in art history can link the past and present through the future enacted in art. In both cases, historians have to be conscious of the temporal disconnect between the tools of analysis (present) and the objects being analyzed (past), as Harrison clearly is. The critical issues are whether the tools are themselves constitutive of the contemporaneity of today’s art, whether they are being used self-reflectively, and whether they are philosophically insightful. My argument is that the philosophical tools employed by Cavell, Danto, Sontag, and Eco were indeed contemporary in the 1960s, were certainly employed self-reflectively, and definitely provide key insights into Pop, then and now. As we have seen, their tools reinforce the historical accounts of Pop art that Crow, Harrison, Doris, and other contemporary art historians have articulated. So it seems perfectly acceptable to include these four philosophers in the current accounts of Pop art and its legacy, given some of the prevailing norms of contemporary art history, especially after its self-conscious theoretical turn in the 1980s. At the same time, to return to the theme of the anti-aesthetic stance, Danto’s and even Cavell’s insights into Pop art entail a commitment to essentialism that may confirm one of the anti-aesthetic theorists’ main objections to aesthetics—that it cannot critique contemporary art because it seems committed to the universality of art at the expense of its historical particularity.73 This commitment, it is argued, is at odds with art’s contemporaneity insofar as it is determined by particularity. Danto would respond, in a Hegelian vein, that universality and particularity are compatible, just as essentialism and historicism are compatible because contemporaneity is where they meet: the universal needs to manifest itself in the contemporary (the real), and the contemporary is unintelligible without universality, at least philosophically. However, it is this commitment to essentialism that may very well explain why Danto and other aestheticians continue to be relatively absent from the standard art-historical narratives about Pop.

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But there is another reason that I think better explains the relative absence of aestheticians from the Pop narratives. One of the distinctive aspects of 1960s art is that aesthetics, ethics, and politics seemed inseparable: the revolutionary changes in art embodied in Pop were correlated with broader revolutionary changes in society and culture that took place in the 1960s. Even if aesthetics, ethics, and politics never achieved the union to which 1960s culture aspired, as Crow argues, it is still the case that to understand art of that time, we must understand the aspiration of such a union and, in addition, the reasons for its successes and failures. And even if the union may have been largely imaginary, it is still the case that the imaginary was itself a cultural force in the 1960s in a way that is central to the identity of that period and its legacy. For example, the American political right’s critique of the 1960s is evidence of the continuing efficacy of its political imaginary, as is the American political left’s proud allusions to its 1960s roots. Finally, even if aesthetics, ethics, and politics are considered to be separate today, it is still imperative when articulating an account of 1960s art that their practical as well as theoretical inseparability at that time be highlighted. In short, aesthetics, ethics, and politics complemented one another normatively in the 1960s, and their complementarity must be part of in any philosophical or historical account of the contemporaneity of 1960s art. If it is fair to say that Cavell, Danto, and Eco generally did not (and still do not) engage the ethics and politics of Pop when they discuss its aesthetics, it would also be fair to claim that they do not adequately critique 1960s art.74 This claim has led anti-aesthetic theorists to the conclusion that no aestheticians can critique 1960s art, which, in turn, reinforces the anti-aesthetic claim that aestheticians cannot ever critique contemporary art. That is, because ethics and politics are key determinants of the aesthetics and the contemporaneity of 1960s art, to avoid ethics and politics for whatever reason is to avoid contemporary art. Ethics and politics have to be explicit and vital parts of any aesthetician’s critique of 1960s art for that critique to be a candidate for inclusion in (most) art-historical accounts of that period. So the defense of aesthetics against the antiaesthetic objection that aesthetics cannot critique contemporary art

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requires a discussion of the ethics and politics of art—the topic of the remaining chapters. Sontag will be the central figure in this discussion because, among other things, she wrote extensively on this topic over a forty-year period, and, as noted at the start of this chapter, she recognizes artists as “self-conscious aestheticians” who, among other things, help us to understand art’s moral-political power.

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2 THE SONTAG EFFECT

Consider two widespread ideas—now fast approaching the stature of platitudes—on the impact of photography [that public attention is steered by the media and that we become callous in a world hyper-saturated with images]. Since I find these ideas formulated in my own essays on photography—the earliest of which was written thirty years ago—I feel an irresistible temptation to quarrel with them. —Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Susan Sontag’s writings since the 1960s are, in the spirit of the Pop Effect, mainly concerned with the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of contemporary art. At the same time, she is an invaluable ally in the critique of the anti-aesthetic stance. She defends certain claims associated with this stance in On Photography (1977), especially regarding the alleged impossibility of art’s having any sustainable moralpolitical power in contemporary society, yet she later repudiates these very claims in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003).1 Her writings in the intervening decades reflect both a critique of aesthetics and a hunger for aesthetics, making her a perfect subject here.

SO NTAG AN D AESTHETI CS

Sontag’s On Photography clearly has had a significant influence on the many discourses about contemporary photography written over the last few decades, even if her influence is eclipsed by Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida or Walter Benjamin’s earlier writings on

photography, and appropriately so, as she was clearly indebted to them.2 Sontag’s influence extends far beyond photography into contemporary cultural criticism and aesthetics, however, because she argues that “all art aspires to the condition of photography.”3 That is, what she says about photography is intended to be—and has been taken by many theorists and critics as—applicable to all contemporary art, from the visual to the poetic, from traditional mediums to advanced multimedia art, from artworks to everyday images. For example, when she argues in On Photography that any photograph of human suffering can only aestheticize it, giving the viewer pleasure but causing more suffering for the victim, this argument is meant to apply to all contemporary art.4 Moreover, when Sontag offers a trenchant critique of this argument in Regarding the Pain of Others, she specifically repudiates her earlier critique of the moral-political power of photography and, again, of all art. What was the rationale for Sontag’s earlier view, why did she change it, and what is the relevance of her later view to the critique of the anti-aesthetic stance and, moreover, to the contemporary hunger for aesthetics? The answers to these questions, all pointing to what I call the Sontag Effect on contemporary aesthetics, reveal how Sontag ultimately undermines the very anti-aesthetic stance she once helped to perpetuate, at least on the pivotal point of moral-political art. If moral-political art is what largely motivated the anti-aesthetic stance in the first place, to undermine it on this score is to unsettle the very rationale for the stance. To make the Sontag Effect more personal and concrete, keep in mind her account of the first time she affectively experienced photographs of the Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps, when she was only twelve years old.5 She says they changed her life because of the moral effect they had on her, so much so that she says her life could be divided into two periods, before and after she experienced the photographs. What is striking about Sontag’s account is that she argues in much of On Photography that this kind of moral effect is either impossible or else explainable only in sentimental terms.6 Clearly, neither option is adequate for such a life-defining experience, of a type that many other people have had. Such affective experience demands philosophical explanation, by appeal not

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only to the arguments Sontag provides in Regarding the Pain of Others, but also to a neglected theoretical thread in On Photography.7 Her critique of photography in On Photography is offset, if not undermined, by her own arguments in both texts of the central role photographs play in moral-political critique. Who better than Sontag to undermine a formidable theorist such as Sontag? In her view, what is true of photography potentially holds for all art, so nothing less than the moral-political power of all contemporary art is at stake. The photographs discussed here concern mostly the enactment of suffering, violence, terrorism, and other occasions of human suffering inflicted by other humans, not only because Sontag focuses on them, but also because they reveal the moral-political power of art, particularly in defiance of the anti-aesthetic stance that holds that art cannot have such power. To appreciate the dramatic change in Sontag’s views on whether such enactment is possible in morally, politically, and aesthetically effective ways, first picture Annie Leibovitz’s photograph of Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a white tub of milk (Whoopi Goldberg, 1984). Now picture Leibovitz’s black-and-white photograph of a bicycle in a pool of blood on a street in Sarajevo during the 1993 siege of the city (Bloody Bicycle, 1993). This pair of images captures Sontag’s philosophical change of heart because she argued in On Photography that any photograph of a war scene would likely be reduced in its effect to a fashion photograph because it could only aestheticize war; yet only a few years later, a fashion photographer—Leibovitz—was able to produce morally and politically effective images of the war in Bosnia without succumbing to the aestheticization of suffering. Again, what accounts for this change? Clearly, the answer cannot depend merely on the intimate relationship between Leibovitz and Sontag, who herself was producing Beckett’s Waiting for Godot during the siege of Sarajevo.8 The explanation should be philosophical, and Sontag provides one because, despite her ambivalence about the relationship between art and morality, she ultimately believes that “the aesthetic is itself a quasi-moral project.”9

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SO NTAG ’ S O N PHOTO G RAPH Y

Sontag provides a brief, but compelling, account in On Photography of the history of photography and its present condition— technologically, ontologically, socially, and aesthetically. She explains both how all contemporary art aspires to the condition of photography and, at the same time, how photography aspires to be art. One gets a strong sense of the power of photographs beyond their sheer ubiquity, though that is one of the central facts that provoked her to write on this topic because it seems that “just about everything has been photographed” since the medium was first introduced in 1839.10 More philosophically, what interests her is how “The omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our moral sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.”11 This interest raises a number of questions. By duplicating the world through photographs, which is a process of creating a semblance, we move away from the world. Yet in doing so, we seem to make that same world “more available,” more approachable. How does an aesthetic process of moving away from the world while seeming to make it more available have a moral-political effect on a world that is distanced as it is duplicated? In other words, in what sense does the world seem more available than it is, and how does photography’s semblance character, its ability to create a duplicate world, ensure rather than undermine its moral-political effect?12 Photography is marked by a series of dualities that are traceable, according to Sontag, to a more basic question: is photography art because photographs, being “clouds of fantasy” and “pellets of information,” trade simultaneously on “the prestige of art and the magic of the real”?13 Here are just some of the ways she characterizes this duality throughout On Photography. As objective data, almost like found objects, photographs capture reality; but as artifacts, even psychological science fiction, they interpret it, sometimes solipsistically.14 They seem to embody an uncompromisingly egalitarian attitude toward subject matter by translating all people, events, experiences, and objects into images, yet they do so with utter indifference,

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making everything interesting yet banal, noble yet all too common.15 Though photographs can satisfy desire when used as props for auto-eroticism and other sexual acts, they also frustrate desire by multiplying it ad infinitum, giving us little while teasing us with ever more.16 Seemingly capable of freezing time, they enable us to recover the past and hold on to the present, but at the same time, they confirm time’s relentless melt. Photographs allow us to participate in experiences beyond our reach, in time or space, yet also seem to alienate us further from those same experiences. While chronicling history and bearing witness to events, they also show an apparent disregard for history by combining, say, images of Elvis and Proust in a single photograph. Finally, photographs can both awaken our moral conscience and anesthetize it, confusing us as to whether photographers are moralists providing us with a visual critique of reality or immoralists creating ideologies complicitous with the status quo.17 According to Sontag, all of these dualities are most poignant in the case of photography, but they are relevant to all the arts, though some dualities apply to certain mediums more than to others. Their relevance to all art is the ultimate content of her claim that all art aspires to the condition of photography. The motivation and justification for this claim seems to be that all the arts have long had a complicated relationship with reality—as its shadow, its Other, its mimetic twin, and the like. Although photography has a more causal relationship to reality than the other arts have and thus seems able to capture reality in the way that they cannot, this capture does not resolve the long-standing problematic relationship between art and reality. On the contrary, photography demonstrates that even when art is causally tied to—even part of—reality, it necessarily remains separate from it at the same time because the camera is also subjective and interpretive. So these dualities, which have their origins in the arts that predate photography, attain a new status with the advent of photography because now it is evident that they never will be resolved and that it is a mistake to conceive of art in a way that presumes they are resolvable. Rather, these dualities constitute the ontological condition of photography and, by example and extension, of all the arts.

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The flip side of Sontag’s claim that all arts aspire to the condition of photography is that photography aspires to be art. She is clear that photography is indeed art, though she insists that by now the question is irrelevant. It is irrelevant, however, only because of the way it has been answered: photography is art, but it becomes art only after it alters our conception of art by rendering obsolete traditional conceptions tied to certain ideas about originality, expression, universal beauty, autonomy, and disinterested judgment. For example, the originality of art, often traced in modernity to the subjectivity of the artist, does not make sense in the case of photographs since their “origin” has as much to do with the causality of light as with the expressiveness of the artist. To take another example, photographs seem to displace the centrality of beauty in art by enacting what is not beautiful—the ugly, the grotesque, the uncanny, and so forth. At the same time, however, photographs generalize beauty by extending it to any and all objects, finding “the kind of beauty that only the camera reveals,” which has had the ironic effect of leveling any discrimination between beauty and ugliness.18 Also, since photography is the most realistic art, it seems to achieve the pictorial equivalent of reality that some theorists argue has been the end that drives the logic of art history. Yet what has actually stimulated photography’s development as art, according to Sontag, is a surrealistic sensibility that she claims “lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise,” a sensibility that involves the “creation of a duplicate world [semblance], of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.”19 This sensibility is what makes (some) photographs art. Sontag’s idea of surrealism is inspired more by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of bodies in motion and Eugène Atget’s photographs of nineteenth-century Paris, as described by Benjamin, than by the dream-like work of Man Ray, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, or other surrealists active in the early twentieth century. Just as Muybridge’s photographs reveal in their detailed temporality the secret of how a horse actually runs, thereby correcting our unaided perception of equestrian running, Atget’s photographs disclose “what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift” by reality on the streets of Paris, thereby revealing something akin to the “details of structure,

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cellular tissue, with which technology and medicine are normally concerned” and which allow us to see underneath reality’s skin and correct our perception of it.20 Sontag adds a “moral-political unconscious” to Benjamin’s account of the optical unconscious (Muybridge) and what might be called the urban unconscious (Atget). She believes that a photograph can reveal a morality or politics hidden in plain sight in the details of an image of reality and, moreover, that this morality or politics can alter our perception of that same reality, just as an Atget photograph can remove “the makeup from reality” and reveal “image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things—meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams.”21 In short, photography’s surrealist moment, which makes it art, also makes it a form of moral-political critique of reality. To return to the opening description of photographs, it is this moment of moral-political critique that renders reality more available by bringing it closer to us, at least in moral-political terms. At the same time, what allows the moral-political unconscious to make its appearance is “a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings” that is captured in the surrealist details of a photograph, specifically what Benjamin calls “a tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject.”22 In effect, the eye gives way to the camera: “a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious,” in particular a moral-political unconscious.23 However, it is not the photograph itself that opens up this space, but the estrangement from our environment, or what John Dewey calls hunger, a break with our environment (see the introduction to this volume). The addition of moral-political critique here does not signal the repair of this break or the satisfaction of this hunger. Rather, moral-political critique—here, in a photograph—is the symptom of this hunger; though following our Deweyan model, the moral demand that this hunger be apprehended is paired with a political demand that it be recognized and satisfied. Despite the influence of Benjamin on Sontag’s conception of photography, however, she sometimes speaks of photography in terms reminiscent of Plato’s theory of art as the mere shadow of reality, which would eliminate the space for the moral-political unconscious

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that was just opened up. For example, she says, “the work photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographs are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and commerce.”24 And elsewhere she emphasizes that what photographs make immediately accessible is not reality, “but images,” and that photography “is, first of all, a way of seeing,” not seeing itself.25 Plato’s metaphysics, where truth is outside the cave and images are confined to the world of appearances inside the cave, seems to remain in place after all. Yet, elsewhere in On Photography, she argues that the classic, Platonic dichotomy between the world and its image does not fit photography because a photographic image is, as we have seen, “also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”26 So we are not locked in Plato’s cave when we are experiencing photographic images. Or are we? For Sontag, there is a surrealist twist on Plato’s metaphysical logic because the duplicate world that photographs create is also capable of “turning the tables on reality.”27 In effect, the aesthetic dimension or semblance of photography’s dual nature steps in here to provide us access to the objective dimension, often for the first time and with the following positive result: “To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to reexperience the unreality and remoteness of the real.”28 That is, to possess reality as images—to see reality through the enactment provided by images—is at the same time to turn the tables on reality. What we thereby gain access to in reality is its unreality, not that it is not real, but that it ought not be real.29 Enter moral-political critique. Art exerts its critical power as an ability to say “no” to the very world of which it is now a part and thereby attains moral-political effect in the world through its semblance character. So the “powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality” and, in turn, our conception of art.30 Aesthetics and moral-political critique are thus complementary rather than at odds. However, after freeing photography from the cave in On Photography, Sontag seems to return it to captivity just when morality and politics explicitly become the main issues in her discussion. For example, the effects derived from photography’s ability to create a

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duplicate world are sometimes characterized as “knowledge at bargain prices—a semblance of knowledge,” and its ability to appropriate reality in order to turn it on itself is characterized in harsh terms: “the act of taking pictures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape.”31 If photography’s semblance character empowers it to critique reality, how can this same character now be considered a deficiency, even an act of violence? Is there something different about moral-political reality? Sontag says, for example, that a photograph can goad conscience, but it cannot explain anything and one cannot understand anything from it, since a photograph is said to “hide more than it discloses.”32 But she never claimed that photographs could explain or understand anything else, so why is this point about explanation and understanding being made in connection with morality and politics, as if the standards or expectations were higher in these cases? Does photography’s ability to have a moral-political effect hinge on its being able to explain a moral-political reality or facilitate the acquisition of moral-political knowledge?33 In short, why is it that Sontag sometimes fails to acknowledge photography’s moral-political power even though her account of the semblance character of photography shows that it is possible and even though she experienced it when she first saw the concentration camp photographs? Sontag’s critique of the moral-political power of photographs unwittingly relies on a negative critique of art as trafficking in mere illusions or lies while giving aesthetic pleasure, making it seemingly incapable of conveying any moral-political content or form that is critical of reality. It is as if she worries that people viewing photographs cannot help but get too absorbed in the pleasure of semblance to see the morality or politics of the photographs, or to see that the “illusions” in such cases should be attributed to reality rather than to art’s semblance character. I say “unwittingly” because Sontag insists that photography renders obsolete the concept of art as merely disinterested pleasure, yet she sometimes relies on that very concept in her critique of photography’s moral-political power. To correct or counterbalance this critique, which would help to resolve her ambivalence about art’s moral-political power, Sontag needs only

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to extend her own claim about how photography changed our conception of art to her account of the moral power of photographs. Just take her point that photographs are only able to furnish knowledge that is dissociated from and independent of experience. Although this sounds merely negative, she adds, “Indeed, the importance of photographic images as the medium through which more and more events enter our experience is, finally, only a by-product of their effectiveness in furnishing [such distant knowledge].”34 And if you ask what the strategies are for creating such distant knowledge, she directs you to the aesthetic side, or semblance character, of art rather than to its realistic, or objective, side. So it turns out that aesthetics provides the strategies that allow “more and more events” to enter our experience, not despite, but because of photography’s semblance character and thus its distance from reality.35 That is, photography has power (i.e., efficacy in material reality) precisely while distancing us from reality, by duplicating it, by being semblance that opens up new experiences, moral-political critique, new social commitments, and even knowledge.36 So semblance has been redeemed, as Theodor Adorno would say.37

SONTAG’ S REG ARDI N G THE PAI N O F OT H E R S

Sontag’s ambivalence about photography’s moral-political power is reflected in Regarding the Pain of Others, though ultimately she overcomes it for good.38 For example, her ambivalence is evident when she (again) discusses two “contradictory features” of photographs: “their credentials of objectivity” are “inbuilt,” yet they always have, “necessarily, a point of view”; that is, they are a “record of the real” and they “bear witness to the real” insofar as a person is typically there to take them.39 In short, photographs provide both objective records and personal testimonies. Later in the same text, however, she says that one of the things fueling the pervasive critique of photography is the idea that “the dual powers of photography— to generate documents and to create works of visual art”—should be construed as opposites, as if we have to choose between one power

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or the other.40 If such a choice were forced, the objective power would typically win out and the aesthetic side would be subjected to the anti-aesthetic stance, that is, to “some remarkable exaggerations about what photographers ought or ought not to do.”41 Sontag may have contributed to these exaggerations, or at least given them more life, by speaking of the two contradictory features of photography and by suggesting in her later essay, “Photography: A Little Summa,” that these features result in two different kinds of photographs: The photographs of the terrible cruelties and injustices that afflict most people in the world seem to be telling us—we who are privileged and relatively safe—that we should be aroused; that we should want something done to these horrors. And then there are the photographs that seem to invite a different kind of attention. For this ongoing body of work, photography is not a species of social or moral agitation, meant to prod us to feel and to act, but an enterprise of notation. We watch, we take note, we acknowledge. This is a cooler way of looking. This is the way of looking we identify as art.42

But this cannot possibly be the solution Sontag is advocating in the end because, besides dividing photography into documentary (realistic) and art (aesthetic) camps, it separates morality and politics from art by identifying each with a different type of photograph and, in doing so, by placing the demands of apprehension (or arousal) and satisfaction on the side of nonartistic photographs, whereas art is characterized as cool and detached.43 Fortunately, Sontag’s language of photography’s “dual powers” does not involve any contradiction and need not force us to make a choice between them. Rather, by Sontag’s own account, these powers are complementary, as they have been throughout the history of photography.44 Moreover, it is this very complementarity that grounds the moral-political power of photography, for morality and politics are themselves relational as combinations of reality (objective, outward) and our valuing of it (subjective, inward).45 So Sontag has a solid basis for repudiating her own critique of photography’s moral-political power.

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Sontag argues, of course, that the moral-political power of photography hinges on more than its ontological condition or the features of the medium. To take photographs of suffering as examples, the “more” here is the historical context of our reception of such images and specifically the cultural norms governing such reception: “Without a politic, photographs of the slaughter-bench of history will likely be experienced as, simply, unreal or as a deethicalizing emotional blow.”46 Sontag analyzes the relevant norms and politics in Regarding the Pain of Others, where she begins with Virginia Wolff’s views on the morality of World War I photographs. Wolff believes that a person would have to be an “ethical monster” to view such images and not be pained by them to the point of being able to resist recoiling from them, striving instead “to abolish what causes this havoc.”47 Yet, Sontag argues, war photographs do not give us a transparent, immediate glimpse into the causes of suffering, though the objectivity of photography may seem to promise just that. Rather, if we have access to anything involving suffering as a result of viewing war photographs, it is access to the moral demand that the suffering be apprehended and the political demand that it cease. Sontag qualifies this last point in an important way, however, by distinguishing what Wolff conflates: the apprehension of suffering and the protest of it because, “To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames.”48 Yet it is important to stress that Sontag is no longer expressing any ambivalence about the moral-political power of art; she is only analyzing how much and which type(s) of moral-political power it has. She insists that we can indeed protest the suffering we apprehend and, in addition, that we even expect to be able to extract people from their suffering. According to Sontag, our normative expectations of images of human suffering (whether in photography, in any other art medium, or outside art) are characteristic of modernity, even if they are not always realized. That is, an underlying normative expectation of modern images of suffering is the belief that, in principle, the suffering can and should cease. By contrast, although the history of art is replete with representations of suffering, they typically were not

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accompanied by the belief that the suffering should or could stop, and thus, they had little or no moral-political effect; at best, they enacted a fate that people were expected to apprehend and accept, not apprehend and protest. For example, images of Christ on the cross typically did not move any human to think of stopping his suffering, despite how painful it clearly was, because believers were expected to learn from Christ’s loving example about his willingness to die for their sins. According to Sontag, this belief about suffering first began to change in the seventeenth century with, for example, the introduction of images of “sufferings endured by a civilian population at the hands of a victorious army on the rampage,” which inaugurated the “practice of representing atrocious suffering as something to be deplored, and, if possible, stopped.”49 But only much later in history, specifically with Francisco de Goya’s wellknown The Disasters of War (created 1810–1820, but not published until 1863), do we have “a turning point in the history of ethical feelings and sorrows” because his images of the horrors of war and the vileness of soldiers run amok in Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain “are meant to awaken, shock, wound the viewer.”50 Starting with Goya, we have a new, modern “standard for responsiveness to suffering” because enactments of suffering are now transitive in the sense that people viewing images enacting something shocking, like war, are expected to be shocked: shock is now the norm, making it  possible for photographs “to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct.”51 Confirming the Deweyan account of the demands of art, the cultural norm governing modern images of suffering is henceforth that they carry the expectation that the suffering be apprehended, recognized, and even satisfied (ceased). To be sure, this norm is no guarantee that recognition will follow apprehension, nor that satisfaction will follow recognition. Yet the moral-political power of images starts with apprehension plus the expectation that recognition will follow, even in cases where its chances of success may be limited. In short, the cultural norms underlying modern art secure the possibility of the moral-political power of art. Yet even when Sontag firmly recognizes the moral-political power of photographs, she still worries whether any good can come from tarrying with grief caused by human suffering in connection with

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war, terrorism, or any other human cause because compassion is such an unstable emotion.52 That is, if our reaction to images of suffering are, in her words, not always “supervised by reason and conscience” and thus “can answer to several different needs,” including a merely prurient interest, we cannot be assured that they will have a sustainable moral-political effect.53 In Judith Butler’s words: “Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence?”54 Of course, Butler is not recommending violence as an alternative to grief, but pointing to violence as a tempting threat or dangerous risk lurking in the shadows of our moral-political response to grief. For example, how can we speak with any confidence about the moral-political power of, say, images of dead civilians and soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan, for might they not promote violence instead of critical moral-political reflection? In other words, all Sontag has accounted for thus far is the possibility of photographs having moral-political power. If the norms governing modern images of suffering do not yet account for the realization or sustainability of their power, what do we need to examine: the aesthetic and material conditions of photographs, specifically their formal details (perspective, lighting, size, composition, etc.)? Or, on the belief that the referents of photographic images “are to be found not in the images themselves but in the discourses that influence the way they are read,” as some such as Herta Wolf argue, do we need to look beyond the images to the discourses surrounding them (starting with captions) to see whether the images can have any moral-political efficacy?55 Where else do we look? To the way the photographs are disseminated (books, prints, mass media, or online), where they are viewed (art gallery, a more public setting, or online), or how they are used (for commercial gain, political purposes, artistic expression, etc.)? Finally, how much difference does it make who views the photographs and how they respond to the moral-political demands that the photographs make on the viewers? Addressing these issues, especially the last one, will help us to understand how art has moral-political power. But, according to Sontag, all these issues must be addressed with a critical eye on the

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particularity of the ontological and historical conditions of art.56 From the start of Regarding the Pain of Others, she makes this point by emphasizing the particularity of images depicting terrorism, war, and other forms or sources of suffering of which compassion is also a potential affect. For example, she argues that pictures of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s were effective not because they showed what “war as such” does, but because they showed “a particular way of waging war.”57 To take them as universal images enacting the abhorrence of all war would be to elide the Spanish history and politics that determined that particular war and its specific horrors. Moreover, to mistake these images for enactments of something universal not only would be to overlook their moralpolitical effect, but also would actually undermine that effect since it requires particularity. To see that this is the case, look at Sontag’s point this way. If any photograph were to depict war as such (i.e., universal war), the moral-political effect it enacts would have to be aimed at all war and, to be sustained, would depend on the belief that all war could be eliminated. That is an untenable position, morally as well as philosophically, according to Sontag: “The destructiveness of war . . . is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong.”58 So, even persistent wars (e.g., the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) do not need to be “invested with the meaning of larger struggles” beyond “the clashing interests of the belligerents themselves” to attract the attention of people around the world. On the contrary, what attracts our attention even to persistent wars is their particularity because only particularity is able to penetrate the callousness that sets in when we believe war is always everywhere.59 If it takes particularity to break through the universality of war and of suffering, for now we no longer have to object to all war to be against this war, then only when a war image enacts such particularity is it able to break through and only when it succeeds in doing so does it have any sustainable moral-political effect.60 By contrast, when suffering is universalized or globalized, people feel the suffering less rather than more because they feel that it is “too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention.”61 So

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even if an image of universal war were able to meet the moral demand that we apprehend the horrors of war, it cannot possibly meet the political demand that all such horrors cease because no universal action to achieve this end is practicable. Particularity is crucial not only with an eye to the source(s) of the suffering that is photographed, but also with an eye to the victims photographed. For example, Sontag tells the story of a 1994 photography exhibition in Sarajevo during the Serbian bombings. The photographer, Paul Lowe, included images of the Somalian War along with images of the ongoing siege of Sarajevo. Wanting their “suffering to be seen as unique,” the Sarajevans objected to the inclusion of the Somalian images: “To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them . . . , demoting Sarajevo’s martyrdom to a mere instance” of a universal phenomenon.62 So any reference to the universality of human suffering had the effect of diminishing rather than enhancing the significance of the suffering felt by the Sarajevans, which is why they found it “intolerable to have one’s own suffering twinned with anybody else.”63 In short, because human suffering (caused by war or other events) is experienced by particular individuals in a particular historical context, only a photograph enacting suffering as historically particular can capture suffering. Such capturing is necessary if that photograph is ever to have a moral-political effect, so, again, an image needs to enact the particular to be moral.64 In the end, it is precisely Sontag’s emphasis on particularity, supplemented by the notion of the moral-political demands of art, that ultimately enables her to resolve any lingering ambivalence about art’s moral-political power.

THE CRI TI QU E O F CO M PASSI O N

Sontag’s worry whether any good can possibly come from our tarrying with grief arises from the contemporary cultural critique of compassion, which is the principal affect tied to the moral-political power of art. This critique is so influential that it has become canonical or, as Sontag argues (against herself), platitudinous, especially among anti-aesthetic theorists. So the critique of compassion

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must be addressed because it threatens to undermine the possibility of images of suffering having any moral-political power, even if all the other conditions for such power have been met. To address it concretely, it will help to discuss specific images in which the affect of compassion is at stake. In doing so, I want to show how Sontag’s concept of particularity helps to answer the broader critique of compassion. In recent critiques of images of suffering, the word compassion has had a largely negative connotation because it is associated primarily with the viewers and they are, in turn, identified, because of class or other privilege, as being at a safe distance from the people who are suffering. Compassion is seen as a way for viewers to maintain their distance, confirm their innocence, and preclude any feeling of guilt—all in an effort to avoid responsibility for the suffering and any action that might change the circumstances causing it. As Erina Duganne argues in the recent catalog Beautiful Suffering, while quoting Martha Rosler, “the weakest possible idea of [the substitute for] social engagement” turns out to be compassion.65 Such criticism is often directed at so-called concerned photography, in which the compassion is said to be confined to the sensibility of the photographer and his good intentions to express concern about the suffering of others, such as the victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The problem, as the critics see it, is that the compassion of the photographer (and the viewers) is considered to be at the expense of those experiencing the suffering, as if the largely anonymous suffering were merely an occasion to make the photographers (and their audience) feel better. Although this is certainly a possible outcome of any photograph of suffering (or any viewing of it), depending on the specific kind of photograph, the particular kind of person, and the definite context of viewing, is it the norm of all images of suffering? If it were, the result should indeed be a prohibition on such images, which is often the result of anti-aesthetic critiques of compassion. Sontag’s critique of her own earlier position on compassion is the key to her defense of compassion against the general cultural critique of it. To start with, she analyzes the possibility and sustainability of compassion discussed in On Photography, where she

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seems to side with the claims that photographs anesthetize as much as stimulate our conscience and that even when our conscience is stimulated, the moral effect of photographs cannot withstand the ravages of time and familiarity that breed apathy. In Regarding the Pain of Others, however, she argues that photographs can stimulate as much as anesthetize and that their moral effect is strong enough, at least at times, to be sustainable. She regards her own earlier view as conservative: “The view proposed in On Photography—that our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images—might be called the conservative critique of the diffusion of such images. I call this argument conservative because it is the sense of reality that is eroded.”66 Also, in On Photography Sontag called for an “ecology of images” that would enable us to discern the good images from the bad images, or at least the “too many to handle” from the “just enough to absorb,” cognitively and affectively. But in Regarding the Pain of Others, she rather bluntly dismisses the idea of such an ecology, saying, “No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror” by weeding out images for us.67 Sontag’s positive account of compassion is strengthened, I believe, once it is linked to the moral-political demands of apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction because these demands help to sustain compassion: “Compassion . . . needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing ‘we’ can do—but who is that ‘we’?—and nothing ‘they’ can do either—and who are ‘they’?— then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”68 The aesthetic experience of a photograph can occasion the affective apprehension of a human need, what I have been calling a hunger resulting from a disequilibrium with our environment. But if a photograph is to be political as well as moral, it must also be tied to action. In this light, apathy—typically thought to be a condition of postmodern life overrun with ubiquitous, mind-numbing images and, as such, a reason photographs can neither have nor sustain any moral-political effect—is itself a consequence of that effect’s being stuck between

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moral and political demands. The cure for apathy is thus not to embrace it in the form of cynicism—as Sontag claims Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and many others have done—but rather to acknowledge the moral-political effect of photographs and try to sustain it through action instead of succumbing to the cynical (and, I would add, anti-aesthetic) stance. Of course, this is easier said than done— Sontag herself still says in Regarding the Pain of Others that “ethical indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action.”69 But the normative conditions for sustaining the moral-political power of images have been established: the transitivity of affect (moral demand that suffering be apprehended) must be followed by translation into action (political action that this suffering be recognized and satisfied). While these normative conditions now await their material counterparts, we at least know now where to look if translation does not follow transitivity. It will be our fault, not the fault of the artists who have provided us with images of suffering. Consider one common example of concerned photography: the work of Sebastião Salgado, especially his photographs of Brazilian gold miners in Serra Pelada, to which art theorists and critics often object. But what exactly is the objection? As Sontag is one of them, we can focus on her critique, starting with her strongest, yet also most untenable claim: “The problem is in the pictures themselves, not how and where they are exhibited: in their focus on the powerless, reduced to their powerlessness.”70 That Salgado’s images are intrinsically problematic is a typical comment made by his critics, who claim that he makes a beautiful spectacle out of other people’s suffering and thereby exploits them (by, in effect, making them suffer a second time when images of their suffering are made public), albeit against his own stated good intentions. Yet, one page later in Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag says, “no effect of a photograph of a doleful scene can be taken for granted.”71 This means that there is nothing intrinsic to a photograph that by itself will determine whether it will have a positive or negative effect on viewers or whether the effect it has in one context can be sustained in another. Included in the negative effects that the intrinsic properties of the photograph alone cannot determine is the effect, attributed to Sal-

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gado, of reducing the powerless to their powerlessness. So Sontag’s second point undermines her initial critique of Salgado. Moreover, between Sontag’s two incompatible statements, she makes another critical claim about Salgado’s work that resolves the problem she is addressing without committing her to any questionable claim about the intrinsic nature of photographs. Her third claim is that Salgado grouped his Brazilian photographs with similar images of workers from a number of other countries, forming a collection he called “migration pictures.” They included “a host of different causes and kinds of distress,” thereby relating the Brazilian distress or suffering to these other examples with the net effect, according to Sontag, that Salgado makes suffering loom large “by globalizing it.”72 This globalizing does not make people feel more compassionate; on the contrary, it “invites them to feel that the suffering and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable,” so much so that no action could ever be taken to alleviate the suffering.73 On this global, rather than local or particular, scale, “compassion can only flounder” because it simply cannot be sustained without the possibility of relief action being associated with it, and that association is untenable on a global scale.74 So the real problem with Salgado’s photographs—seen together, not just individually—is that they deny the particularity of suffering, disregard the possibility of any local action to alleviate the suffering, and thereby undercut the very compassion they aim, ostensibly, to elicit. Even if Salgado achieves the transitivity of affect in his photographs (moral demand), he blocks the step of the translation to action (political demand). Using her own notion of the particularity of suffering combined with the moral-political demands, Sontag therefore has a normative basis for criticizing Salgado’s work without invoking any indefensible claim about the intrinsic properties of photographs. Likewise, to the critics’ point that Salgado makes a spectacle out of people’s suffering, Sontag’s response should be that it is the global scale of the spectacle that causes the problem, not the spectacle itself.75 As she herself argues in the same section of Regarding the Pain of Others, it is impossible, even undesirable, to eliminate the spectacle from images of suffering, and not only because historically it has been

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a vital part of the history of such images, especially in various religious traditions. She makes the stronger point that the spectacle is related to the surreal condition of photography; that is, it is an effect of its creation of a duplicate world by virtue of art’s semblance character. The spectacle in modern times is a publicly displayed semblance saying “no” to reality, so, far from being dispensable, the spectacle is central to contemporary art critique. This does not mean that we cannot critique the spectacle, but the critical point should rather be about the particular kind of spectacle created by specific photographs of suffering and whether it facilitates or impedes the moral-political effect. Here, too, the issue of particularity is central. Also, the problem with Salgado’s photographs is not their beauty, as some theorists claim. Even these theorists recognize the beauty of other images of suffering they think are effective, most relevantly Alfredo Jarr’s images of the very same Brazilian gold mines.76 No matter how understandably uncomfortable we may be when an image of something doleful is also beautiful, Sontag rightfully insists that this goes with the territory of art, so to speak. Photographs are sometimes beautiful, sometimes not, regardless of their subject matter, including suffering.77 The issue then is whether beauty makes an image of suffering more or less morally-politically effective—that is, whether beauty can sometimes be an ally of art’s moral-political, transformative power. To be an ally here is to enhance particularity and, if necessary, to resist universality, even though (or because) beauty is typically associated with universality; whatever is beautiful is typically thought to be universally beautiful, but the morallypolitically relevant beauty is particular. Of course, the moral-political power of art is not solely a function of the presence or absence of beauty; it is also a function of the other factors we have been discussing, especially the cultural norms governing the reception of images and the historical context of the viewing, the moral-political demands, and the condition of particularity. With these points in hand, we can address the most ethical criticism of compassion—that the victims enacted in images of suffering suffer a second time at the hands of the photographers (or other artists) (i.e., the charge of aestheticization). People suffer again, it is

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said, when their suffering is rendered public and when those viewing it seem to experience some aesthetic pleasure, including the pleasure of their relative safety from the suffering. This is a serious criticism, but it can be addressed in such a way that graven images of suffering are not prohibited once it is made clear, first of all, that what generates this criticism is the very affect of compassion it targets. That is, compassion is not always eliminated or undermined by the critique of compassion; sometimes it is merely subjected to a new order of ranking: the compassion of the theorist (or critic) is privileged over that of the photographer (or viewer). For example, if you look at the catalog of the Beautiful Suffering exhibition, you will notice that most of the theorists connected with it go to great discursive lengths to express their anxiety about viewing (or discussing) images of suffering. Such anxiety is largely displaced compassion, albeit of a type that has little or no possibility of being combined with action, resulting in a case of apprehension without the possibility of satisfaction, or a moral demand without the corresponding political demand. That is, theorists want to show compassion toward people who are suffering, but they worry that it will be construed as a form of secondary victimization, so they withhold their compassion and instead expend their energy writing about their anxiety about the inadequacy of images of suffering. Yet, as the curator, Mark Reinhardt, suggests, while the theorists take refuge in the word, their own medium where they presumably feel safe, they become more anxious about the inadequacy and instability of the word relative to images of suffering because the word is separate from any action; so their anxiety is compounded.78 But amidst all this anxiety, what about the victims of suffering to whom compassion is supposed to be directed? However good the theorists’ intentions are here, mine included, they should not be privileged any more than the intentions of the concerned photographers, which these same theorists summarily dismiss as irrelevant. It is all about effects, they say, not intentions. Fine. But the effect of the theorists’ anxiety is mainly to their benefit, just as they claim the compassion of concerned photographers benefits mainly the photographers (and the viewers). This last point reveals a deep issue underlying the critique of compassion, which is present in many discussions of the moral-political

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power of art. It seems impossible or premature, even presumptuous, to make any assertions about the moral-political effect of images without first identifying the “we” on whom they are said to have an effect, because one viewer’s call to peace is another’s call to arms. As Sontag rightly warns, “No we should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain,”79 be it the suffering of the victims of the Iraq War or of the subjects in any other photographs of human suffering. So who are the “we” who are supposed to feel compassion when viewing images of suffering, especially if “we” are expected to view them in a way that we apprehend suffering and demand that it cease? The identification of the “we” is what I call the publicity condition for art’s moral-political power because it determines the public or people on whom art exercises its power, i.e., on whom it makes its moral-political demands. Although any talk of “we” seems to imply a consensus, its identity in the case of images of human suffering is indeterminate before any particular image is created or viewed. Yet there is a “we” expected to experience grief and compassion in the presence of these images. So is this “we” real or imaginary? To begin with, the “we” is always plural and not univocal, so it is not defined or shaped by consensus. Rather, it comprises multiple, even conflicting views: those who cause the suffering, those who experience the suffering, those who take images of the suffering, those who view them, those who critique them—the list goes on. Second, the “we” is the effect of the taking and viewing of the images, not the presumed audience a photographer has in mind before producing them. That is, what brings these many senses of “we” together without collapsing them is the power of both the moral demand of these photographs that the suffering they depict be apprehended and the political demand that the suffering cease. The combination of these demands comprises what Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson call a demand for accountability: “photographs retain the promise of a reality to which we can point, and which in turn points, with its demand for accountability, at us.”80 If any degree of consensus emerges among the audiences, it forms around the issue of accountability: some people are held accountable by others. So we have to establish the presence and scope of art’s moral-political power in particular cases

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before we can know who the relevant audiences are. This means that the audiences will not be any more fixed than the moral-political affects (such as compassion or grief) needed to constitute them. The variability of the audience for images of human suffering is, like the instability of the affects elicited by them, a function not only of the particularity of the suffering represented in them but also of the particularity of the accountability (i.e., who are the particular parties holding or being held accountable). So particularity remains a fundamental condition of the moral-political power of photographs, and one that establishes its limits as well as possibilities. At the same time, the publicity condition—here in the form of the audiences, the “we”—emerges as another fundamental condition of this power. Although there may seem to be a circle here between the moralpolitical power of images of human suffering and the “we” who view them, there is, rather, a reciprocal relationship: the moralpolitical power helps to constitute the “we” as those affected by the photographs and held accountable to (or for) them, yet the “we” has to be present in at least a nascent form for the power to be realized and sustained: “Photographs cannot create an ethical position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one.”81 For example, images of Abu Ghraib helped to identify and consolidate a “we”—Americans against the Iraq War (or at least against the means used to conduct it). Yet those images alone did not turn people against the Iraq War (or its means), even if the images are necessary for them to realize they had turned. The images pulled more people into the “we” and helped to give them credibility as well as visibility. In Sontag’s words, the images are “an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass sufferings offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Who is excusable? Was it inevitable?”82 So, although Sontag herself says that it “takes some very peculiar circumstances for a war to become genuinely unpopular,” she also acknowledges that sometimes war imagery can indeed be part of these “peculiar circumstances.”83 That is, although facts about the Iraq War, especially regarding the casualties and the treatment of prisoners, have certainly been central in shaping the American

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public’s view of the war, photographs are necessary complements to those facts as the vehicles that “bring the war home,” as their counterparts did during the Vietnam War.84 Photographs are necessary, as this analysis of the “we” helps to reveal, because facts (or texts) alone are not enough to understand and critique war (as we’ll see with Gerhard Richter’s War Cut in chapter 3). For example, reports issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross about the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by their American captors had been in circulation for months before the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib appeared in the press in spring of 2004.85 Although the reports were denied repeatedly and with considerable success, the photographs undeniably depict torture, making it clear that we hunger for images in order to understand and critique the Iraq War. Once the Abu Ghraib images were made public, for example, opponents to the Iraq War could not (so easily) be called unpatriotic because conducting war justly is a condition that Americans (as well as the international community) traditionally place on conducting war. What makes the Abu Ghraib torture undeniable, however, is not the photographs alone, as if they were transparent windows into the reality of torture that took place there. If there is no question that the torture is real and thus undeniable, it is not simply because of the content or qualities of the photographs, but because of their addressees—we, the viewers. That is, the depicted torture is undeniable to those of us who apprehend it as torture and find the torture morally unacceptable; the torture is undeniable because it is unacceptable. We who respond to the moral demand that the torture be apprehended are who render the torture undeniable. If this kind of response is obvious to Iraqis who were tortured and to all others who oppose torture during war, it is complicated for Americans because it was our soldiers who tortured the Iraqi prisoners and so we, not just the soldiers, could be held accountable for the torture. “Considered in this light,” Sontag concludes, “the photographs are us.”86 Of course, this accountability could just as easily make us less responsive to the moral-political demand embodied in the Abu Ghraib images because we feel defensive or even ashamed to acknowledge our role in the torture. Yet even those

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who denounced the Abu Ghraib images confirmed their moralpolitical power, even their accusatory power. For example, why else did the Bush administration denounce those images if they did not depict torture or other forms of unacceptable behavior? And why else did they try to limit the damage caused by the images by insisting that only a few soldiers were involved and they were acting without orders? However these questions are answered, the moralpolitical power of war images was reestablished by the Abu Ghraib images and, as Sontag, Kelsey, Stimson, Butler, and others confirm, this case compels us to rethink our critique of the moral-political power of art in general, confirming Sontag’s point that all art aspires to the condition of photography.87 However, implicit in the critique of compassion and the complex question of the “we” is the further philosophical issue that there are moral limits to the moral-political transformative power of photography—or, more generally, of any art form. Even though Sontag insists that “transforming is what art does,” she also emphasizes, as we saw earlier: “To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames.”88 But given the specter of the anti-aesthetic stance, it is very important to emphasize that these limits do not point to, nor are they the result of, any deficiency of art (e.g., photography). That is, if we do not act in any way or in the right way after viewing photographs of suffering, our action or inaction is, rather, a function of our (the viewers’) morality, which has many causes, conditions, and stimuli other than works of art. “That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of the assault by images. It is not a defect [of art] that we are not seared, that we do not suffer enough, when we see these images.”89 Yet, if photographs can make us more aware of our morality and politics, they have done their part and demonstrated a very important power. It is still very much “a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others.”90 For example, the hell of the Iraq War is enacted in the photographs of people killed over there and because it is enacted, we can more easily apprehend the hell for

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what it is and “turn the tables on reality.” Such is the moral-political power of photography. If, following Dewey’s insights, art can also make us demand that the suffering it enacts cease, it becomes a close and often necessary ally of politics, confirming that art and politics can have a common end. Art compels us to think about how the Iraq War could be stopped, regardless of our beliefs about the wisdom or justice of it, because an end to the Iraq War is a necessary condition for the cessation of (some of) the suffering there. To be sure, the end of the Iraq War proved difficult to achieve, for reasons having nothing to do with art. Although we may become less responsive to the horrors depicted in the images of the war if we think the war cannot be stopped, it is again not a deficiency of art that makes us callous.91 Rather, it is in order to resist this callousness that we need to reflect critically on the war through art because we need distance from that which we have to endure if we are to recognize and possibly change it. Art provides just this distance. Precisely because of this distancing capacity, or aesthetic semblance, art is a necessary condition for the satisfaction of the needs and demands it enacts. That art is not also a sufficient condition says no more than that it is art. Given the dual demands of apprehension and satisfaction, however, we still need to ask (again) whether the moral apprehension that is the effect of certain images or art can have the further effects of recognition and satisfaction. Can our moral apprehension of human suffering lead to the political recognition and satisfaction of that suffering? Take the case of the siege of Sarajevo. As Sontag reports, the problem there was not that the world did not recognize cognitively what was going on, given the daily print and ongoing television coverage of the siege and genocide. But this recognition did not inspire the international community to action. It was only when photographs of the siege and genocide were made public that this community truly apprehended that genocide was under way and decided, finally, to intervene.92 The challenge to photographers was to depict what was going on so that it could not be denied in the way that the printed words about the very same content were denied. That is, they needed to make it possible for viewers to apprehend the genocide by depicting its effects and by doing so in

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such a way that they would also enact the political demand for intervention. This moral demand was enacted in the performative acts of persistently taking photographs of the ongoing presence and endurance of genocide. Although it is obvious, it needs to be stressed that only political action (in this case, by the United Nations, including the United States) could stop the genocide, art could not do so, just as the realization of a dream requires more than the dream keepers. The important point for our understanding of the moral-political power of art is that without the photographs, there would have been no apprehension of the suffering; and without the apprehension, there would have been no recognition of the genocide and no intervention. Finally, I mentioned two photographs by Leibovitz at the start of this chapter: one fashion or entertainment photograph of Whoopi Goldberg and one documentary photograph taken during the siege of Sarajevo. This contrast opened up the discussion of what allows images of the second type to have the moral-political effect Sontag once argued no photograph could have. The overarching issue has been the role aesthetics plays in determining what makes it possible for some of those images to have moral-political power. I think it is clear that some images can have this power, even if we cannot agree which images have it. As long as our disagreement involves implicit or explicit aesthetic strategies tied to the powerful images, the skepticism associated with the anti-aesthetic stance has been answered, though likely and rightfully not silenced. Remembering Sontag’s claim that all contemporary art aspires to the condition of photography, we can now turn to some examples of contemporary art to see whether they, too, have moral-political power and whether their power is also owing to the aesthetic strategies they utilize.

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3 THE RICHTER EFFECT

I see no point in enumerating the old, lost possibilities of painting. To me, what counts is to say something; what counts is the new possibilities. —Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh”

The ultimately positive resolution of Susan Sontag’s ambivalence about the moral-political power of photography opens up discussions of cases in which this power seems to be realized in art, again despite anti-aesthetic claims to the contrary. The transition from nonartistic photographs to art, whether photographs or works in other mediums, is facilitated by Sontag’s claim that photography and art share the same condition. But we now need to examine art that makes moral-political demands on us to see whether her claim is accurate and justified. There are many cases and kinds of contemporary moral-political art, which would seem to make the choice of which one(s) to discuss rather difficult, but the choice is not so difficult after all in the context of the present critique of the antiaesthetic stance and especially the iconoclasm it entails. As Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas observe in their recent collection The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, the “iconoclasm that pervades the production, dissemination and philosophy of the image in the twenty-first century is nowhere more pronounced than it is in relation to images of traumatic historical events. In spite

of the ubiquity of public images that witness such events, there is a persistent skepticism expressed toward their capacity to remember or redeem the experience of the traumatised victim.”1 This skepticism is equally, if not more, evident in critical responses to art dealing with such events. So moral-political art depicting traumatic history is a clear (though not the only) choice here.

RI CHTER AN D AESTHETI CS

Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof painting series, October 18, 1977 (1988), and his more recent art book, War Cut (2004), provide compelling cases of contemporary moral-political, traumatic, historical art.2 Of course, I do not mean for the burden of either the critique of the anti-aesthetic stance or the renewed expectations of moral-political art to fall on Richter’s shoulders alone. But he is exemplary here because, though he acknowledges the hostility toward art within the contemporary art world, his work cannot be understood adequately if it is seen primarily through the eyes of the anti-aesthetic stance.3 He provides another set of eyes through his writings, in which, among other things, he explicitly resists antiaesthetic interpretations of his work, even though he may seem at times to endorse them.4 Many theorists would discount Richter’s (or any artist’s) writings about his work, however, on the grounds that they are self-serving, incoherent, or misleading, that the artist’s intentions are not to be privileged, or, stronger, that the artist (qua author) is dead. By contrast, I think Richter’s writings are part of a larger body of evidence that we need to consider when we try to understand his art, especially because they are often conceptual and point to other discourses and kinds of art.5 More than evidence to be taken up by a theorist, the artist’s words are philosophical because, as Gilles Deleuze says about directors who also write about cinema (e.g., Jean-Luc Godard), painters talking about painting “become something else, they become philosophers or theoreticians.”6 In that role, painters “talk best about what they do,” which is why Deleuze asserts in his book on Francis Bacon, “We do not listen enough to what painters say.”7 Besides, conceptual art such as

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Richter’s does not speak for itself. As somebody needs to speak for it, why not the artist, too, among others? To be sure, we should not interpret any artist’s work through his or her words alone because they have to be supported or confirmed by the work. As we will see, Richter’s resistance to the anti-aesthetic stance has pictorial as well as textual dimensions, especially in his Baader-Meinhof series and continuing in War Cut.8 Another reason Richter is particularly appropriate here is that he was involved in an early 1960s art group called Capitalist Realism, which was both a German version of Pop art (Leben with Pop) and a satire on the socialist realism that he had learned in art school in East Germany ( just before the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, he escaped to West Germany, where he was able to experience capitalism in all its iconic glory for the first time, at least in a direct and extended way). In addition, Richter has been central in the resurgence of German painting in the post–World War II period, especially since the 1960s. Although considerably more than this could be said about Richter’s significance as an artist, his Baader-Meinhof paintings and War Cut are especially relevant because they are explicitly, if controversially, moral-political in a way that his other work, in general, has not been.9 His shifting strategies of painting (realistic and abstract), his use of various mediums (photography and sculpture, as well as painting), and other similar kinds of fluctuations have allowed him to be seen as morally-politically evasive. But without constraining himself artistically, Richter ceases to be evasive in the Baader-Meinhof paintings and in War Cut, and he does so by utilizing some of the very aesthetic strategies—monotone, blurring, underlying photorealism, abstraction, and so forth—that seemed to mark him as evasive. How does he utilize these aesthetic strategies in this series and this art book in ways that render these works morally-politically effective? As we’ll see, the series and book serve well as Richter’s pictorial claims on us about a host of issues: the artistic response to trauma, the representation of death, a critical artistic engagement with German politics, and resistance to the anti-aesthetic stance in contemporary art theory. To the extent that Richter makes claims on us, with some leading to a better under-

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standing of these issues, he is contributing to the regeneration of aesthetics—I refer to this as the Richter Effect. Finally, Richter describes art in somewhat Deweyan language as a process of making models of “an alternative world, or a plan or a model for something different”; in short, art “makes visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.”10 If such postulating is understood as a demand that has moral (apprehension) and political (recognition and satisfaction) dimensions, Richter’s work enacts the demands of art that can, in turn, regenerate aesthetics.

RICH TER’ S BAADER- M EI N HO F S E R I E S

Richter’s October 18, 1977 painting series (Baader-Meinhof series) was first exhibited in February–April 1989, in Museum Haus Ester, a museum in Krefeld, Germany, that was originally designed as a  house by Mies van der Rohe.11 The series consists of fifteen paintings depicting the leaders of the first generation of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, which was an urban guerrilla/terrorist movement active in (West) Germany, beginning in the late 1960s.12 The RAF was first active in the student democratic movement known as Students for a Democratic Society and in Vietnam War protests and later became involved in the youth offenders’ rights movement and other social causes. Formally organized only in 1970, the key members—Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Holger Meins—were in jail already by 1972. Meins died of a hunger strike in 1974, and Meinhof committed suicide in May 1976. Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe died, officially by suicide, in the Stammheim prison (Stuttgart, Germany) on October 18, 1977 (hence the title of the series).13 Richter’s paintings are “based” on documentary, or source, photographs and stills from videos of the RAF taken by the police, media, friends, and a studio photographer (the picture of young Meinhof), mostly in connection with the Stammheim deaths of Baader, Raspe, and Ensslin. The latter are depicted in both October 18,

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FIGURE 3.1

Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Confrontation 2 (Gegenüberstellung 2, 1988). (Reproduced with permission of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

1977, Confrontation 2 and October 18, 1977, Hanged (figures 3.1 and 3.2). Astrid Proll, a surviving though also imprisoned member of the RAF, made a very provocative and insightful comment about Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series in the introduction to her book of photographs, Baader-Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67–77 (1998).14 She

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FIGURE 3.2

Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Hanged (Erhängte, 1988). (Reproduced with permission of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

said she could not bear to look at the 1977 media photographs of her dead comrades until twelve years later when she saw Richter’s paintings based on the very same sources: “Thanks to the painter Gerhard Richter, whose Cycle 18th October 1977 freed these pictures from their mass media context, I was finally able to approach them [konnte ich mich ihnen annähern].”15 What exactly did Richter accomplish in his paintings to deserve Proll’s thanks, given the fact that she was trained as a photographer and presumably not a naïve viewer?16 What made it possible for her finally to endure and even draw near to the photographs, many of which she had copies of? Part of the answer is the mass-art/high-art distinction between the media photographs and Richter’s paintings, as Proll thinks the paintings toned down or even corrected the hype, manipulation, and distortion surrounding the images of the Stammheim events of October 1977, which the media and police largely controlled. She objected not only to the content of the images—depictions of her comrades’ deaths, which very well could have included herself— but also to how they were manipulated by the media and police to depict the Baader-Meinhof members as common criminals, or rather as uncommon criminals—that is, terrorists not deserving of compassion or even civil rights. Yet Richter’s paintings, based on these same photographs, did not have the same effect on Proll of making her turn away from them. On the contrary, she was absorbed by the paintings because they made demands on her that she could not ignore. So how are Richter’s images different from the media photographs and how does this difference make it possible for Proll to “approach” the source photographs, though only after being absorbed by the paintings? To be sure, some kind of distance is embodied in Richter’s paintings, but the twelve years between the first appearance of (most of) the Baader-Meinhof photographs in 1977 and the first exhibition of the paintings in 1989 could have provided distance, too. So there has to be something besides temporal distance at play here, though even Richter acknowledges he needed that time.17 If Proll had wanted to keep her psychological distance from the Baader-Meinhof history by avoiding the photographs, as she did, she could have maintained that distance by also keeping Richter’s paintings at bay

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or by looking only at them instead of then going on to look at the photographs. So what interested her in the paintings, which in turn allowed—even compelled—her to approach the photographs? Only if and when this question is answered can we ask the further question of whether the Richter Effect is confined to a surviving member of the RAF or whether other viewers more distant in involvement, time, and place can also be affected in a similar way. Richter’s paintings enact the Baader-Meinhof deaths, as well as the summary events leading up to them insofar as they are reflected or implied in those deaths. So what is this enactment, and how do the paintings achieve it in a critical way (i.e., nonmanipulative, in contrast to the media) when photographs with apparently equivalent content cannot do so? In general, enactment is tied to a basic function of art, as described by Richter, with echoes of John Dewey: “Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense [meaning] and giving shape to that sense.”18 In short, “enactment” means to engage in art as a way to endure experience as we try to shape and understand the meanings of what experience gives us to endure. Or, in Deweyan words, works of art are enactments of hunger that enable us to endure hunger while we demand of others its apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction. To be clearer, enactment in Richter’s case does not mean that his paintings stand between us and our experiences, as if they were a shield protecting us or a fog signaling our repression of the past. That is, it is not that there is an event, then our experience of it, and then paintings in between the two. Rather, enactment is what allows us to have the experience at all, even if we were present when the event to be experienced first occurred. The event is there but the experience is not until and unless it is given form, which giving is the role of art. This is another reason why Proll is an important figure here. She was an agent of the Baader-Meinhof events when she was a member of the group. Once she was outside the group, either in prison or after being released, she then became a witness. So, in effect, she occupies two different roles: an agent of action and a witness of action. The kind of enactment Richter’s paintings provide is most directly relevant to her second role, but it applies at least indirectly to the first as well. In both cases, Proll needed enact-

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ment because she could no more apprehend what she was doing as a member of Baader-Meinhof than their victims could apprehend what was being done to them, and she could not apprehend any better as a witness until she saw Richter’s paintings. This “apprehension” qua experience requires form, and enactment provides the form—in this case, Richter’s paintings. Moreover, these paintings enact the Baader-Meinhof events for Richter, not just for Proll. Similarly, he has two roles: that of a person needing enactment because he witnessed the Baader-Meinhof events as a German citizen and that of an artist providing enactment: his paintings.19 In turn, or so I argue, the paintings enact the Baader-Meinhof legacy for many of the rest of us as well because they open the legacy to us by providing the kind of form we need to experience it. To make this enactment more concrete, consider what Richter says of the difference between the police photographs of the dead terrorists and the paintings of the same. “Perhaps I can describe the difference like this: in this particular case, I’d say the photograph provokes horror [and fear], and the painting—with the same motif—something more like grief. That comes very close to what I intended.”20 This does not mean that the paintings provoke grief instead of horror and fear; rather, there is a conjunction in the paintings: horror/fear and grief, whereas the photographs provoke only horror/fear. So the paintings have added something—an affective space for grief. This space is not only metaphorical; it is also concrete in the sense that the public exhibition of the Baader-Meinhof paintings in a museum or gallery is a performative grieving affair. Viewers very much respond to the series as if they were enacting attendance at a wake or funeral. For example, in Don DeLillo’s short story “Looking at Meinhof,” a viewer’s experience of Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings is described, albeit fictionally, in these words: “She’d been alone for a time, seated on a bench in the middle of the gallery with the paintings set around her, a cycle of 15 canvases, and this is how it felt to her, that she was sitting as a person does in a mortuary chapel, keeping watch over the body of a relative or a friend.”21 Even the painting of Meinhof, which makes her seem younger and more innocent than she was at the time (it was

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based on a 1970 photograph, when she was already involved in the RAF), is a familiar sight at wakes and funerals because people sometimes want to remember the deceased in their earlier or happier years.22 Finally, the last painting in the series, Funeral (figure 3.3), is large enough (6 ft., 63⁄4 in. × 10 ft., 6 in.) that viewers are able to feel as if they are not only witnessing a funeral procession but also actually enacting it. Insofar as they do enact it, they are participating in Richter’s performative enactment of the Baader-Meinhof deaths. Grief and compassion are the particular affects elicited by the way the paintings enact the Baader-Meinhof history, the deaths in Stammheim in particular. They are the affective content of the Richter Effect. When asked about the object of the grief, or to whom the affect is directed, Richter responds that the grief is not for the individual members of the RAF; instead, it is grief for “That is the way it is”—they are dead.23 In other words, the grief is for Baader’s, Ensslin’s, and Raspe’s collective or group deaths, for the RAF they embodied, rather than for them individually—a group of paintings devoted to a group of individuals. Richter is careful to make this point before acknowledging that the affect of grief is intended to elicit compassion, as it typically does. Clarifying now the object of compassion, he says that it is not compassion for the dead terrorists as individuals. Rather, it is compassion for the death that they had to suffer as a group because of their beliefs or, better, the failure of their beliefs: the compassion is for “the fact that an illusion of being able to change the world has failed.”24 This failure is not the RAF’s alone, but one that its contemporaries and others can also share (even later in history), if they agree that (West) German society needed to be changed in certain ways.25 It is not that we share the illusion, though we may, but that we see the object of illusion— again, that the RAF believed German society needed to change. Richter asks that when we analyze the relationship between his paintings and the historical reality of the Baader-Meinhof deaths enacted in them, we realize we are analyzing, to start with, the enactment of his own particular relationship to that reality: “I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality.”26 That is, the paintings do not enact general statements

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Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Funeral (Beerdigung, 1988). (Reproduced with permission of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

FIGURE 3.3

about the deaths of the RAF members, let alone about the universality of death. They enact first, though not only, a particular artist’s relationship to those particular deaths; in short, they are Richter’s way of making sense of the deaths or giving meaning to them, or at least his way of enacting his hunger for some such meaning. Evidence of whether this enactment succeeds can be found in the form of the paintings that is realized through his choices of various aesthetic strategies, especially the blurring strategy (to be discussed later in this chapter). Similarly, Proll decided to publish her book of photographs of the RAF as a way to enact and thereby approach her own particular Baader-Meinhof history, especially given that she thinks it has been distorted by media-generated myths. Even though Proll’s preferred mode of enactment was photography because of her training, she first needed Richter’s paintings to enact the source photographs (double enactment instead of double negation). So in Richter’s and Proll’s cases, painting is the primary mode of enactment of the Baader-Meinhof deaths. To be clear, Richter is not trying to depict the objective reality of  the Baader-Meinhof deaths. On the contrary, by blurring the objective reality of the source photographs, he is raising the issue of what counts as objective in this case. He is enacting those deaths, both by showing that the Baader-Meinhof members (“the dead”) have already been enacted (when depicted in photographs) and by engaging in his own enactment of the same deaths in an effort to endure their horror and understand their meanings. In Richter’s words: “The deaths of the terrorists, and the related events both before and after, stand for a horror that distressed me and had haunted me as unfinished business ever since, despite all my efforts to suppress it.”27 Elsewhere, he says that his relationship to the meanings of the Baader-Meinhof terrorism, not the blurring technique itself, accounts for the imprecision of the paintings: “this [his relationship to the experience of the deaths] has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever.”28 But this imprecision does not explain the paintings themselves; the blurring simply points to their being paintings hungering for meaning(s), enactments not simply to be compared with what they enact as if that comparison alone would explain their meanings. It

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is the paintings, not what is enacted, that provide meaning here, or at least the demand for meaning; after all, the meanings of what is enacted are at issue here. In effect, the imprecision explains only why the paintings were painted: Richter was trying both to endure— find a way to live with—the horror of the Baader-Meinhof deaths and to understand their meanings.29 He even describes the act of painting these pictures as a process that made the content enacted in the photographs more bearable, giving him a “voice” about them so that he would no longer be a “mute spectator” in their presence.30 If horror reduces Richter to silence, art qua enactment allows us to get his voice back. This restoration of his voice is the Richter Effect, as described by the artist himself. The sense of endurance here—and thus of enactment—is not that of getting through or over some event but, as Richter explicitly says, of getting over the suppression of it, getting to the point that one can handle not being able to endure or understand its meanings—yet. Of course, the horror of pictures can also induce us to forget what is pictured, if what is enacted (e.g., the traumatic reality of death) is too difficult to absorb or process, affectively and cognitively—as it had been for Proll, until she saw Richter’s paintings. By painting these pictures in such a way as to create an affective space for grief and compassion, Richter enacts the Baader-Meinhof deaths with his art, with what he describes as the daily practice of painting. What he does for himself, he does for Proll. Since any exhibition of these paintings is a public performance of grief and compassion, these affects are open in turn to the rest of us, though, as we will see, the right context and background have to be in place for us to experience these affects. It is important to stress here that the affect of grief here is particular rather than universal; that is, Richter’s paintings enact particular deaths tied to particular individuals (even though they are seen collectively as a group), not to some universal sense of death. To quote Dewey again: “The esthetic portrayal of grief manifests the grief of a particular individual in connection with a particular event. It is that state of sorrow which is depicted, not depression unattached. It has a local habitation.”31 The reason particularity is impor-

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tant here, as it is in chapter 2, is that the themes tied to the RAF— death, terrorism, and the like—are too easily universalized because death and now terrorism are everywhere. If understood mainly as universal phenomena, however, they no longer could have the same effect on Proll or any of the rest of us. For example, although I may be moved by the death of any person or terrified by the acts of any terrorist, what moves me to the point that I need enactment to endure the death or act is its particularity. I am moved by this person or act here. The more I am moved, the more enactment I need, the more I need art. The particularity here is temporal as well as spatial. As Richter said several times, coincidentally in 1977 as the Baader-Meinhof events were unfolding, “I want to picture to myself what is going on now. Painting can help with this, and different methods=subjects=themes are different attempts I make in this direction.”32 He also said in 1977 that the basic intention in all his work is “to picture to myself what is going on” around him—here and now.33 Richter even describes his painting as a kind of reporting, suggesting another link to the newspaper sources of many of the photographs he worked from. But it is reporting that is not mere repetition because the aim of the enactment is to help him, Proll, and others “to see how it is” in the case of the legacy of the RAF.34 But the idea that particularity is a condition for moral-political art—an idea that stems from Sontag and is realized in Richter’s work—raises the question of whether particularity is not an obstacle at times to the very affect of compassion for which it is said to be a condition. In Richter’s case again, the grief is particular: the Richter Effect is initially tied to a particular person (Proll), Richter is a particular artist, and so on. At the same time, however, the key affect of compassion elicited by Richter’s art is, by definition, shared with others because it means to “suffer with.” So how can the art be particular, yet the compassion it elicits be shared with others? How is the transitivity of compassion possible, given all this particularity? In short, if the Richter Effect remains particular, it seems that the moral-political effect of his work cannot be shared, yet part of the exemplarity of his work is precisely the particularity that generates an affective space for compassion and grief shared by others.

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Richter’s enactment of his relationship to the Baader-Meinhof deaths is not necessarily confined to him, or to Proll, if those of us who view the paintings are able to experience them as enacting an affective space for compassion and grief (as well as horror and fear) that we, too, can occupy. The public viewing of the paintings as a group is the performative site through which the rest of us can see whether we indeed are able to apprehend and occupy this space. Although Richter starts with an issue that is of concern to him, his aim is for others to understand his enactment, which means that we first have to experience and understand the aesthetic form(s) of this enactment. For this to happen, Richter believes that the paintings have to speak for themselves publicly—that is, in the performative site in which they are enacted: “They are there to show themselves and not me. . . . That’s why form is so important . . . because without form communication stops.”35 So although the enactment starts from a particular and subjective content—a particular artist’s relationship to the collective RAF deaths—it ends up as something objective and public: aesthetic form for all to experience—art as enacted hunger. Although form in this case is presented primarily through the blurring strategy (discussed in the next section), that technique, in turn, unites form and content. The enacted content is the blurred form because blurring is the effective, aesthetic enactment strategy in this case. Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings enact an affective space for public grief and compassion that is at the same time an invitation to address a host of questions, in the same way that the Abu Ghraib images were an invitation to reflect critically on questions about the Iraq War. For example: What was the RAF trying to achieve and why did it fail? What was the role of violence in the group’s actions and goals? What does it say about German society that it both generated and suppressed this group? Could somebody feel compassion for the RAF (its aspirations and failures as distinct from its persons and actions) as well as for the German state? Were the civil rights of  many German citizens compromised during the search for the Baader-Meinhof members? How did they really die in Stammheim? I am not suggesting that Richter could or should answer all these

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questions. His role as an artist is, in effect, to revive these questions to counter the German government’s view (or hope) that the events of October 18, 1977, would put an end to the RAF, even if Richter himself shared such hope on this score. Instead, these events were at best the end only of a chapter because successive generations of the group were active until 1998 and also because terrorism has only become more common around the world since 1977 (starting for Americans with the Iran hostage crisis in 1979).36 Because Richter’s paintings are able to revive these questions, the paintings are able to sustain their contemporaneity, as the revived questions are about the present as well as the past. The nonclosure and thus sustained contemporaneity of the Baader-Meinhof legacy also means we need to be demanding answers of ourselves, and art as enactment is a principal way to begin to do so. Again, although art can help to demand answers, it cannot provide them; we need more than art for any answers. So the Richter paintings do not settle any of the issues they raise, but nor could they be expected to. Rather, their role is to be unsettling, not so much on the question of how the Baader-Meinhof members died, but on the deeper questions of the “why”—that is, on the level of meaning(s). In the end, the demands that the BaaderMeinhof deaths placed on Richter were enacted in his paintings, and they, in turn, make demands on all those who experience them. Mirroring the shift from critique of art to critique by art, demands placed on art are now also demands placed by art (discussed in the introduction to this volume).

R I CHTER’ S BLU RRI N G STRATEG Y

The means of enactment in Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series are the aesthetic strategies he employs in the process of producing them: composition (cropped or edited versions of photographs or video stills), scale (mostly life-size), paint surface (thin, yet painterly), color (many shades of gray), blurring, and so on. Of these, the blurring strategy is the most perspicuous and controversial, so it is also most in need of analysis. To this end, Richter’s comments on this strategy

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are quite revealing, though what they reveal is fundamentally different from how the blurring is typically interpreted by critics and theorists. Richter lists a number of reasons for the blurring strategy, which he has utilized since 1963: “I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.”37 This statement is typically interpreted as if Richter used the blurring strategy to erase all aesthetic properties from his paintings (following Robert Morris’s example), or as if he were neutralizing any content depicted in them, or as if he were destabilizing any meanings of the photographs, or, finally, as if he were doing all the above. For example, Gertrud Koch argues that Richter erases the meaning and intentionality of the source photographs by blurring them in the Baader-Meinhof series and, in so doing, tears them out of time and strips them of any history: “The picture cycle in question puts on display neither the ‘beautiful souls of terror’ nor the harsh machinery of the state; what they show is blurredness, things out of focus, behind which objects and people disappear.”38 If this were accurate, however, what would account for viewers’ engaged, even heated reactions to the Richter paintings?39 Koch’s own answer is that “what is so scandalous about these pictures is not their emotional impact” or cathartic effect “but rather their cold distanciation.”40 Yet if that were true, why would Proll (and other viewers) react so passionately to “cold” paintings? Simply because they were cold and she expected partisan paintings? Or is Koch suggesting that Richter’s cold paintings offset the deep, startling affects Proll experienced in the presence of the source photographs (“sie hätten mich zu tief erchüttert”)?41 But the result of such a balancing act would be mere neutrality, a canceling of powerful affects by the absence of any affect. How could a series of affectless paintings enable Proll to approach the photos (“mich ihnen annähern”), especially if the German word Annäherung can also suggest a rapprochement, not merely a neutral approach?42 In the end, this type of critical interpretation of the blurring strategy is not adequate in the case of the

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Baader-Meinhof paintings because it cannot fully explain the Richter Effect. In addition, such a neutral interpretation does not take account of the fact that Richter’s blurring strategy cannot have the same effect every time he employs it, for that would make the blurring independent of the content of the paintings in which it is employed or the context of their reception. But without ties to content and context, the blurring could no longer have any effect.43 In the particular case of the Baader-Meinhof paintings, it is clear that the content of the depictions of death is moral-political because of the views and actions of the RAF and the German government’s responses to them. The context has remained quite volatile in various venues since the paintings were first exhibited. Although Richter insisted that the October 18, 1977 series be kept together and hoped it would be purchased by a German museum, the RAF’s moral-political legacy proved too controversial.44 For this reason, or possibly for other more self-interested reasons (e.g., money) that people freely speculate about, Richter chose to sell the series to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City in 1995. The sale was not welcomed: neither in Germany, where people thought the paintings were, for good or for bad, an important, if controversial, part of recent German history; nor in New York, where critics thought that MoMA and Richter conspired either to dehistoricize the paintings (in the interest of avoiding politics or of developing a narrative of Richter’s work that confirmed MoMA’s self-identity as the grand narrator of modernism) or to consolidate the martyrdom of the Baader-Meinhof members.45 Richter himself said that he hoped the politics of the paintings would finally not outweigh their aesthetics. Intentions aside, history intervened to render Richter’s hope naïve and the critics’ judgments on this score largely irrelevant. After being exhibited at MoMA in 1995 and again in late 2000, the Baader-Meinhof series was part of a Richter retrospective at MoMA in early 2002, within six months after the Al Qaeda attacks in New York (Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania) on September 11, 2001. The ethics-politics of terrorism reappeared with a vengeance, making it impossible to separate the aesthetics and ethics-politics of these paintings, whatever Richter’s, MoMA’s, or the critics’ wishes

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might have been. These attacks caused New York viewers (wherever they lived) to experience the Richter paintings in a new light because terrorism was no longer a German affair, even in the case of the RAF, in part because the Middle East affiliations of the group became all the more salient.46 Even though MoMA exhibited Richter’s paintings with virtually no information to explain their context, New York viewers in 2002 were, in principle, able to bring their own context to the paintings, thereby opening them up to a form of engagement that could not be purely aesthetic. In my terms, viewers were more able to appreciate the need for the type of enactment achieved in Richter’s paintings, and, moreover, they became more vulnerable to the Richter Effect (and, I would add, better judges of it). At the same time, there was a new context for the paintings—the relationship between American and German art institutions against the background of their respective experiences of terrorism. In Guerin’s words: “The new context of 18. Oktober 1977 adds another layer of uncertainty and contradiction that fuels the image’s revivification of traumatic historical events in the mind of the viewer.”47 So, clearly, the Baader-Meinhof paintings did not escape the ethics-politics of terrorism when they were moved to New York. In turn, this means that Richter’s use of the blurring strategy did not enable him to elide the terrorism and moral-political passions of the Baader-Meinhof history, however much he may have tried. Nor did this blurring allow New York viewers to avoid all this history. For if such avoidance were the effect of the blurring, the Baader-Meinhof paintings would have been received in New York City as if they were (failed) history paintings representing a distant past while being irrelevant to the present. On the contrary, Richter’s blurring strategy has had the effect of enabling him, Proll, New Yorkers, MoMA visitors, and others to endure and, if possible, understand the ethics-politics and pain of terrorism. Thus the content (Baader-Meinhof legacy) and context (first Germany and now New York, and other venues if the series travels) of Richter’s paintings ensure that they have a contemporaneity that makes the effect of the blurring different from most other uses of it in his work, before or since.48

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Still, if the blurring strategy is different in the Baader-Meinhof case, how does it work to generate the Richter Effect? The blurring has a kind of push/pull effect, though not just in the formal way described by Robert Storr, who says that Richter pushes back the images as he pulls the paintings forward. Rather, the paintings push back the Baader-Meinhof deaths (because of horror and fear) only to allow us to pull them toward us (draw them near for the first time) for purposes of grief and compassion. The push/pull here is affective rather than merely formal, though it is achieved in part by  the formal means Storr describes. In Eric Kligerman’s words: “By rendering the figures of these paintings opaque [push], Richter disrupts the spectator’s gaze and beckons her to look more closely [pull].”49 But there is more than a single push/pull here, because the pull has its own push back that seems equally tied to Richter’s aesthetic strategy of blurring gray paint. Guerin describes this additional push and its positive effect on the viewer: “The grey spacebetween established in the works’ surface articulations produces a fundamentally destabilising viewing experience. This experience is characterized by a simultaneous invitation to an emotional engagement of each individual viewer and a withholding of all such possibility, a withholding that ultimately guarantees an intellectual involvement”—and, I would add, an affective involvement.50 Sontag describes a similar affective push/pull/push in a critical essay on Robert Bresson’s films, where a “pull toward emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement,” though very much the intended effect, “is always, to a greater or lesser extent, postponed.”51 The possibility of empathy or compassion is thus partly created through detachment that not only passively allows for reflection but also actively is its ally. In Richter’s own words, the paintings have a “blurred look, whereby something has to be shown and simultaneously not shown, in order perhaps to say something else again, a third thing”—third in addition to horror and fear, namely, a space for grief and compassion.52 The opening up of this space is the effect of the practice—or, better, performance—of painting as the enactment of the Baader-Meinhof deaths. It is we the

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viewers who occupy this space, so the effect of the creation of this space is that we can experience the enactment of the BaaderMeinhof legacy. The events are not just being reported to viewers, as if we were merely passive recipients of facts illustrated by images. Rather, we are able to participate in reflection on the meanings of these facts as a result of our affective experiences of Richter’s paintings.53 To take a specific example from Richter’s series, consider the two paintings of Baader as he lay dead in his cell, called Man Shot Down 1 and Man Shot Down 2 (figures 3.4 and 3.5). The first painting seemingly individualizes or humanizes Baader’s death by isolating him from the context of his prison cell (which is enacted in a separate painting called Cell). He is a dead man, not a dead prisoner. Yet the title of the painting does not give Baader a name, so he remains abstract even as he is individualized because he has here mainly a

FIGURE 3.4

Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Man Shot Down 1 (Erschossener 1, 1988). (Reproduced with permission of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

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FIGURE 3.5

Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Man Shot Down 2 (Erschossener 2, 1988). (Reproduced with permission of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

generic identity. In turn, the second painting, which appears to be a close-up of the first one, is more rather than less unclear because of the blurring strategy: as we move in closer to Baader, he becomes less accessible to us. So Richter has drawn us in to something that, by comparison with its source photo, is much less gruesome (the source photo shows blood that, in the painting, is merely a black blob), yet almost as soon as he pulls us in, he pushes us back so we cannot get too close. Speaking of the series as a whole, Guerin observes, “The paintings only give the appearance of offering access to the desires and emotions of the represented individuals [e.g., Baader]. Because as soon as the invitation is extended, it is retracted.”54 Richter opens up the possibility for compassion but, in pushing us back slightly, but firmly, he does not allow us to get too attached, too up close and personal. And why all this pushing and pulling? Not, as some have

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argued, because painting cannot convey anything more determinate about the RAF deaths or because Richter himself is so wedded to indeterminacy that his interest is to represent only that. Along with uncertainty and the general blurring strategy, indeterminacy has a determinate effect here, as elsewhere in Richter’s work—to engage the viewers affectively. That is, the point is to engage us affectively so that we might then reflect on the Baader-Meinhof legacy, not to leave us with a sense that there is nothing determinate with which we might be engaged nor with the idea that engagement is fruitless because it cannot provide the necessary determination. The legacy is real—what is missing is our affective experience of it. Such experience is what the paintings make possible. This is, again, the sense in which Richter’s paintings enact our experiences of the BaaderMeinhof legacy as well as his own experience of it. The issue of the distinctiveness of Richter’s use of the blurring strategy in the Baader-Meinhof series revives the earlier question of how we might best understand the relationship between his paintings and the source photographs. More specifically, the revival of this issue raises the question about what the paintings are blurring, that is, what they are a blurring of. The source photographs? Richter is emphatic that the paintings not be interpreted as blurred photographs, even though he acknowledges that the paintings had their origin, on the level of subject matter, in the photographs. Had he wanted to produce blurred photographs, he could have worked in a darkroom, painted over photographs, or utilized a digital photoediting program. But that is not what he did—in this case, anyway.55 Nor are the Baader-Meinhof paintings blurred photo-realistic paintings of the source photographs, even though, according to Richter’s own description of the painting process for this series, he began with photo-realistic renditions of the Baader-Meinhof photographs and video stills.56 The reason this second option is not accurate, according to Richter, is the same reason he refuses to describe his paintings as blurred: “[Paintings] are never blurred. What we regard as blurring is imprecision, and that means that they are different from the object represented. But, since pictures are not made for purposes of comparison with reality, they cannot be blurred, or imprecise, or different (different from what?). How can, say, paint on

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canvas be blurred?”57 In short, whereas photographs can be blurred, as we all have experienced while trying to capture a fleeting moment on camera, paintings cannot be blurred. If they seem blurred, that is only to say they are paintings, albeit ones that at the same time have a constitutive relationship to blurred photographs. Paintings offer only the semblance of blurring, but a semblance that seems to have the same aesthetic effect as a blurred photograph, which, if it happens, is to say that it is an effective semblance, as good as a real blur. The important point here, however, is that it is only qua paintings, which cannot be blurred, that these works seem to be blurred and thus compared to photographs, which can be blurred. In effect, Richter engages the contrast between photography and painting, adopts the photographic accident of blurring, and applies that accident to paintings, all in order to depict the difference between the Baader-Meinhof photographs and paintings and, more important, to allow the paintings to enact the affective space for grief and compassion that the photographs cannot provide. The photograph/painting difference helps to open up this space and, in turn, raise demands about the meanings of the RAF legacy. In seeming to be blurred, Richter’s paintings not only announce themselves as paintings rather than as photographs, but also announce that the source photographs are not what they first seemed to be. Photographs are sometimes thought to offer an unmediated (i.e., objective) record of their subject matter because they are said to be causally related to the reality they depict—in the present case, the deaths of the RAF leaders. By offering the semblance of blurred versions of these same photographs, the Richter paintings selfconsciously introduce mediation into this case. That is, by showing that the content of the photographs is subject to mediation, Richter raises the critical questions about when and how mediation enters the picture. Perhaps there is no unmediated causal link between the photographs and their content? Perhaps the difference between the photographs and the paintings is no longer a distinction between unmediated or objective images and mediated or subjective images? The point here, however, is not merely that all images are subjective to some degree, as Sontag argues, though that would be a point well taken. Rather, the point is that all images are forms of mediation, so

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mediation alone cannot differentiate one type of image from another, or a subjective image from an objective one. The way these issues about mediation play out in the BaaderMeinhof paintings is something like the following. One main intention of the source photographs, at least those taken by the media and the police, is to achieve closure on the public reception and legacy of the RAF by announcing, through photography, that the BaaderMeinhof leaders are finally dead and the German state is victorious. Photographs of the RAF funeral are the ultimate closure because they show three principal Baader-Meinhof members being interred. Yet the credibility of the claim of closure rests on the alleged objectivity of the photographs, which, in turn, rests on the presumption that they are unmediated depictions of the deaths of the BaaderMeinhof leaders. However, in highlighting the fact that the photographs are mediations, too, Richter’s paintings help to raise doubts about this key presumption and, with it, the closure that rests on it. In doing so, the paintings render the meanings of the photographs unclear—unclear because now mediated; that is, the photographs that once seemed to provide an unmediated closure on the legacy of the RAF are now seen to be mediated (by those who took the photographs). As Guerin put it, “where painting and photography meet, we find Richter’s most devastating claim regarding the failure of both media to mimetically depict the reality of that which they see.”58 But, as she adds, Richter does not merely “dichotomise the photographic representation and that of his paintings. Rather, he uses the discrepancies between the two media to find a common ground.”59 As it turns out, however, the common ground is a shared “epistemological uncertainty” or a “mutual prohibition of their access to reality.”60 However, uncertainty is no more the final effect here than is indeterminacy—both are means, not ends. The uncertainty opens up the need, and possibility, for the viewers to recognize that the legacy of the RAF is far from clear-cut. All presumptions need to be on the table for further reflection, a possibility for reflection that is made possible by the paintings, specifically by their interaction with the source photographs. So, if the BaaderMeinhof events were thought to achieve closure through the photo-

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graphs, that closure is now blurred, the events are now open, the deaths are now up for reflection. To be clear, the mediation issue raised by Richter’s paintings concerns the meanings of the Baader-Meinhof deaths, not just their facticity, as the basic fact that the key Baader-Meinhof members were dead was presumably established by the death certificates (though the “how” of their deaths has long remained a controversy for some people). In the words of Gregg Horowitz, the source photographs render the Baader-Meinhof members as the dead (level of facticity) but cannot render their deadness (level of meaning), whereas the paintings render their deadness, too, so much so that “the deaths of Baader, Ensslin, and the others were being suffered in the act of painting itself.”61 Richter confirms this point about the performative dimension of his paintings when he says that as he painted the Baader-Meinhof series, he was “occupied like a gravedigger.”62 In turn, this suffering is sustained by the process of public mourning initiated by the exhibition of the paintings as a funereal performance because, as we discussed earlier, viewers file past a series of paintings of (mostly) dead people that culminates in a funeral procession.63 It is not that we identify with the people in the actual procession, but that the audience for the affective experience depicted in the painting is extended to us, allowing us to share this experience. The Richter Effect has hit home. Yet although the important distinction between the dead and their deadness points again to the difference between the source photographs and the Richter paintings, it does not explain it. The limit of the photographs, their inability to render deadness, has to do with their nature as photographs, according to Roland Barthes, because all they can depict is what has been. In doing so, they seem to ratify “what has been” without question, with certainty, thereby providing “a certificate of presence” not unlike a death certificate in its presumed finality.64 It is important to note, however, that Barthes adds that photographs cannot do the same for meanings because they are contingent and meanings are not (or so he seems to assume). This does not necessarily mean that photographs have no meanings. It  means that their relationship to meaning is a function of their

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signature relationship to reality—the ratification of “what has been.” In the gray light of Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings, however, that signature is blurred, and photography’s claim to provide any “certificate of presence” is called into question because photography is now recognized as a form of mediation. This questioning suggests that photography may not even be able to render the dead, let alone their deadness, because its claim to do so rests on its being unmediated, and it is mediated after all. Moreover, it now seems that their deadness (meaning) may very well be the key to the dead (facticity), not the other way around. That is, by being able to render their deadness, Richter’s paintings are also able to render the dead because we do not fully know the facts about the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof leaders until we first apprehend the meanings of those facts. By creating public space for their deadness through the use of the blurring strategy (and other aesthetic strategies), Richter has thereby opened up new relations between the meaning and facticity of the Baader-Meinhof deaths, not just new relations between source photographs and a series of paintings (figure 3.6). To clarify what Richter has achieved, we have to ask again: What is the blurring in his paintings a blurring of, if it is neither of the photographs nor of the paintings? Should we conclude, as Desa Philippi has, that there “is a futility about asking what these works are about, what their referent might be”?65 Are the paintings really so impenetrable, as Koch also argues? Other critics who have written on the Baader-Meinhof series, whether supportively or critically, have drawn similar conclusions by arguing that the blurring introduces indeterminacy into the Baader-Meinhof history, or at least into our collective memory of it. What is indeterminate, according to this type of interpretation, is not just (1) the deaths of the BaaderMeinhof members who were in the Stammheim prison in October 1977, but also (2) the political and violent actions of the RAF before they got arrested and (3) the actions of the German government against them, which raised many questions about civil rights for German citizens as a whole. In this interpretation, the blurred paintings are an aggregated pictorial metaphor for the indeterminacy of our collective memory of the Baader-Meinhof history, which

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FIGURE 3.6

Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, Dead 1 (Tote 1, 1988). (Reproduced with permission of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

means that both the dead and their deadness are indeterminate. To accept such conclusions, however, is to give up hope that the Richter Effect can be explained or extended from Proll to the rest of us, which would mean that the affective experiences enacted in his paintings could not be explained or even said to be real. Moreover, the indeterminacy interpretation seems to confuse the source photographs and the Richter paintings on the issue of the presence and memory of the RAF. Although the source photographs of the RAF are supposed to assert the causal presence of what they depict and provide a reliable basis for the memory of the same, they rather have the effect of denying the presence of the RAF and closing off any memory of them, except as criminals. In the words of

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Rainer Rochlitz, “Richter painted the documents of a historical mess, brought on tragically by the adjournment of the work of memory.”66 As we saw, the photographs were intended to achieve closure on a  tumultuous chapter of contemporary German history by documenting dead criminals who were to be remembered as such, which is to say they hardly warranted being remembered at all. By contrast, Richter’s paintings negate this closure and reestablish a presence for the RAF by rekindling people’s memory of them, as happened in Proll’s case. In effect, Richter returns the Baader-Meinhof members to the visible realm of the living, where in their deadness they can live among the living. And why would we want them living among us again, given that the period of time marked by the violent actions committed by and against the RAF is one few of us would want to relive, especially given the contemporaneity of terrorism here and abroad? Yet one of the reasons the Baader-Meinhof history is so hard to endure is that it is not well understood. In this light, Richter’s painting series is painful because in responding to the demand to understand this history, he also opens up a wound. But the wound has always remained open, though for that very reason it has been suppressed (by Richter, but not by him alone). It is a virtue of Richter’s paintings that he has created an opportunity for the wound and its causes—apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction—to be experienced in ways that only art has been able to do. So something more is going on in Richter’s paintings than a metaphor for indeterminacy, something more than the erasure of the meanings of the source photographs and the decomposition of the history they depict. What is negated by Richter’s paintings is the media and police’s attempted closure, and what is determinate is the reopening of the Baader-Meinhof case. As I mentioned, the RAF initially became politically active largely in opposition to the Vietnam War, based on a legitimate critique shared at the time by only some in Germany and the United States, but eventually by most of the general public around the world. That the RAF eventually adopted violent strategies to express their opposition to the war and other issues is likely to be what is remembered more than anything else. Unfortunately, when opposition groups engage in violence, either on their own accord or as a result

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of government provocation, the effect is that any discussion of the legitimacy of their opposition gets shut down. Moreover, as Jeremy Varon and many others have noted, violence begets repression of many people besides those perpetrating the violence: “What people remember about the [Baader-Meinhof] era is typically not only the pervasive fear of terrorist violence but also the tremendous constriction of thought and feeling caused by heightened demands for loyalty to the state, enforced, in part, by repression.”67 In response to this constriction and repression, albeit starting twelve years later (and counting), Richter’s paintings reopen discussion of the underlying concerns that gave rise to the RAF and discussion of the issues that arose as a result of the German government’s efforts to suppress it. In Varon’s words again: “Critics warned that censorship inhibited precisely the kind of dialogue that would permit the left and West German society as a whole to make sense of the current crisis.”68 It has taken an artist to reopen this dialogue by creating space for grief and compassion. It is up to the rest of us to take advantage of this opportunity. Now, even if one were to acknowledge the need for such discussion and agree that Richter helped to generate it, one might ask why he did not paint pictures of the victims of the RAF instead of (or in addition to) the terrorists in order to present a more balanced picture of its legacy. After all, he did paint victims in his series of eight paintings of nurses murdered by a serial killer (Eight Student Nurses, 1966). And in a painting about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Woman with Umbrella (1964), Richter painted Jacqueline Kennedy in a moment of shock accompanied by grief. Also, in talking once about Andy Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964), Richter said he “preferred” to paint victims, whereas Warhol seemed to prefer the criminals.69 In the Baader-Meinhof case, however, Richter was not interested in photographs of the victims, though there were many of them available. The reason, I think, is that pictures of the victims would not be tied to the full range of moral-political issues surrounding the RAF and Germany’s reaction to it, and those issues remain controversial and thus need to be discussed. That is, there is no longer any comparable controversy among the general public about the victims, since they did nothing

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to deserve their fate, even if they were considered guilty in some way (e.g., because of any Nazi past), according to the RAF. Although the victims’ portraits would still provoke grief and compassion because of their relative innocence, they would not likely open up a broader discussion of the ethics-politics of the Baader-Meinhof legacy. Rather, grief and compassion for the victims, though important, would only confirm their already largely accepted innocence and their relative separation from the underlying issues. In short, Richter sidesteps the criminal/victim duality that, even when accurate, tends to shut down reflection and discussion. Of course, Richter could still have painted portraits of the innocent victims as well, again for the sake of balance. Or else he could—also or rather—have painted unsympathetic portraits of the terrorists with or without his sympathetic portrayal of the innocent victims. But what would have been the purpose of these additional paintings, given that the innocent were already recognized as such and the terrorists were already seen, via the source photographs, in an unsympathetic light? Richter’s purpose was something else.70 He had a need to enact something more than certain innocence and certain guilt, clear victims and clear criminals—again, more than the simple criminal/victim duality. It is not that he wanted to blur this duality or these distinctions; rather, he wanted to open up discussion of the moral-political issues that the rush to certainty and closure had shut down.71 So it is not morally irresponsible of Richter that certainty is not the purpose or effect of his paintings (nor the intent of his statements about them).72 These paintings are indeed tied to uncertainty, for without uncertainty they would have had no raison d’être. But, again, this does not mean that the moral certainty of the killer/victim framework has been dissolved or that all the moral-political questions are entirely up for grabs. On the contrary, it means that moral-political nuances, subtleties, and the like can now be introduced. Discussion, deliberation, and debate about the Baader-Meinhof legacy—including the impact on the victims— are opened up by the Richter Effect, by the space for grief and compassion created by his paintings.73 So Richter’s paintings open up discussion of moral-political issues that were once thought to be closed, and they do so by using a

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medium thought to be so deficient, especially relative to photography, that it could not achieve the Richter Effect. If we agree with Proll that Richter’s paintings are indeed adequate enactments of the Baader-Meinhof deaths, we can also recognize that some paintings are not deficient after all. While no single painting series can by itself overcome a long-standing anti-aesthetic critique of representation (painting especially), it can make us recognize that the anti-aesthetic stance has limits, which only art can enable us to see— another benefit of the Richter Effect. And if we can agree on these points, then perhaps we can be hopeful that the anti-aesthetic stance in art, art theory, and aesthetics will no longer be such a large shadow blurring the power of art. Then, extending from contemporary painting to all contemporary art, we, too, could say with confidence, as Richter does (though more by painting than by speaking), “Art is a perfectly natural human quality, and from that point of view it can’t be called into question.”74

RI CHTER’ S WAR CU T

Some anti-aesthetic critics of Richter might acknowledge that their general interpretations of his work do not fit the Baader-Meinhof series, but they would likely add that the interpretation I have given of this series may not readily fit his other work. Fair enough. In either case, however, this series seems to be an anomaly that needs to be explained because the paintings are simply too demanding on us morally and politically to be ignored. Typically, one anomaly such as Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series may not inspire us to rethink the theory that deems it an anomaly. But if we were confronted with a second anomaly, we would be compelled to rethink the theory because its very validity would now be in question and because that is how theory develops—through critical self-reflection. Well, Richter produced a second anomaly in 2004: War Cut, an art book that is similar in important effects to the Baader-Meinhof series. Richter juxtaposed 216 close-up photographs of his painting Abstract Painting No. 848-2 (1987) with photocopies of excerpts of articles from a German newspaper (Frankfurter Allgemeine

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Zeitung) written over two days as the Iraq War was launched by the United States: March 20–21, 2003. The topics of the articles have a wide range: the impending invasion; whether it could be avoided through diplomacy; the military showdown with Saddam Hussein; the actual start of the war; demonstrations against it; positive and negative reactions from countries around the world; the alleged link between Iraq and the September 11 attacks; evidence of weapons of mass destruction; the rise of terrorism; the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan; the launching of the war as depicted on television; the anticipated and emerging effects of the war on the stock market, plane travel, and other areas of everyday life; and so on. Richter’s painting is abstract to begin with, and, thus, the closeups are even more so. The excerpts are textual close-ups reproduced without the structure of newspaper columns—they appear to be typical word-processing documents spread out on the page as if they were images. Each page of the book is divided into two halves that, because of the format and size of the book, resemble a laptop computer screen, especially when filled with images. Every left-side page is paired with a right-side page; and after the first two pages, each pair is in turn paired with a second two-page spread immediately following it. For example, after two entirely blank numbered pages, page 3 is also blank, but page 4 has an image in the lower-right half; page 5 is likewise blank and page 6 has a text in the lower-right half. Then page 7 is blank, and page 8 has an image in the upper-right half, and page 9 is blank followed page 10 with text in the upperright half. And so the pairing and mimicking of images and texts continue for 324 pages throughout War Cut, followed by a one-page model displaying the layout of the entire book (figure 3.7). What is the relationship between these two kinds of close-ups, one from a painting and the other from a newspaper? Is there some connection between what we see and what we read? Are the images illustrations of what is described? Are the texts narratives of what is depicted? The answers to these questions are as unclear as the questions are obvious. With the Baader-Meinhof series still in mind, we might say that the answers here are blurred. If so, we should ask: What is being blurred? I think this question, very familiar from

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FIGURE 3.7

Gerhard Richter, War Cut (2004), p. 326. (Reproduced with permission of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York)

our earlier discussion of Richter, is easier to answer in the case of War Cut if we remember that the book is about the launching of the war. The answers to most of the questions we might ask about the war as we look at the visual and textual close-ups were not yet known in 2003, except on the most descriptive or factual level. Yes, the United States invaded Iraq and did so using massive military force that the Iraqis could not resist for long (a military doctrine referred to as “shock and awe”). However, it was unknown what effects the invasion was having, who and how many were being killed, and what ends were to be achieved by the invasion. There was an official Bush administration rationale for the war (weapons of mass destruction), and there were other public reasons for the war given at the time. We now know that many of those reasons did not withstand scrutiny, but said scrutiny had hardly begun in the two days in March 2003 covered by War Cut. In short, no definitive answers could be given at that time to these substantive questions about the meaning(s) of what was happening. Despite the blurring of most answers, however, the questions raised by the newspaper articles were clear, and War Cut is very effective in raising and sustaining them when too few other people, artists or otherwise, were willing or able to do so, with aesthetic or other means. So, despite predictable anti-aesthetic claims to the contrary, an artwork using aesthetic means was able to contribute to our critical understanding about the Iraq War by provoking—even demanding—such critique through images juxtaposed with texts. As Richter himself claims, he was using artistic form to make sense of the complexities of the Iraq War as it was commencing: “In this case the facts are so overwhelming, the contents so crucial, the form is also more significant. We need it simply to be able to deal with the subject matter.”75 At the same time, the close-ups of Richter’s painting were surrogates for the images of the war that were withheld or else closely censored by the U.S. government, which exercised unprecedented iconoclastic control over the production and dissemination of war images to prevent them from having moral-political effects on the public(s) that they would not be able to control. That is, the government was worried that if the American public saw images of American or Iraqi casualties (other than Saddam), their support of

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the invasion might be weakened or they might become skeptical of their largely uncritical acceptance of the official rationale for the invasion. Visible only through controlled images, the war was thus mainly an abstraction to the general public. Against this background, some of Richter’s close-ups look like blurred television or video screens (especially the ones with vertical stripes/striations), others have a deceptively pastoral (or Monet-like) effect, and those that are red look destructive. Individually and collectively, however, the close-ups are blurry, just as the war at the time was a visual blur, an abstraction, a mostly invisible event except for the television and newspapers images “brought to you by” the embedded journalists, the U.S. government–authorized text and image makers. In this light, Richter’s War Cut enacts the iconoclastic use and abuse of war images while sustaining a place for images that would enact a more complete picture of the war, allowing it to come into view, as has increasingly happened (the Abu Ghraib images are the most infamous, but there was also an “iconoclash” over whether military photographs of American soldiers returning home in flag-draped coffins should be seen by the general public). It is not that Richter chose to publish abstract images instead of more realistic images. He had no choice, because there were no “real” images available in March 2003 (figure 3.8). What can artists possibly do when they are in such a situation? What representational substance can their art possibly have when the state controls the imagery that would allow us to see the war and thereby be better able to critique it? Does Richter’s War Cut merely enact the absence of any representational substance in art in the face of the Iraq War, as many of his anti-aesthetic interpreters would likely argue, given what they have said of his other work, even the Baader-Meinhof series? On the contrary, War Cut achieves much more. It enacts perhaps all the representational substance that existed in late March 2003, given that the U.S. government effectively controlled the war images. Richter enacts this control by reproducing abstract close-ups that were in turn mediated by newspaper texts that were themselves mediated because information about the war was also heavily controlled and Richter produced mostly excerpts. He enacts this predicament of control (i.e., iconoclasm) very

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FIGURE 3.8

Gerhard Richter, War Cut (2004), pp. 139 and 140. (Reproduced with permission of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York)

well by engaging in art. At the same time, he enacts the fact that something was not being represented because of the censorship on all levels, though by definition he could not enact exactly what that something was. However, although the unrepresented remains unrepresented, the fact of its being unrepresented (the fact that there is something that is unrepresented) is now enacted in art. Moreover, what was not represented was not “beyond representation” in principle (unrepresentable), as many Richter interpreters would likely argue. Rather, it was beyond representation for a very mundane, earthly reason: the political iconoclasm of the U.S. government. The viability of any critique of the war using art depends on this point being clear. For their part, the newspaper excerpts provide textual evidence that something was happening that remained partially out of sight at the time, and they help us recognize that reading about the war was not enough to “bring it home,” that we needed to see the visual effects of the war in order to critique it. We needed images to be our eyewitnesses. In the end, the images and texts collaborated to enact a first “cut” of the Iraq War as it was commencing. A basic contrast between the images and the texts is striking, but in a way that confirms their collaboration as the contrast dissolves. Although the images are opaque and do not convey any information, descriptive or otherwise, the texts seem very detailed, descriptive, and informative. As Richter says, the “plain presentation of the facts” seemed consoling, at first.76 At the same time, however, the texts are also rather opaque, not just because they are excerpts and thus like the close-ups of Richter’s painting, but because they are very tentative, as they describe or analyze an event that had only just begun, which means the full extent of the war’s consequences, meanings, and the like are incomplete. In the end, the texts in War Cut are as opaque to our understanding as the images are to our perception: “Even the facts in the newspaper articles somehow become unrealistic in this context.”77 Just as we have to ask what the paintings are depictions of, we also need to ask what the articles are descriptions or analyses of. The event is blurry as long as both sets of questions cannot be answered. But we should not lose sight of the fact that the questions are not blurry. They are visible enough

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to demand answers. In Deweyan language, they are enactments of questions that we need to answer if we are to understand an event that (at that time) was just getting under way. That the answers are not readily forthcoming is a serious deficit, but not one that belongs to the images or the texts. It is a deficit of understanding owing to the newness and incompleteness of the event. Without the images, however, in combination with the texts, we would not even know about this deficit, and, thus, we would not even know there is something we do not yet understand. Although War Cut does not complete our understanding of the war, it does enact and sustain our hunger to understand it by holding our lack of understanding before our eyes, along with the object of this lack. Our hunger for understanding of the Iraq War is inseparable from the war as a visual and textual object of understanding. Hunger and its object are effectively enacted in War Cut.

DEMANDING ART AN D DEM AN DI N G ART C R I T I QU E

Only artists can break through the anti-aesthetic barriers, and Richter has done it in a commanding fashion at least twice. He produced a public, affective space for compassion and grief in his BaaderMeinhof series through the aesthetic strategies he employed, and he thereby invited viewers to demand an inquiry into the meanings of the Baader-Meinhof events and their legacy. Though the effects may have been limited by its format and timing of publication, with War Cut he similarly provoked critical reflection on the meaning of the Iraq War by aesthetically juxtaposing images and texts. If critics were to suggest that the medium of the book was chosen for War Cut because Richter recognized that painting was inadequate, they would have to remember that a painting forms half of the book; plus, Richter himself says that completing War Cut allowed him to find his way back to painting after a hiatus.78 So Richter has succeeded in producing art that is able to enact what many art theorists continue to say is virtually, if not actually, impossible, especially when painting is involved. The Baader-Meinhof series and War Cut

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should help them to see why their anti-aesthetic view of art is mistaken, as it is belied by the works of a contemporary artist they greatly admire. However, some might object here that, even if all of what I just claimed were true, it is still not the case that Richter’s art has, or could ever have, any moral-political power in society, for the efficacy of his art is confined to the art world. While keeping in mind Dewey’s notion of art as enacted hunger that carries with it a demand that this hunger be satisfied (apprehension plus recognition and satisfaction), let me respond to this objection by imagining an image of dead soldiers or civilians in Iraq (perhaps on the model of Jeff Wall’s photographs). This image would not just be alerting us to the recent and ongoing casualties of the Iraq War, for that could be done through a newspaper article. Rather, the image (as art) would also create affective and reflective space for feelings of grief and compassion, in the way that Richter opened up comparable space through his Baader-Meinhof paintings. This space makes it possible for viewers to apprehend the human casualties of the Iraq War and to demand that these casualties end. By experiencing this image, viewers are implicated in its content and thereby committed, if only unwittingly or even reluctantly, to its underlying demands of apprehension and satisfaction. This implication entails, or at least invites, viewer participation. However, according to Sontag, in On Photography, all an image can provide is a semblance of participation because you need experience to participate in events, yet, for most of us, viewing war photographs is our only experience of the Iraq War.79 Insofar as participation in war is limited to looking at images of war, all we have is the semblance of participation, which only confirms our alienation or distance from the war we were hoping to participate in. In other words, although art as enactment is to be understood as experience, our experience of the Iraq War images is confined to the image world, the Platonic cave-like world of semblance. Such experience, qua semblance, is not real and it cannot have any effect on the real world. Or? One of Sontag’s own examples of war images in On Photography involves photographs of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, which are close in kind to the thought experiment I introduced, though

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I imagined an art example like Richter’s. First of all, she contrasts the existence of those photographs to the nonexistence of photos from the Korean War in the early 1950s to make the point that there were ecological tragedies and genocidal atrocities in Korea as well, but ideologically there was no space for images at that time, no willingness on the part of the public to see them and therefore no context for photo-journalists to take them. By contrast, the American public became openly critical of the Vietnam War, though only after the escalation under President Lyndon Johnson, and journalists thus “felt backed in their efforts to obtain photographs” of the suffering of Vietnamese people and American soldiers.80 In turn, the photographs helped to sway more of the public to oppose the war, and it was eventually ended partially because of such opposition: “During the Vietnam era, war photography became, normatively, a criticism of war.”81 Sontag rightly insists on the point that a political ideology defined the war and made the photographs and their moral power possible; that is, “the contribution of photography follows the naming of the event” by the reigning political ideology. To take our current war example again, we can see how American political consciousness evolved over the nine years of the Iraq War, March 2003 to December 2011. Initially the political consciousness in the United States rendered “pictures of wretched holloweyed GIs” inspirational rather than critical, but that changed significantly after the 2004 publication of images of the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison.82 Americans are now open to viewing photographs of the Iraq War, in tandem with their moral-political willingness to engage in a critical assessment of its justification, chances and costs of victory, and so on. So our new case confirms Sontag’s basic point: “What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photography,” or by extension by any art, “is the existence of the relevant political consciousness.”83 In agreeing with this point, however, I want to highlight her own claim that we are indeed morally affected by photographs and, in the case of the Vietnam War (and, we can only hope, in the case of the Iraq War), that our being affected changed the course of the war in a positive way by helping to end it. Such change would be an exemplary case in which the moral

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demand for the apprehension of the suffering caused by the Iraq War leads to the (realization of the) political demand that such suffering cease. That is, although moral apprehension is in part contingent on the right political climate, it is also true that moral apprehension helps to anticipate and shape that climate. The Abu Ghraib images are again a prime example of how this works: the political climate needed to be there for the images to be seen, but that same climate also needed to be morally provoked to become public. That the war continued for more than seven years after those images first appeared is certainly an indictment of our moral-political culture, but this fact is not indicative of the limitations of images, these in particular or images in general, and certainly not indicative of our ability to represent moral-political issues through other means such as art. The principal affect of artistic images of war is compassion, if the right political culture is in place. Yet in contemporary art theory, as we saw in chapter 2, compassion is considered unstable, unsustainable, and easily exploited to the point that the opposite of compassion is typically the actual affect that is stimulated by images of war. Or talk of compassion is predicated on a false identification between viewer and viewed (audience and victim) that collapses the difference between these two parties (roles) and leaves us with a mere semblance of shared feeling or, at best, a feeling shared only among viewers. Or compassion is contrasted with action or resistance so that when we feel compassion for others who, say, are suffering, we are thereby relieved of the responsibility to act to resist the conditions that created the suffering. At the same time, many contemporary art theorists claim that the meaning (the signified) of art is to be considered to be opposed to its form (signifier) so that any art interpretation in which meaning plays a significant role must necessarily elide form. Plus, meaning is presumed to be universal so that particular meaning, which I have emphasized, is thought to be impossible; in fact, even particularity is said to be problematic because it always entails its opposite—universality. As if all these objections were not enough, the mere discussion of painting (in Richter’s or any case) raises the ire of many contemporary art theorists because they think we are done with that medium, at least with

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respect to art that aspires to any criticality. They claim that paintings cannot assert themselves as such; for example, Richter’s paintings are constantly interpreted as if they were photographs or anything but paintings.84 Rather, paintings can at most represent their inability to assert themselves so that they are reduced to representations of their own impossibility. Of course, mention of impossibility brings us back to the anti-aesthetic stance (and iconoclasm), particularly the claim that all images today are subject to the prohibition on graven images and, more specifically, that painting operates under a constitutional deficiency—that it is impossible in contemporary culture. In short, following contemporary art theory, Richter’s paintings cannot create an affective space for compassion (and grief), nor can they capture the meaning(s) of the deaths of the members of the Baader-Meinhof Group; and the close-ups of the painting in War Cut are, in effect, forensic photos of the body of painting whose representational substance is deceased (the first confirmed, artistic casualty of the Iraq War). To respond to these concerns, let me first say that Richter’s works do not assume universal meanings because they do not assume any meanings; rather, they are works in search of meanings, so their meanings are in the future though their subject matter is in/of the past. Likewise, they do not assume any universal “we” (neither viewers nor victims, neither subjects nor objects of compassion) because they do not assume any “we.” They are works in search of multiple “we”s shaped in and by the performative spaces produced by their public exhibition or publication. They do not assume universal compassion stemming from our shared humanity (even less is there any shared pleasure associated with images of death or war); rather, they are in search of compassion that will be shared only by some of us, not even by all those who experience Richter’s works, because a political context is needed for any such affect to be generated, shared, and sustained. But, again, part of the moral-political power of Richter’s paintings is to help anticipate and shape the political context needed for the apprehension and sharing of the affect of compassion. He is engaged in such searches because he believes that, as an artist, he has no choice. As we saw earlier, he describes art in very Deweyan language as a process of making models:

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“When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals.”85 The models are not autonomous because art is not autonomous, which means they cannot be realized in the fictive space from which they emerge. They are realized beyond the public performance space they create, and what happens from there with these alternative worlds is not up to the artists alone. Other agents, factors, and conditions need to be in place if these models are to have a future in society. On this note, let me end with another quote from Richter. In speaking about the “moral function of art,” he lists other tasks of art besides “giving shape to meaning”: “Art does have a moral function . . . and it can transform, shape, investigate, delight, show, provoke and what have you. But this does not mean that art can be expected to do any kind of social work, or expose abuses, or unmask intrigues, or anything like that.”86 If Richter has shown that art can indeed make moral and political demands on us to do this “social work,” he is well aware of the limits that reality places on the realization of these demands: “You cannot say that art is no good because Mozart didn’t prevent the concentration camps, any more than you can say that no more poems are possible after Auschwitz. All I know is that without Mozart and the rest we wouldn’t survive.”87 Traumatic historical events such as Auschwitz demand a response from artists, who, in turn, demand a response from viewers. Both the artist(s) and the viewers also make demands on aestheticians to help them understand these demands and the events generating them. So, demands placed on and by art enact a hunger for aesthetics. As an artist, Richter is exemplary because he understands this predicament and resists any aesthetics that does not help him with it.

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4 THE SALCEDO EFFECT

Beyond all that is factual, it is art that is the testimony of life. —Doris Salcedo, Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth

Doris Salcedo is a contemporary artist who has created contemplative, public, affective spaces that elicit compassion for human victims of violence, suffering, or death and who, through her artistic practices, has successfully resisted the anti-aesthetic stance even while being identified with it. A Colombian sculptor who has exhibited worldwide, Salcedo constructs social sculptures and installations aimed at “giving form to society through art” and integrating political awareness with art.1 The major political focus of her early work was the violence in Colombia perpetuated by death squads, drug cartels, and terrorists, which has been excessive by any standard for several decades.2 More recently, in Shibboleth, an installation at Tate Modern in London (2007–2008), Salcedo created what Paul Gilroy aptly describes as a “public space of quiet reflection” about the racism experienced by immigrants in contemporary Europe.3 What unifies Salcedo’s early (more Colombia-focused) sculptures and her current (more internationally focused) installations is, according to Achim Borchardt-Hume (a Tate curator during the Shibboleth installation), a political and aesthetic commitment to

bearing witness to those who have suffered the consequences of violence.4 This commitment makes Salcedo’s work, in Marcia Tucker’s words, “tangible and moving proof of art’s need to redress the evils of a world gone awry and its ability to reformulate that world for the better.”5 Finally, in the judgment of Dan Cameron, Salcedo’s “artistic evolution has taken on the urgency of a singular campaign to challenge the art world to back up its claims to be taken seriously in moral terms.”6

SALCEDO AN D AESTHETI CS

To reach an understanding of Salcedo’s art, we first need to analyze the aesthetic strategies she utilizes in her art. But to carry out such an analysis, we first need to critique the anti-aesthetic language prevalent in many discussions of Salcedo’s work, including some of her own words, because that language obscures her aesthetic strategies and, moreover, their affective results and moral-political efficacy. If such obscuring really happens, why do some critics unwittingly or explicitly perpetuate an anti-aesthetic interpretation of Salcedo’s art and thus make it impossible (for them) to account for the affective space for compassion and critique that she creates? The reason they persist with this language may simply be faute de mieux. The anti-aesthetic stance has been dominant for so long that too many theorists no longer have a clear sense of how aesthetics could possibly contribute to moral-political critique. So, after deconstructing the critiques of some of the aesthetic concepts embodied in Salcedo’s art, I want to clarify the positive role of these same concepts and to demonstrate that aesthetics is vital to her success. In doing so, I think it is important to distinguish between the nonaesthetic and the anti-aesthetic. Salcedo’s art is clearly generated by a number of nonaesthetic factors (e.g., suffering, loss), and, in turn, it elicits nonaesthetic affects (e.g., grief, compassion, dignity). However, it is a mistake to conclude from the presence of the nonaesthetic factors and affects that the complete artistic process of her work—from conception to production to installation to public experience—is anti-aesthetic because these same factors and affects

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are generated by aesthetic strategies utilized throughout this process. In a word, Salcedo makes art that we cannot experience affectively for its nonaesthetic affects unless we engage with the aesthetic strategies that allow her to achieve an affective enactment of various forms of suffering. To acknowledge the aesthetics of Salcedo’s art in the face of the anti-aesthetic challenge, we need to look more closely at what antiaesthetic theorists and Salcedo are criticizing, specifically when they seem to reject wholesale the aesthetic concepts of representation, intentionality, autonomy, subjectivity, expression, and the like. We will see, in the end, that these concepts are not artifacts of a reactionary discursive regime that hinders political art, as some theorists claim. On the contrary, these concepts are tools that, once recalibrated, can help us to understand how an artist such as Salcedo is able to develop effective political art, despite the tendency in contemporary art to avoid politics (though more among theorists and critics than artists, especially since the 1993 Whitney Biennial).7 As Cameron rightly emphasizes, if contemporary artists have tended to shy away from Salcedo’s kind of art, it is not because they have not experienced or are not concerned about any of the violence or suffering she is grappling with, but “because the [theoretical-critical] debate on modern and postmodern art has centered on philosophical issues of abstraction and representation that have little bearing on the stream of public crises that fill our newspapers and conversations.”8 As Jacques Ranciere also argues, we need to shift the debate away from the crisis of representation and back to these public crises, which is what Salcedo’s art enables us to do.9 Jill Bennett’s insightful book Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, helps to make this shift possible because she focuses on how Salcedo is able “to find a communicable language of sensation and affect with which to register something of the experience of traumatic memory.”10 By being able to “capture and transmit real experience,” Bennett continues, Salcedo creates an affective experience of art that is at the same time “a manner of doing politics,” a form of critical awareness in art that helps us understand the world.11 Finally, as exemplary political art hungering for aesthetics, Salcedo’s work also contributes to the regeneration of aesthetics

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because she helps to make it clear that the anti-aesthetic stance is no longer tenable on its own terms.

CRI TI QU E O F THE ANTI - AESTHE T I C

Typical of the critical literature on Salcedo’s art is the argument that she adheres to the goals of the anti-aesthetic stance by negating the aesthetic concepts and practices of representation, intentionality, autonomy, subjectivity, expression, and the like. For example, Charles Merewether begins one of his many essays on Salcedo by discussing “the negative condition” of art where the emphasis is on “the limits of representation,” on that which cannot be accounted for, and “experience which is incommunicable.”12 Andreas Huyssen cautions us about the danger of the “aestheticization of violence” that reduces other people’s suffering to a spectacle for audiences to enjoy, especially on the international circuit of art biennials where artists contribute to the phenomenon, discussed earlier, of secondary victimization.13 Rod Mengham describes the “formlessness” (unform) and meaninglessness of Salcedo’s artistic practice, whereby in a Kraussian fashion she removes meaning from objects (e.g., furniture) by declassifying them without supplying another meaning, leaving them “suspended in a permanent state of formal hesitation.”14 In a similar vein, Carlos Basualdo argues, in discussing the chairs in Salcedo’s installation Noviembre 6, “they have not lost the will to continue to mean something and yet, whatever they mean has become hopelessly incomprehensible.”15 Even Mieke Bal starts her otherwise insightful catalog essay by emphasizing that Shibboleth creates a negative space that signifies nothing, consistent with the anti-aesthetic claim that art has little or no representational substance.16 Granted, Bal continues by saying that precisely because Shibboleth signifies nothing, it thereby signifies everything. But this, ironically, only confirms the influence of the anti-aesthetic stance because now the negativity of Salcedo’s work is taken to be foundational for the aesthetic strategies that Bal herself identifies: “the aesthetics of negativity traverse all the [nine] strategies previously deployed, to give them a new urgency.”17 Also, Bal describes how

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Salcedo “handles materials as a form of ‘hopeless mourning,’ ” which is itself a dominant anti-aesthetic trope, though Bal ends her essay by referring to Salcedo’s impressive, if still angry, optimism.18 Salcedo does not always make it easy to sustain the nonaesthetic/ anti-aesthetic distinction or to disregard the anti-aesthetic language in interpretations of her work. She sometimes employs that same language in her own writings and interviews, and it is prominently represented in excerpts of various theoretical or poetic writings that she has selected for inclusion in several of her catalogs.19 But she is much less committed to the anti-aesthetic stance than her appeals to it may suggest. For example, she talks in several interviews as if she were trying to convince viewers that her art is not to be experienced in aesthetic terms, and she even says that she is “not interested in the visual.”20 Such anti-ocular language is an unmistakable sign of the anti-aesthetic stance. However, Salcedo is very clear about her aim in making such points. Consider, for example, Abyss (2005), installed during the Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Castello di Rivoli (Turin). Her intention was to allow viewers “to experience the complexity of this imposing space, as well as the ungraspable nature of its dome, located somewhere between a political hegemony and a transcendental idea.”21 To create this experience, she added to the bricks forming the domed ceiling until they came all the way down to within four feet of the floor, blocking windows and doorways so that the brick walls were closing off the space of the Castello, bringing down to Earth all the weight of the political power that the imposing dome symbolized and sustained. In Borchardt-Hume’s words, “The post-colonial condition of being shut out, in and up—physically, intellectually and metaphorically— here was likened to a terrifying vertical drop.”22 In creating experiences for the public in these spaces, the measure of success, in Salcedo’s own terms, is that she not create a spectacle, but that the spaces “play an active role in the construction of consciousness” about the abuses of excessive political power.23 So when she says that there is nothing to be looked at in Abyss, she is trying to avoid turning the artistic enactment of excess power into a spectacle that undermines critique. And why exactly does she want to avoid a spectacle? Not simply because it is ocular or visual or aesthetic, but because she

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believes it can carry the implication that the power enacted in art cannot be resisted: the “activity of the onlookers underscores this impotence.”24 That is, Salcedo takes “spectacle” to be a concept that implies that visual imagery of abuse is inseparable from and perhaps even causes political passivity. Yet, as was the case with Susan Sontag’s argument that apathy, not aesthetics, undermines the moralpolitical power of images of abuse, Salcedo’s real objection here is political, not aesthetic.25 She definitely wants to avoid any implication of passivity, but she also recognizes that some types of aesthetic strategies are needed not only to create the kind of affective experiences of abuse she has in mind but also to generate political awareness as a result of these affective experiences. For Salcedo, as for John Dewey, an aesthetic experience of abuse is not complete unless the moral apprehension it elicits is, in turn, accompanied by a political demand that the abuse be recognized and satisfied (ceased). In the end, “spectacle” is for Salcedo just the name of a failed type of aesthetics, and its avoidance does not presume or imply any general anti-aesthetic stance. So she avoids the fallacy common among advocates of this stance. Salcedo has the same objective of combining apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction in her art when she criticizes other aesthetic concepts. Regarding the concept of intentionality, for example, she insists at times that it is irrelevant to her work from its inception, throughout the artistic process, and until the time it is experienced by viewers. In making this claim, however, Salcedo revealingly invokes the aesthetic concept of autonomy in a positive light, confirming that she is committed to some form of it: “I can only give form to works which, once completed, are autonomous creatures, independent of my intentions.”26 Her point in critiquing intentionality is that her merely subjective intentions (“subject-oriented”) do not define her work, yet at the same time she explicitly pursues the intention of creating objective experiences in public spaces where the viewers help to define the work (“public-oriented”). In Bal’s words, Salcedo seeks “to make art that does not belong to her; she is not interested in leaving her signature, but instead considers art a means to affect the world outside of herself.”27 Or, in Salcedo’s own words, she does not complete her role in the making of her sculpture until

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it is situated where it is to be exhibited: “The image is not finished in my studio; I complete it in situ, in the very space where the viewer will encounter it. What I propose is that everything that takes place in that space, once I have finished the work, occurs within the viewer’s own space.”28 So each sculpture or installation remains incomplete—as an example of Umberto Eco’s “open work”—until it is completed by viewers: “The artwork fully manifests itself at that moment.”29 Salcedo continued this commitment to the open work in the installation Neither (2004), in which she addresses the intolerable reality of contemporary detention camps around the world (e.g., at Guantanamo Bay). Her explicit intention was to create for viewers an experience of “the existence of spaces where absolutely inhumane conditions are accomplished.”30 To realize this intention, she transformed the interior of the White Cube Gallery in London into the semblance of a detention camp by using cyclone fences to close off openings between various rooms and by embossing the fences like frescoes into the outer layer of plasterboard on the interior walls of the gallery. Her intention was for viewers to feel as if they were in a detention camp instead of merely looking at a depiction of one: “I wanted Neither to be an experience. For this reason, there is nothing to be looked at.”31 So, although it may seem at first that Salcedo rejects the aesthetic concept of intentionality, she is actually just insisting that her work not be interpreted by reference to the intentions of an autonomous artist wanting to express her subjectivity in the form of an autonomous, completed work. By contrast, her intention is to open her art to those who have the opportunities to experience it affectively in galleries or museums, resulting in public and political experiences. Salcedo’s openness, however, does not imply that her work is wide open to any experience or interpretation. Her art is addressed initially to individuals who are suffering (in Colombia, Europe, or wherever, depending on the installation): “Sculpture for me is the giving of a material gift to that being who makes his presence felt in my work.”32 In including the victims as well as the audience in the list of addressees, Salcedo thereby restricts the scope of interpretations of her work: “Each work has specific readings, but the decisive element is

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the existence of a real victim behind each piece.”33 That is, the openness of her work is limited by the intention to provoke and sustain public memory about the forgotten or invisible suffering of particular (if always anonymous) individuals. So the concept of intentionality is still very relevant here, though only once it is clarified, which means only once Salcedo’s public-oriented intentions are clarified. Take Shibboleth (figure 4.1). It comprised a 548-foot-long crack in the concrete floor that began outside the main entrance of Tate Modern and, as it widened from several inches to almost two feet, it was lined with a rock-like cast produced by Salcedo in her Bogotá studio and then shipped to London to be laboriously installed. There was nothing around the “crack” in Turbine Hall, Tate’s enormous exhibition hall.34 Without some indication from Salcedo about her intentions for this installation, how would the public know that the “crack” was even an art installation or that the cast inside the crack had political as well as aesthetic value? Shibboleth might have been mistaken for an artless crack in the floor or merely a formalist crack (though perhaps mainly by people like Testadura in Arthur C. Danto’s essay “The Artworld,” discussed in chapter 1). More specifically, Tate Modern visitors who recognized Shibboleth as art would still have been at a loss to recognize that it was about immigration if Salcedo did not say that her intention was for the crack to intrude on the space of Turbine Hall “in the same way the appearance of immigrants disturbs the consensus and homogeneity of European societies. . . . The space which illegal immigrants occupy is a negative space, . . . this piece is a negative space.”35 So intentions matter after all. This is not to say that the experiences that Shibboleth makes possible are determined solely by Salcedo’s intentions, especially given that her works are open and completed in situ by the audiences. Rather, her stated victim-instigated and publicoriented intentions only set the parameters for how the open work can be experienced by the public who, in turn, still complete it.36 The concept of autonomy is also more complicated than it may seem to be at first when Salcedo, following the anti-aesthetic stance, seems to reject it outright. In criticizing autonomy, she principally means that she does not choose her subject matter—for example,

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FIGURE 4.1

Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (2007). (© Doris Salcedo. Reproduced courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and White Cube, London. Photo: Tate Photography, London)

violence in Colombia—but that it chooses her: “my themes are given to me, reality is given to me, the presence of each victim imposes itself.”37 “I don’t have the opportunity to choose the themes that inform a piece. The oft-celebrated freedom of the artist is a myth.”38 More emphatically, Salcedo rejects the idea of autonomy understood as the independence of art from politics because her work is explicitly political. But, as we saw already, autonomy also refers to the independence of artworks from the artist, that is, from any subject-oriented intentionality. This means that (1) Salcedo’s art is not autonomous because it is indeed political, yet (2) her art is autonomous because it is independent of her, that is, it is publicly constituted as well as publicly oriented. We can understand this apparent tension by emphasizing that Salcedo does not reject the aesthetic concept of autonomy entirely; rather, she recalibrates it as a claim about the autonomy of her work from narrow, subjectivist notions of subjectivity and intentionality. Moreover, this autonomy is a condition of the possibility of the audience’s public engagement with the work. That is, she is confident that autonomy as she recalibrates it can open up the possibility of a dialogue between an installation that enacts people’s suffering and “the spectator who is open to it”: “I am a connection between the victims, with their invisible and marginalized experience, and the public which looks at my work.”39 This engagement or dialogue cannot happen unless her work is autonomous from her because only then is it open and available to be completed in situ by the audience. In turn, because this engagement is central in determining the politics of Salcedo’s art, autonomy is also a condition of the politics of her art. This is an unexpected turn, except perhaps for those familiar with Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, because autonomy and politics are typically at odds: autonomous art is not political, and political art is not autonomous. In Bal’s words, however, what we have in Salcedo is “the aesthetics of an art that seeks to intervene in the world: an art that seeks to be political because it is aesthetic, and vice versa. There is no tension between art and politics here; art can only be art if it is political.”40 Salcedo has found a way to negotiate the tension between aesthetics and politics, and she has done so in a way

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that anti-aesthetic theorists fail to recognize so long as they totally reject autonomy. In addition, the affective experience that people may have of Salcedo’s art is also autonomous in the sense of being independent from their everyday experience, if it does not already include affective experiences of the suffering of others, whether because of lack of exposure, overexposure, or indifference. For example, the suffering enacted in the 1991–2004 installation series Atrabiliarios (which means “defiant, mourning, melancholy”) is not conveyed by the material contents of memory (the shoes) but, according to Nancy Princenthal, “by the attempt to join that experience [of suffering] to present normal, unbroken time and place,” that is, daily experience.41 Such autonomy is temporary because Salcedo’s art breaks it down, in effect, by giving every viewer the opportunity to apprehend the endured suffering enacted in her installations and to make it part of his or her everyday experience. As we just saw with Shibboleth, for example, Salcedo intended for the “crack” she cut into the floor to disturb the space of Tate Modern in the same way that immigrants disturb the consensus and homogeneity of European societies. Her intention was thus to create an autonomous (from her), public, affective experience for viewers that, in Deweyan fashion, breaks from the audience’s everyday experience in order to make room for the victims’ endured suffering by creating a silent public space for people to engage with it. In this light, the autonomy of aesthetic experience, albeit only in the sense of the difference between aesthetic experience and everyday experience, emerges as another condition of the politics of Salcedo’s art. But it is important to reiterate that this autonomy is not permanent. If the installation succeeds, the aesthetic and everyday experiences are intertwined and autonomy is willingly forfeited, though some tension (and thus some autonomy) will always remain. When these experiences are intertwined, her installation succeeds not only as art, but also as political art (though for Salcedo, there is no difference between the two). So, as she did earlier with the concept of intentionality, Salcedo combines seemingly incompatible points under the single aesthetic concept of autonomy, and she does so in a way not recognized by

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anti-aesthetic theorists who abandon autonomy rather than recalibrate it. Some recalibrated aesthetic concepts (and strategies) therefore remain central to Salcedo’s work, despite the otherwise antiaesthetic language that even she sometimes uses to explain it. Since each of these concepts has several different meanings, as we have seen, any critique must be targeted to a specific meaning. The risk of not having such a clear target is that the critique will end up undermining the intelligibility of the art in whose name the critique is introduced. This is especially true of Salcedo’s art because each work or installation is the result of a long process (often involving years) that is only partly captured by aesthetic language because of its nonaesthetic origins and effects, but it is a process that cannot be explained by anti-aesthetic language. For example, she often starts by intimately interviewing victims of violence throughout Colombia, describing herself as a “secondary witness” in the sense that she bears witness to the witnesses of the violence, those whose lives have been disfigured by death.42 Throughout the (nonaesthetic) interviews, Salcedo establishes “a form of communion” (or engagement, dialogue) with each person: “in a way, I become that person, there is a process of substitution. Their suffering becomes mine. . . . The work develops from that experience.”43 The (nonaesthetic) compassion “endures throughout the whole process of making the work” until it is enacted in a work of art: “I make the piece for the victim who makes him- or herself present in my work.”44 Although the aim of enacting endured suffering or loss in an artwork—the affect of compassion—is nonaesthetic, it is achieved only by using an aesthetic strategy (combining what Bal calls anthropomorphism and labor, the first and eighth strategies) because the enactment requires the aesthetic choice, handling, and design of everyday materials (such as clothing, lace, hair, bone, shirts, and various pieces of furniture) so that the art enacts the particularity of the endured suffering or loss embedded or inscribed in the everyday objects of the lives of those who have suffered. “The selection of the objects is different in each work, Salcedo reports, but she adds that there is common denominator: “they are objects used and transformed by each individual in his everyday life.”45 In the choice of these objects and

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materials, Salcedo creates a public ritual to provoke and sustain the memory of suffering and loss that others have endured and she has witnessed.46 The open artwork or installation that emerges from Salcedo’s process that combines nonaesthetic and aesthetic moments is then experienced by a viewer who, in her words, “may find something in the work that triggers his or her own memories of sorrow, or some personal recollection. It is during this unique moment of beholding that the viewer may enter, as I did, into communion with the victim’s experience.”47 This trigger links some people’s endured suffering to other people, thereby making possible a collective, affective experience of enacted suffering (a particular affect becomes transitive). It is the everydayness and familiarity of the objects that makes it possible for viewers to feel compassion because as they experience the familiar objects (e.g., furniture) affectively, they connect with the endurance of suffering enacted in them. At the same time, however, the objects are disorienting and disquieting because they are not so familiar after all, as they have been rendered dysfunctional by, say, having various materials (e.g., a dress) embedded in them to evoke the victims’ suffering. The familiar and uncanny artworks, which are both haunting and comforting to the survivors whose loved ones suffered or died, mediate between the victims and the viewers. Salcedo describes this mediation variously as a dialogue or an encounter, and she refers to each installation as a meeting place.48 Thus, the affective installation space she creates is performative and transitive at the same time by permitting “the life seen in the work to reappear . . . as if the experience of the victims were reaching out . . . as if making a bridge over the space between one person and another.”49 Finally, just as Gerhard Richter elicits grief and compassion in his Baader-Meinhof paintings to counterbalance the terror or horror of the events depicted in them, Salcedo elicits compassion that is combined with terror, in most cases the terror of death, especially of a loved one: “I do not illustrate testimonies. Rather, in the testimonies I work with, I look for this simultaneous appearance of terror and compassion.”50 To see more concretely how Salcedo elicits compassion for the people whose endured suffering is enacted in her art through the

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use of a set of aesthetic strategies, consider Atrabiliarios (figures 4.2 and 4.3). Salcedo works with shoes (mostly) belonging to victims buried in mass graves in Colombia who were identified, if at all, mainly through their shoes.51 The mostly female (only one male) black, white, brown, and ivory shoes are exhibited, singularly or in pairs, inside as many as forty small niches cut into the walls of the exhibition space, with varying distances of one to two feet between them. Each shoe-filled niche is covered over with opaque animal fiber made from cow bladder that is sewn to the wall with black surgical thread, placing the shoes behind a skin-like shroud, blurring them like the memories of the people to whom they belonged,

FIGURE 4.2

Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios (1992–2004). (Shoes, animal fiber, and surgical thread; dimensions variable; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein, Patricia and Raoul Kennedy, Elaine McKeon, Lisa and John Miller, Chara Schreyer and Gordon Freund, and Robin Wright; © Doris Salcedo. Reproduced courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photos: Ben Blackwell)

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FIGURE 4.3

Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios (1992–2004) (detail).

yet also burying them in a more respectful way than the victims themselves were. Contrary to the blur in Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings, Salcedo’s blurring of the shoes is, in Princenthal’s words, “a form not of expressive discretion but rather of brutal candour.”52 In Salcedo’s words, each shoe is impregnated with the presence of a missing person, each a reminder of her absence, each inscribed with the suffering or loss endured by those who survived.53 She transposes all these experiences of suffering or loss to a real space through their enactment in the chosen materials and the objects, combined with the artistic process to which they are subjected. The experiences are present not just in the sculptural objects but in the affective space created by the way they are installed (Bal’s fourth strategy, installation): “it was vital to construct the work in spatial terms, to act as a meeting point for those who had lived through such ordeals.”54 This affective space is marked by silence that echoes the silence of the suffering of the disappeared victims (desaparecidos), of their loved ones, and of others who witnessed the violence. The experiences of the disappeared are now visible in the shoes

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comprising Atrabiliarios, and the act of their being silenced is enacted in the silence of the shoes entombed in the walls of the gallery or museum.55 The whole artistic process culminating in the series of installations jointly called Atrabiliarios is thus highly expressive of the Colombian victims’ endured suffering. In Bal’s judgment, “The worn shoes embedded in niches in gallery walls are among the most gripping traces of human presence. They have been worn and worn out, have taken the shape of the individual foot, and supported those walking the earth in search of life.”56 Yet Salcedo (along with some of her commentators) distances herself from the aesthetic concept of expression, following anti-aesthetic theorists who think it is inextricably tied to the autonomy and subjectivity of the artist. However, Salcedo’s not expressing herself through her art—except, of course, in her role as the secondary witness conversing with the victims of violence—does not mean her art is not expressive. In fact, if it were not expressive in the sense of enacting endured suffering, it could never be successful in eliciting the intended affects, on her own terms. “I displace my own ‘self’ and try to encounter the experience of the direct victims of violence in Colombia. I try to engage in a dialogue with these victims which will allow me to establish a connection with the affective dimension of their experience of pain.”57 So here, again, Salcedo distances herself from only one version of an aesthetic concept—subjective expression—while she embraces another version—one tied to the objective expression of violence experienced by other people. We again see that recalibrated aesthetic concepts and strategies are needed to explain Salcedo’s art. Another example illustrating how inadequate the anti-aesthetic language is in the case of Salcedo’s art is her own occasional appeal to the language of the Other, inspired by Emmanuel Levinas.58 She imagines herself encountering and giving voice to the Other (e.g., Colombian victims of violence or European immigrants) in “the field of sculpture.”59 In doing so, however, she sometimes mentions the impossibility of being successful in such an encounter because of the “delay”:60 “the Other needs me urgently, but I arrive late. I always work on the premise of the delay in arrival, which marks my work with a lack of hope. It is not a question of the impossibility or immen-

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sity of the task but of my being incapable of acting effectively. I am disabled.”61 This is strong language, and, if it describes Salcedo’s end point, what she can possibly accomplish in her art, it implicates her in the anti-aesthetic tendency toward iconoclasm by pointing to a disability, which, though attributed to her instead of her work, seems to have the same implication—that she cannot possibly succeed in creating any dialogue about the Other’s suffering. However, this language—emphasizing disability, difficulty, deficiency, and the like—should be seen for what it is: useful only for describing the predicament of the Other’s suffering Salcedo starts from, not for explaining her artistic process or its effects: “I would say that the only way in which I confront memory in my work is to begin with the failure of memory.”62 Her work starts from the failure of memory because it is so precarious, hovering as it does “between the figure of the one who has died and the life disfigured by death.”63 She fittingly acknowledges that the memory of violence is difficult to sustain: “One struggles between the necessity of being faithful to the memory of the other, to keep that loved one alive within us, and with the necessity of overcoming that impossible mourning with forgetting.”64 And she also acknowledges that what needs to be remembered is accessible only through the silent traces of violent suffering inscribed into the lives of the survivors and, in turn, enacted (embedded, rubbed, sewn, inscribed, etc.) in the objects comprising her art. Yet, when Salcedo points to her “being incapable of acting effectively,” she (like Sontag earlier) is talking about her predicament as a person once her artwork has been completed by the audience. So the efficacy or power in question here concerns her not as an artist, but as a member of the public affected by the experiences of the Other’s endured suffering enacted in her work, despite the precariousness of memory. In short, none of Salcedo’s acknowledgments about the difficulty of doing her art add up to a disability or failure of art—on the contrary. These last few points are central to the argument I am making throughout this book, so let me approach them in yet another way. Salcedo directly witnesses the endurance of the Other’s suffering (her Colombian compatriots and others), though she only indirectly witnesses the causes of the suffering; that is, she witnesses the traces of

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endured suffering in the Other’s words, silence, and everyday objects. In turn, her artworks enact this witnessing by seeming to be wounded, bandaged, broken, and so on, enabling viewers to witness the enactment of those traces in her art. To appreciate the enactment of the witnessing of endured suffering, first picture furniture in a private home witnessing not only the dead Other in Colombia (sometimes killed in their homes), but also the mourning of people (a second type of Other) still living and enduring great suffering because of their loss. Now picture the same furniture in a public setting such as an art museum or gallery where, by enacting the endurance of such loss, it bears witness to the Other’s suffering that it silently witnessed so that we can experience the suffering affectively (e.g., in the installation La Casa Viuda [1992–1995]) (figure 4.4). What is very poignant about the furniture in this new context is its silence that, as we have seen, is meant to echo the silence of the Other who has been disappeared. In Bennett’s words, Salcedo reworks “familiar objects in ways that evoke the losses that households have borne and the silences that descend in the spaces inhabited by the bereaved.”65 At the same time, however, this silence (its echoing) is a way for Salcedo, qua witness/artist, to give voice to the Other whose endured suffering has become enacted in the everyday objects transformed into art. Or, as Daniel Birnbaum observes in writing about Salcedo’s installation Untitled (1989–1990), comprising seven stacks of folded white shirts impaled on steel rods, “the white shirts make no noise and abstain from all exaggerated gestures. They combine pain with an almost unbearable muteness, speak of incomprehensible suffering, yet remain silent.”66 Admittedly, this entire process of witnessing the Other’s suffering enacted in Salcedo’s art is as fragile as it is urgent, from start to finish. To do justice to the urgency, however, the fragility should not be mistaken for a deficiency. If we make this mistake, we can never explain how Salcedo’s installations succeed because deficiency implies impossibility. If we acknowledge that they succeed, we have to explain the success, which means we cannot rely on the anti-aesthetic discourse because it is predicated on notions of art’s ontological disabilities. A key concept tied to Levinas’s notion of the Other is “delay,” mentioned earlier, but it may hinder our understanding of Salce-

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FIGURE 4.4

Doris Salcedo, La Casa Viuda I (The Widowed House I, 1992–1995). (© Doris Salcedo. Reproduced courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York)

do’s art, even though she sometimes appeals to it. In the end, her interpretation of delay leads to a conclusion quite different from what anti-aesthetic theorists imagine. Whereas they see delay pointing only to art’s ontological limits, Salcedo sees it as an indication of art’s power, albeit within certain limits. Her interpretation of delay is best conveyed through a Jorge Luis Borges story, “The Secret Miracle,” which Salcedo references and retells on several occasions.67 In 1939, a Czech Jew in Prague about to be executed by the Nazis asks God for a final wish, which is that he be allowed to finish writing his verse drama The Enemies. His wish is granted just as the execution is about to be carried out, even after the order to shoot him has already been given and just before a quartet of bullets complete their fatal trajectories toward him. The execution is suspended in time, and he then works for a year to complete his drama. When he finishes, and likely even before the ink he used has had a chance to dry, the bullets that will execute him arrive at their target. He dies. Yet art (writing) gave the man the power, which he otherwise would not have had, to delay his death for an appreciable length of time, though it did not prevent his execution in the long run. And his work survived when he did not, providing a permanent reminder of his existence and sustaining the injustice of his death.68 By contrast, the concept of delay is often invoked by antiaesthetic theorists to argue that an artist always arrives too late to help any victim of violence, where “help” means to stop the suffering while it is under way. But Salcedo’s point, as I understand it, is not merely that the artist does not stop the suffering, just as writing a play did not stop the man’s execution. Rather, against the metaphysical point that suffering is part of the human condition and, as such, cannot be eradicated by art, neither in this case nor in general, she believes that art can delay death so that we might apprehend, recognize, and understand it. The purpose of the delay here is possible understanding of the unjust death of a particular Jew, but it does not replace action; rather, it is understanding made possible by art that conveys and sustains the demand for action, starting with the recognition of the injustice of his death. It is impossible to deny the metaphysical point about suffering as part of the human condition, so we need to clarify how it affects

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the artist’s predicament. Instead of imagining a photographer who is present while violence is being perpetrated but who chooses to take pictures instead of intervening to stop the violence, imagine a photographer who arrives on a scene just after violence has ended and becomes important as a witness, perhaps the only one. Photographers may very well be in the first type of predicament, which raises aesthetic-moral issues of responsibility.69 But although generally arriving late on the scene, photographers (and other artists) are more like detectives who arrive after an apparent crime has been committed and then reconstruct what happened, often with the help of eyewitnesses, in order to determine who is responsible for the apparent crime. Being late in this sense is simply a function of being a detective rather than, by contrast, a police officer. Whereas the officer may feel inadequate because he is late, the detective’s role commences only after the fact of a possible crime has been established, and, at that moment, he is not late in the negative sense. Salcedo, qua artist, is a detective rather than a police officer, and she is not deficient in this one role simply by virtue of not having any other. Moreover, she does not succeed despite the human condition of suffering or the more historical forms of resistance to our condition that she may encounter. On the contrary, she succeeds only because of how she responds to the resistance she meets on both metaphysical and historical levels. More concretely, just as the detective typically has only clues to work with, which may suggest that he faces an impossible task, Salcedo has only traces of human suffering at hand, which has led some to argue that she will necessarily fail to express that suffering in full or at all. But the traces, like the clues, are called leads precisely because they may lead the detective or artist to the criminal or suffering. These leads do not guarantee success, of course, but nor are they symptoms of failure. Rather, they suggest that we need to reframe the anti-aesthetic rhetoric of necessary failure by recognizing that the leads, alleged signs of deficiency, are actually signs of potential power. The general philosophical point here is that it is crucial not to conceive of art as being deficient. Instead, we have to identify the conditions that point to the possibility of art’s success rather than focus on a mistaken ontological deficiency that would entail the impossibility of success.

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Of course, we cannot overlook the limits of art, starting with the acknowledgment that art cannot radically alter the human condition, if by that is meant the eradication of suffering (or the prevention of the Czech’s execution). But art does have the moral-political power to critique the reasons for our suffering. Friedrich Nietzsche argues in a related vein that humans can endure suffering, but we cannot endure the realization that there is often no (good) reason or purpose behind it. He claims that we use religion and morality to blame ourselves for our suffering, starting with the ideas of original sin or free will, to imagine both a cause and a purpose for our suffering: we cause our own suffering and then redeem ourselves by enduring it. However, there are other kinds of reasons for human suffering, and some of those reasons can be apprehended and satisfied (though some cannot be apprehended, and some can be apprehended, but never satisfied). One type of reason open to apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction through art is moral-political when, in Elizabeth V. Spelman’s words, the suffering is “more immediately traceable to the intentions of our fellow humans to harm us.”70 That is, there are moral-political reasons for some human suffering, and this kind is what Salcedo targets, on the belief that one of art’s key roles—and a main source of its moral-political power—is the critique of the suffering that is amenable because of its human causes to both apprehension and recognition and satisfaction. The aim here is to recognize the causes of this kind of suffering, not to give purpose to suffering (as any notion of the redemption of suffering would suggest, whether that takes place through religion, morality, or art). In short, the moral-political critique of suffering through aesthetic strategies is the task that Salcedo has adopted (or, as she would put it, that has adopted her). Now, even if Salcedo focuses on the particular political and historical dimensions of suffering rather than on the universal metaphysical human condition, she still has to recognize the difficulties she faces as an artist tarrying with the suffering of the Other. And she does. In fact, reflection on these difficulties informs her artistic process and the choice of aesthetic strategies she utilizes. For example, she understands that people are repulsed by suffering even while they are drawn to representations of it. Just as Astrid Proll talks

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about being able to approach photographs of the Baader-Meinhof deaths only after having the opportunity to experience Richter’s blurred paintings of them, Salcedo talks about “approaching the Other” and creates artworks that at first do not seem to be about suffering, as if they were keeping the suffering at bay.71 For example, discussing the three sculptures comprising the series Unland (e.g., Unland: irreversible witness [figure 4.5]) another set of installations involving furniture, Bal describes this general dynamic very well: “These are works where, on the one hand, the fragility of the surfaces is daunting [because of the presence of lace, hair, and other fragile material in the furniture] so that one barely dares to approach; on the other hand, they are hardly visible as art [because

FIGURE 4.5

Doris Salcedo, Unland: irreversible witness (1995–1998). (Wood, cloth, metal, and hair; 44 in. × 98 in. × 35 in. (111.76 cm × 248.92 cm × 88.9 cm); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase through the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Fund and the Accessions Committee Fund; © Doris Salcedo. Reproduced courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo: Ben Blackwell)

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they are easily taken for furniture, even if damaged], and one feels beckoned to take a closer look.”72 That is, Salcedo realizes the need to give people time to approach her work, akin to approaching something that seems frightening, until they feel more at ease. Only then does the artwork begin to reveal some of its more uncanny dimensions, at which point the enacted suffering begins to be apprehended, not just seen; affectively experienced, not just cognitively observed. In the end, Salcedo’s art, like the Other, has to be approached gently and slowly, but it can be approached because of its aesthetics, in the same way that Sontag describes how a photograph allows us to approach reality after first distancing us from it through aesthetic semblance. The distance between the viewer and the artwork, like the distance between one person and the Other, are bridged aesthetically over time, if only for some time. Salcedo’s art “sustains the possibility of an encounter between people who come from quite distinct realities.”73 So we need no longer accept the strong antiaesthetic judgment that, when encountering the Other, artists can never succeed. However, as if conceding to the theorists who still insist that suffering cannot be expressed and that the Other cannot be approached, Salcedo sometimes speaks as if her work were hopelessly aiming to express the “inexpressible,” the “uncanny,” or something else that seems to be out of the range of human representation (enactment).74 Similarly, Tucker argues, “Salcedo’s work gives visible and concrete form to the inexpressible effects of error, pain, and destruction.”75 These comments seem to revive the anti-aesthetic language of impossibility and deficiency. Yet, what could it possibly mean for art to express the inexpressible or, as others might say, represent the unrepresentable or present the unpresentable? Ranciere takes up the question of whether some things are unrepresentable in or by art and argues that the unrepresentable has two distinct meanings, which seem to converge in the end.76 The first meaning is that a “thing” (entity, event, or situation) cannot be artistically represented because art cannot do justice to the thing’s essential nature; it is thus something we experience affectively but cannot fathom cognitively. Traditionally, God is one such thing; in contemporary times, the sublime or the uncanny are the concepts typically used to invoke the

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unrepresentable. The second meaning of the unrepresentable concerns the means of artistic representation available to artists and has three manifestations: 1. There is a surplus of presence in any artwork that attempts to represent a special thing that by its nature is indeterminate, which means that the thing’s singular essence gets mired in superfluous determinate sensations and thus is never represented adequately. 2. A correlative of this surplus is the status of unreality that, as an attribute of any artwork, has the effect of making the special thing seem less real, even unreal. 3. The combination of surplus presence and unreality renders the special thing an object of aesthetic pleasure, which is clearly incompatible with the thing’s gravity.

In each case, the artistic means are inadequate to the essential natures of things, which therefore fall outside “the competence of art.”77 Combining the two meanings of the unrepresentatble, art fails either because of the nature of the thing being represented or because of the inadequacy of the available artistic means of representation. Both meanings attribute a fundamental deficiency to art for its failure to represent certain things—such as God, the sublime, the uncanny, and so on. In turn, both are linked to iconoclasm if, as Adorno argues, the claim that art cannot represent certain things is problematically combined in modernity with the claim that we should not (even try to) represent them.78 The relevance of Ranciere’s discussion to Salcedo’s art is that it clarifies why we cannot use the concept of the unrepresentable— inexpressible or unpresentable—to explain the success of her art because the whole point of invoking this concept is to establish art’s lack of success, in principle. It seems that the reason theorists nonetheless persist in their appeals to the unrepresentable is that Salcedo’s art is marked by a dynamic of absence and presence which that concept is thought to illuminate. But there is a better way to clarify this dynamic without the concept of the unrepresentable. According to the anti-aesthetic stance, absent suffering can never be

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rendered present or expressed in art, and, moreover, its apparent presence in art is only confirmation of its absence and inexpressibility; that is, suffering is not only absent and thus unpresented, it is in principle unpresentable (or unrepresentable). By contrast, the absence/presence dynamic in Salcedo’s art defies the concept of the unpresentable. No doubt, there is a sense of absence in her work because it concerns the suffering of individuals who, whether they are still alive or not, are not directly presented or even indirectly represented anywhere in her work. For example, the Atrabiliarios series does not contain pictures or names of any of the owners of the shoes included in the installation. Yet those unidentified shoe owners, qua victims, are enacted in her art because the endurance of their suffering is enacted in it, just as the endurance of the victims is enacted in the 1,550 empty chairs filling 142 square meters of an otherwise empty lot (Yemeniciler Caddesi No. 66) between two four-story apartment buildings in an old Greek neighborhood in Istanbul: “If I manage to make a good piece that circulates in the center of society, then their pain will enter into the core of this society. The victims will become the main protagonists.”79 One can experience the presence of the victims affectively despite their absence because one can experience the presence of their suffering affectively through the endurance of it enacted in Salcedo’s art. If such suffering were truly unpresentable and thus could not be present, in principle, we would neither be able to experience the present suffering in its absence, nor have any reason to believe that there were any absent suffering. In short, without presence, there would be no absence either. If that were the case, Salcedo’s art could not possibly get off the ground, let alone succeed. Now, anti-aesthetic theorists might respond that there are two other, weaker meanings of the unpresentable (included within Ranciere’s analysis, previously discussed), but they also do not enable us to understand or explain Salcedo’s art. First, if the unpresentable means only that suffering cannot be fully presented because there is always an excess or a surplus of suffering beyond what is enacted in art, Salcedo would certainly agree. Yet, she does not need to claim that all of a victim’s suffering is fully present in one of her installations. She need only enact the depth of the Other’s suffering so that

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it can be experienced and apprehended by her viewers. To succeed in enacting (presenting) this depth, Salcedo concentrates on capturing people’s endurance of it. Suffering is present (spatially/temporally) through the affects or traces it leaves in works of art that are, in turn, endured by those who experience them (temporally/spatially). For example, in the installation Noviembre 6 y 7 (2002), one of Salcedo’s few projects in Colombia, she lowered 280 empty chairs by rope from the roof and down the sides of the newly built Palace of Justice in Bogotá (see the illustration on the cover of this book). The installation lasted fifty-three hours, marking the time in 1985 when thirty-five M-19 (April 19 Movement) terrorists occupied the original palace before it was destroyed by fire, killing more than a hundred people, including most of the judges. The enacted temporality of the installation is what allowed the emptiness of the chairs to fill the space around the Palace with suffering and to arouse people’s memories of it. In short, Salcedo’s artistic focus is on how the endurance of absent suffering makes its presence felt spatially, objectively, and publicly over time, for that presence is, in turn, what is enacted in her sculptures and experienced affectively by those who view them. Second, if the unpresentable means that the suffering is not redeemed, reconciled, or relieved merely by being presented in art, Salcedo would agree again. In fact, the whole point of her installation is to enact the suffering (i.e., make it present) so that it can be felt and remembered, not to make it go away. As Gregg Horowitz might express it, Salcedo is trying to sustain loss, not to overcome it.80 For example, the public is reminded of the suffering experienced in the original Palace of Justice, but that suffering is not resolved or diminished once the chairs are present or even after they are taken away. On the contrary, the suffering is enlivened with people’s memories of it being stirred up seventeen years after the tragic event took place, creating an effect not unlike the one created by Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings twelve years after the Stammheim prison events enacted in them. In Cameron’s words, the uniqueness of Salcedo “resides in the directness with which her work addresses the unresolved nature of public tragedy.”81 Reviving memory of suffering means reviving suffering, and helping people to apprehend

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that suffering is itself painful. Even if Salcedo hopes that the apprehension of suffering will contribute to its relief, she fully realizes that apprehension and relief (satisfaction) are two different steps. Nevertheless, there is a certain relief in apprehending the dignity of the victims by restoring memories of their suffering. “Art can restore the dignity which has been ripped away from the victims at the time of their violent death.”82 Thus, there seems to be no content to the concept of the unrepresentable that is relevant to the explanation of how Salcedo’s art can possibly succeed. There is, I believe, a serious confusion in much of the talk about the inexpressible (unrepresentable or unpresentable) in connection with contemporary art. The confusion, which we have encountered in earlier chapters, is between (1) the limits of art’s capacity as enactment that allegedly prevent it from enacting certain difficult “things” and (2) the limits of art once it has successfully enacted difficult “things,” such as the Other’s suffering. For example, the critical claim made about Salcedo’s art is generally not that she can never enact the suffering of Colombian victims or European immigrants, for she has repeatedly enacted the endurance of such suffering in her art and thereby enabled people to experience its presence affectively. As it turns out, the international reception of her work over the last fifteen years provides ample evidence to be confident that people who experience her installations affectively, especially her earlier work, are indeed able to apprehend the suffering enacted in them and, in turn, to demand that it be satisfied. So the limits invoked in (1) seem largely irrelevant here. However, while appreciating Salcedo’s success, we also have to respect the limits of her art because, qua artist, she cannot save anybody’s life.83 Such “saving” is a demand that art can make on us, but it is not any artist’s responsibility to satisfy that demand. In a similar vein, Salcedo rightfully insists, “art can keep ideas alive, ideas that can influence directly our everyday lives, our daily experience.”84 More than ideas, Salcedo’s art sustains the memories of the suffering that victims of Colombian violence and European immigration have long endured. Granted, shared suffering is not reduced suffering. But that point does not diminish Salcedo’s work; rather, it refers only to the limits

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of her art even when it is successful, that is, to the limits of its success qua art. Moreover, if she achieves the apprehension of suffering and it is accompanied by the moral-political demand for recognition and satisfaction of suffering, she has succeeded as an artist. The rest is up to us. We are the links among art, ethics, and politics. For some theorists, however, the acknowledgment of art’s limits can sometimes have the effect of confining art to an idealist (ideological, utopian, or Romantic) status as if it were autonomous from society, as if in Salcedo’s case the enactment of endured suffering in her art could not possibly have any effect on the relief of suffering in the “real” world outside or beyond the art world. On the contrary, I think this acknowledgment prevents art from being conceived idealistically because, traditionally, when art asserts its autonomy in this sense, it simultaneously imagines itself having redemptive powers without actually engaging society. Clearly, art must engage politics at least indirectly if it is to have any power in society, which is possible only if we recognize that art is not autonomous in the sense of being independent from politics, as we saw earlier. The different social practices of art and politics are not independent of one another, so politics can indeed pick up where art (with the dual demands of apprehension and recognition/satisfaction) leaves off. One of the major strengths of Salcedo’s art is that she is clearly aware of these points and believes that the acknowledgment of art’s limits enables her to realize its power to engage ethics as well as politics.

SAL CEDO’ S AESTHETI CS, ETHI CS, AND P O L I T I C S

As was the case with Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings and War Cut, Salcedo’s art enacts two demands: the apprehension of suffering, which is moral, and the recognition/satisfaction of suffering, which is political. As Bal says, “[Salcedo] reconstitutes monuments as social spaces where intimacy and politics meet: where the ruptured intimacy of others, affectively experienced, cries out for moral-political action.”85 Also as in Richter’s case, the aesthetic strategies Salcedo

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selects make it possible for her to create art that enacts these two demands. Moreover, the strategies are the key not only to her art’s moral-political success but also to its artistic success, for it is successful as art only if it succeeds in being moral-political. That is, any art enacting suffering caused by violence, terrorism, or war is justifiable in aesthetic terms only if it is morally-politically effective, only if apprehension is indeed accompanied by the demand for recognition/satisfaction. So the question about the moral-political efficacy of Salcedo’s art has at the same time serious implications for the aesthetic judgment of it. Huyssen indirectly suggests a measure for assessing moralpolitical art, which complements Bal’s account of Salcedo’s aesthetic strategies: “If the work is successful in capturing the attentiveness of the beholder [by engaging the imagination of the viewer through the language of artistic materials, the suggestiveness of markings, the uses of space and its configuration, etc.], if it suggests meaning, yet refuses easy consumption, if it yields pleasure in its aesthetic configuration without denying cognitive gain, then it does its job.”86 Salcedo’s art generally meets these criteria, so she succeeds in creating effective moral-political art by critically engaging viewers affectively and cognitively through her aesthetic strategies. To make Huyssen’s measure sharper and more moral-political, however, we need to add that the goal of attentiveness in Salcedo’s art is not merely Michael Fried’s idea of absorption in aesthetic pleasure, even if his absorption has cognitive import as well.87 The aim of Salcedo’s art is rather to engage viewers in an affective experience that in turn stimulates critical reflection about the moral-political demands enacted in it. For example, as Borchardt-Hume argues, Shibboleth “opens a critical space for engagement” with difficult issues, specifically (1) the hate and violence associated with European immigration and (2) the role and culpability of artists and cultural institutions in immigration problems. To make such engagement possible, Salcedo (also) has to turn the moral-political demands placed on art into demands issued by it. By turning the demands outward, she implicates her viewers in the responsibility for these demands. We, too, bear responsibility for these moral (apprehension) and political (recognition/satisfaction) demands.

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Now, what is the role of compassion when art is issuing demands? Compassion emerges in the silent spaces of Salcedo’s installations, as we saw earlier, if and when, in her words, the silence of the absent victims activates the silence resounding within “each human being that gazes upon the sculptures” or installations, if and when the viewers’ “spirit” includes the capacity to sympathize with victims they do now know.88 What creates the possibility of compassion here is what Bennett calls the affective spaces that Salcedo constructs with her art, that is, “spaces in which loss is evoked as an embodied [enacted] experience.”89 However, although Salcedo herself speaks as if she first shares the victim’s suffering and then enacts the shared suffering in her artworks so that viewers are in turn able to engage in dialogue or to commune with it, Bennett believes this account makes it seem that an essentially private experience of suffering is brought into a public space to be shared by others. She proposes instead that the affective encounter Salcedo constructs be extracted from any model of “emotional identification” (between the artist and the victims, between the viewers and the victims) because that model assumes that suffering is merely private and cannot be shared, even when it is witnessed in public. In Salcedo’s own words, “The experience [of suffering] had to be taken to a collective space, away from the anonymity of private experience.”90 Although suffering can be shared only when it is public, it first becomes public through the objective traces of the endurance of suffering left in people’s lives, traces embedded in the objects the victims left behind or in the places they inhabited. These traces—enacted in Salcedo’s art—mediate between those who experience suffering in life and those who witness it affectively through art. Enactment, in Deweyan language again, is what makes this mediation possible because it provides an affective space for suffering to be experienced publicly. Compassion qua affect is the effect of this mediation, as it was in Richter’s case. At the same time, once compassion is achieved publicly through art, it becomes an active component that helps to turn the moral-political demands made on art into demands made by art. Bennett’s subtle account of the compassion Salcedo’s work elicits also helps to clarify the aesthetic conditions of its moral-political success. Bennett takes extra precautions to avoid the privatization

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of suffering, which, in turn, allows her to avoid the problems of the inexpressibility of suffering (because merely private suffering is indeed inexpressible) and the subjectivization of compassion.91 What Salcedo’s art achieves, by Bennett’s account and as we saw earlier, is not the sharing of suffering so much as the witnessing of the enactment of people’s endurance of suffering that leads to the affective apprehension of it. This witnessing requires not preexisting compassion between private individuals (whether the victims and Salcedo or, later, the artist and the viewers), but public enactment of the traces of the endured suffering in objects (tables, chairs, beds, and the like) that generate compassion. So the mode of compassion here is an affect that exists and persists only as a result of the enactment of the endurance of suffering. As we have seen, Salcedo’s timeconsuming artistic process enacts the endurance of suffering until traces of it are sufficiently enacted in the art to make the endurance itself objective. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry similarly describes how Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers focuses on the duration of suffering that a woman suffered, making the film “a sustained attempt to lift the interior facts of bodily sentience out of the inarticulate pre-language of ‘cries and whispers’ into the realm of shared objectification.”92 The focus on endured suffering is crucial here for the additional reason that suffering is not readily apprehended in single or brief affective experiences because, as Scarry emphasizes, the experience of the Other’s suffering (whether directly or through art) has a built-in physical “aversiveness” that repels people even as they attracted to it, requiring extensive or repeated experience for them to apprehend the suffering. This explains why Salcedo does not present us with suffering in a direct way that would only exacerbate this aversiveness. Rather, just as suffering is endured over time, the experience of her art takes time—time for us to sort out what it is and what it is about, to allow the suffering slowly to overcome our aversiveness to it. The viewers become witnesses of the endurance of suffering experienced by others that demands apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction. All this takes place over time, making the temporality of our affective experience of Salcedo’s art as vital as its spatiality. In discussing Salcedo’s third aesthetic strategy (duration), Bal says, “looking

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at the sculptures requires surrender: not to the shape of grief but to its temporality.”93 The installation space shaped by Salcedo’s art is thus the spatial enactment of the temporal endurance of the suffering experienced by the victims. For example, Unland: the orphan’s tunic enacts the endurance of a six-year-old Colombian girl who witnessed the murder of her parents (figure 4.6). Salcedo met with the girl several times, and each time the girl was wearing a dress her mother had given her. Salcedo then embedded a similar dress into a piece of furniture as the enactment of the girl’s endurance of her suffering: “My task is to transform these traces into relics that enable us to acknowledge other people’s experiences as our own, as collective experiences.”94 The girl’s suffering is successfully enacted in art only when her endurance is publicly experienced by viewers through the temporality and spatiality of Salcedo’s installations.

FIGURE 4.6

Doris Salcedo, Unland: the orphan’s tunic (1997). (Contemporary Art Collection Fundación “la Caixa,” Barcelona. © Doris Salcedo. Reproduced courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo: © Archives Contemporary Art Collection Fundación “la Caixa”)

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When viewers experience this endurance, the affective experience of compassion that ensues is not private or subjective, but, like the enactment of the endurance they witness, public and objective. Again, publicity is a prime condition of Salcedo’s art, just as it was in Sontag’s account of the moral-political power of art. In turn, the publicity condition is critical to the ethics and politics of Salcedo’s art because the viewers’ compassion for the endured suffering of other individuals is what makes her art moral-political. In Cameron’s words, she bridges the gap between “the private workings of grief and the public spectacle of politics.”95 Once viewers experience publicly and apprehend the Other’s suffering that has been enacted in Salcedo’s art, they cannot help but demand that it be ameliorated. Although the experience that leads up to this demand is affective, the demand itself is not only moral on the level of the apprehension of suffering, but also political because it takes political action, not more art, to carry out the relief of the suffering apprehended and enacted in art. That is, apprehension becomes political if, to start with, it is shared by the community of viewers who witness Salcedo’s art and if they also demand the relief of suffering they collectively apprehend. However, it is important, in my effort to respond effectively to the anti-aesthetic stance, to stress again that the moral-political demands associated with Salcedo’s installations are made not on art, but rather by art. Just as Scarry argues, as if following Dewey, that there is an integral connection between enacting (expressing) and satisfying (eliminating) suffering such that the enactment is a demand, by art, for its recognition and satisfaction, Bennett similarly describes art that enacts suffering on an affective level as commanding a response from viewers: “Pain conceived of as a call for acknowledgement [apprehension] implies that a response is compelled.”96 The point here, however, is not merely that enactment elicits apprehension that, in turn, compels satisfaction, though that is the ideal normative sequence. According to Scarry, we need to back up a little to see that this norm is itself rooted in the physiology, phenomenology, and sociality of suffering. The desire to satisfy (alleviate) suffering is part of our attempt to endure it that, in turn, drives our search to find a way to enact it, and art is one such way (language is another way).97 All this is rooted in the physical nature of suffer-

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ing, ironically in its aversiveness. Scarry continues: “Pain is a pure physical experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering of ‘against,’ of something being against one, and of something one must be against.”98 As negation, suffering is experienced as an “absence of adequate adjustment” with our surroundings, and the apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction comprising the enactment of suffering are rooted in suffering as something that “cannot be felt without being wished unfelt.”99 Of course, this still does not guarantee that suffering will be enacted or that, if enacted, it will be apprehended or that, if apprehended, it will be satisfied. As we have seen, the enactment of suffering in art may be a “necessary prelude to the collective task of eliminating pain,” but it is not sufficient.100 Viewers may fail to satisfy suffering once they have apprehended it because, as much as we resist suffering as negation, we also resist its enactment (hence the force of the idea of secondary suffering discussed earlier). But then, according to Scarry, the failure of satisfaction should be understood as a new form of suffering’s inherent aversiveness, what she calls the social equivalent of suffering’s (or pain’s) physical aversiveness.101 We resist suffering at all levels: when it is endured, enacted, apprehended, recognized, and even at the level where it might be satisfied. The aversiveness to suffering is now a combined physical and social resistance that both drives and blocks, enables and undermines, the apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction of suffering. Although we still have no guarantees that the satisfaction of suffering will even be attempted, let alone achieved, we do have a normative basis for judging people who experience the enactment of suffering in art (the viewers) but fail to apprehend, recognize, or satisfy it. When the expected mode of response does not materialize from their experience of such enactments, the demands of apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction are now squarely and rightly placed on viewers. If the demands are not met, the failure rests on the shoulders of the viewers, not on those of the artists who have provided the enactment. In the end, it bears repeating that only the viewers can complete the moral-political demands of art as enactment. Salcedo’s art is a key partner in the articulation of this normative account of suffering because embedded in the experience of suffering

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is, in Scarry’s words, a combination of “the sorrow that it is so” and “the wish that it were otherwise”: art enacts this wish by being directed “against the isolating [physical and social] aversiveness of pain,” that is, by rendering suffering objective and public.102 In short, art is necessary for the enactment of suffering, and such enactment is inseparable from the physical and social nature of suffering, all stemming from its dual aversiveness. Salcedo seems to accept such an account of her art when she says that she assumes responsibility toward the bereaved whose suffering is enacted in her work. “I feel as though they [the victims] are inscribed in me. Therefore I assume responsibility toward the bereaved.”103 This responsibility is not a private matter, for, as she adds, “Without responsibility an idea of community is also impossible.”104 That is, the enactment of suffering that she envisions is complete only if viewers also accept this responsibility. So in the end, her art has moral-political power only when viewers accept this responsibility. Once again, the viewers are necessary to complete Salcedo’s art, as she has always imagined. This time, the viewers’ role is to complete the bridges between art, ethics, and politics. Again, we are the links among art, ethics, and politics.

BAL ANCIN G PARTI CU LARI TY AN D U N I V E R SA L I T Y

The moral-political power of Salcedo’s art that enacts suffering is clearly dependent on her aesthetic strategies and the affective experiences those strategies create in and for the public, given the physical and social aversiveness of suffering. Although Salcedo is successful to a large extent, I think there is possibly a serious limit to the moral-political power of her art because she clearly starts from the particular suffering endured by individuals, but she sometimes seems to aspire to enact universal suffering that, in principle, cannot be experienced affectively by anybody and also cannot be enacted artistically. If she insists on universal suffering that cannot be experienced or enacted, her art can only fail (or, at best, it can enact the inexpressibility of suffering, as many anti-aesthetic theorists already argue). To avoid this conclusion for reasons discussed earlier,

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I would like to analyze Salcedo’s appeals to universals. The goal here is to recalibrate the relationship between particularity and universality. Take the following examples from Salcedo’s work: the 1988 massacres at La Honduras and La Negra banana plantations in Colombia are enacted in Untitled (1989–1990); the plight of the disappeared in Colombia are enacted in Atrabiliarios; and Unland: the orphan’s tunic is the enactment of the endured suffering Salcedo witnessed during her meetings with a six-year-old girl whose parents were killed in front of her. All these artworks concern particular events and particular experiences of suffering. Yet sometimes Salcedo seems dissatisfied with the particularity of this suffering and prefers instead to speak about universal suffering: “I am calling on the memory of pain which all human beings have, here or anywhere in the world.”105 And “violence is present in the whole world and in all of us. As a result, I am interested in questioning the elements of violence endemic in human nature. Cruelty, indolence, and hatred toward others are universal.”106 Now, besides the unfortunate, but uninformative, point that human suffering is everywhere humans live, there seem to be at least two other reasons Salcedo invokes the universality of suffering. First, she does not want people to think the violence at the root of the endured suffering enacted in her early work exists only in Colombia because, she worries, then non-Colombians would care less, if at all, about the violence (not to mention her art). Second, for the endured suffering to be apprehended by others, she needs to find an affective (not merely cognitive) link between the individuals suffering in Colombia and the individuals around the world who experience her art because apprehension is not possible without the affective level of aesthetic experience. Combining these two reasons, the rationale for Salcedo’s appeal to some universal seems to be that if viewers saw the suffering as only a Colombian problem and had no affective experience of endured suffering to which they could possibly connect their encounters with Salcedo’s art, her work could not possibly be effective (or, at best, it would be confined to a cognitive experience: that is, people could learn about the suffering in Colombia in a documentary fashion). But this rationale confuses two points that need

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to be separated if Salcedo’s art is to be successful and if its success is to be explained. 1. The affective level of our aesthetic experience of Salcedo’s art cannot be regarded as simply Colombian or confined to any particular country or culture because in principle there are no national boundaries to human affects. 2. The subject matter of our affective experience of Salcedo’s art can, and indeed must, be particular, for we can experience only particular affects tied to particular events (e.g., those which cause suffering to particular individuals).

To make this second point in terms of suffering, it is true that suffering is universal in the sense that every human suffers at times, but we suffer affectively only in the particular (our experience of suffering is particular, even if the neurobiological basis of suffering is universal). Moreover, we need to be careful here not to mistake Salcedo’s strategy for her goal. She invokes the universal to focus our attention on the particular, with the ultimate goal of looking “for the possibility of making the connection between the one particular and harsh event that takes place in Colombia and the equally cruel and harsh everyday life that takes place elsewhere.”107 So while she recognizes that she starts from particular suffering, she is compelled to find a link to suffering elsewhere so that she is able to convey that particular suffering to her viewers who are elsewhere and who are also capable of experiencing suffering or empathizing with it. But suffering “elsewhere” is not “universal” suffering. Rather, “everywhere” is just the aggregate of particular “somewheres” that helps to link victims with viewers (who may also be victims). The goal here is to elicit compassion that links individuals, which is why Salcedo aims to establish a bridge among people on an affective level: the silence of the victim, the silence of the artist, and the silence of the viewer come together in the silent space of the installation. Although this strategy makes sense and is often successful, Salcedo has to be careful that she does leave the particularity of suffering behind, that is, that she does not turn her bridge into a

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Wittgensteinian ladder that is tossed aside once universality (in the form of the links among people) is presumed to be attained. Her goal, it bears emphasizing, is for people to apprehend particular suffering and to demand recognition/satisfaction for the suffering endured by particular individuals (even when they remain anonymous). I raise this caution about invoking universality because critics often talk about Salcedo’s art in universal terms, sometimes couched in international language, as if a broader context is necessary for her work to have significance. For example, Jessica Bradley writes, “while personal and local experience informs [Salcedo’s work], it draws upon specific lived time and place without prescribing singular meanings.”108 The word informs downplays the historical context of Salcedo’s work to the point that it seems to be merely a distant influence, something more on the order of the height of the mountains around Bogotá where Salcedo has her studio. In short, “inform” is too weak to explain the enactment of suffering that Salcedo has in mind for her art. The critique of “singular meanings” is in turn intended to safeguard Salcedo against an interpretation of her art merely according to Colombian cultural identity because that would wrongly trap her art in a neocolonialist discourse.109 At the same time, however, Bradley’s appeal to “the geographically and culturally expanded international art world” may be only the newest form of colonialism or the new so-called international style.110 The problem is that this new style is nowhere and cannot possibly sustain Salcedo’s art because suffering is always particular even if it is everywhere. In a similarly problematic vein, Edlie L. Wong reports that Salcedo “has begun to argue against the national specificity of her work, [thereby delocalizing] the specificity of her geopolitical references,” and then argues that the “transnational circulation of Salcedo’s work” enhances the dynamics of witnessing that is its strength.111 This is precisely what I am questioning, however, for this dynamic is actually weakened when it is circulated so diffusely, which is part of Salcedo’s earlier concern about creating a mere spectacle. For example, her installation Neither, at the White Cube Gallery in London, which we discussed earlier, may suffer from the problem that

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the cyclone fence could be anywhere, not just in many prisons or detention centers (figure 4.7). In a Foucaultian sense, that kind of fence is ubiquitous because it is also used around schools, gardens, highways, athletic fields, empty lots—the list goes on. To make this point with an art-world example, the same fence is also an architectural trope on the façade of the New Museum in New York City. If viewers are supposed to feel as if they were in a detention camp when they are in the White Cube Gallery experiencing Neither, then might they also feel as if they were in a detention camp when they are in the New Museum? Or, might they not feel as if they were at the New Museum instead of in a detention camp when they are experiencing Neither? In the end, there may be too little particularity to the fence in Neither for the installation to indict “state power” or to challenge critically what Gilroy calls “securitocracy,” that is, any contemporary government willing to put security needs ahead of human rights.112 If that is the case, the touted “sitelessness” of Neither, a consequence of its internationalization as well as its ubiquitous fence, threatens to undermine the criticality of Salcedo’s installation. Ultimately at stake with the issue of the relationship between particularity and universality is the notion of moral-political art and the conditions of its power as a form of critique. Olga M. Viso argues, for instance, that Salcedo’s work reflects a “different type of political art,” one that is not sensational or didactic, but that is still able to respond critically to social realities of our times. Salcedo avoids sensationalism and didacticism by allegedly connecting “with humanity rather than assign[ing] blame.”113 Although I agree with the goal of responding critically to social realities and believe Salcedo generally succeeds on this score, I do not think the appeal to humanity is what accounts for her success. To be sure, there is some sense or degree of universality in her work beyond the universality of human suffering and compassion as a shared human affect. For example, as Birnbaum points out, “The tragic tension between the anonymity of political power and violence, and the vulnerability of the single [anonymous] subject seems to be of a universal nature,” and this anonymity and vulnerability are both well represented in Salcedo’s installations, in which there are no names, no

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FIGURE 4.7

Doris Salcedo, Neither (2004). (© Doris Salcedo. Reproduced courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo: Stephen White)

personal narratives, or the like.114 But she invokes the concept of humanity largely to speak on behalf of the people who are systematically excluded from this seemingly all-inclusive concept: “Shibboleth is an attempt to address the section of humankind that has been left out of the history of modernity.”115 Although the concept of humanity (like democracy) gives the appearance of being allinclusive, Shibboleth cuts through that appearance to reveal the reality of exclusiveness and to expose the fact that the concept’s appearance actually perpetuates such exclusivity and thus has negative political consequences in the real world. Following Judith Butler, we could say that Salcedo’s fear “is that what is named as universal is the parochial property of dominant culture.”116 Salcedo’s art is able to exercise power against the mere appearance of universality by emphasizing the particularity of suffering (and its human causes). Borchardt-Hume makes these points, in effect, in his account of how people (should have) experienced Shibboleth: “To experience the work, visitors have to commit the time it takes to walk its 150-metre length, the concrete void steadily drawing their gaze downwards. Akin to a procession, this walk invites us to look at what we have been conditioned to look away from, and to recognize the limitations of the humanist ideals at the heart of Western art and culture.”117 So to interpret Shibboleth as if it were an appeal to a common humanity allegedly already shared by all Europeans is not only to miss the point, but, worse, to make the opposite of Salcedo’s point—in her name. Now, it may be true that she, too, would like to see the concept of humanity include everybody in Europe as well as people all over the world. But this is simply not the focus of her art, even if it is one of her political ideals. In Borchardt-Hume’s words again, Salcedo’s crack in Tate Modern’s floor draws us toward the abject rather than toward “the heights of the Turbine Hall with their promise of elevation.”118 That is, she takes aim at the empirical reality masked by the normative concept of humanity and at how that norm is systematically used to exclude people, even though conceptually it appears to include everybody. So, critics are right that the normative concept of humanity is in play here, but they need to be more precise about its role—otherwise, the criticality of Salcedo’s art is forfeited.

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Tanya Barson offers an interpretation of Salcedo that is similar to Viso’s by emphasizing the “essence” of suffering over its particularity: “Salcedo’s work draws on complex ideas which link her art to poetry and philosophy. Nevertheless, in each instance her sculptures are physical enactments (i.e., material artifacts) of actual experiences and testimonies. The power of her work is in its ability to convey the essence rather than the particulars of those testimonies to the viewer.”119 But I think the relationship between the universal and particular is the other way around. We experience and know a considerable amount about the particularity of suffering, but we experience nothing and know little about its universality or essence. Moreover, we come to know the universal, if at all, only through the similarities among particulars, which are distinct from essence (though often confused with it). Salcedo expresses these points, in effect, with a much clearer sense of the appropriate balance between the particular and the universal than her critics have articulated (though she speaks of sameness instead of similarity): “It is in the context of tragedy where this [the simultaneous appearance of terror and compassion] takes place. Each victim’s experience is the foundation of the work, because that’s where I encounter something absolutely identical in each person. This sameness is the only thing that can be the content of a work of art. Tragedy makes this purely human aspect manifest itself. For me, art and tragedy are intimately linked.”120 Similarity (rather than sameness) is particular while also being the affective link to the potential cognitive grasp of the universal; once that link has been established, it may allow us to identify some essence, but such identification is the task of philosophy, not of art. Salcedo traffics in particularity in order to engage the moralpolitical demands we have been discussing because they are themselves particular. For example, Bal argues that Atrabiliarios is politically effective because of the aesthetic strategy Salcedo utilizes to handle the particularity (individuality or singularity) of the shoes comprising the installation: “Only through such work that places singularity in a ‘holding environment’ while making its affect accessible elsewhere, can art be effectively political.”121 That is, Salcedo does not try to capture the essence, universality, or even generality

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of shoes because her task is not a cognitive exercise.122 Rather, she particularizes or individualizes the shoes, burying each one, or at most each pair, into its own grave in a gallery or museum wall. This is what Bal aptly describes as the second aesthetic strategy, translation, whereby Salcedo retrieves “the singular from the abstraction of generality,” confirming that her position on the universal/particular or general/singular continuum is definitely on the side of the particular or singular.123 In short, although Salcedo particulars are in critical dialogue with certain universals, her focus remains on the particulars. Moreover, the goal of this dialogue is to establish and sustain a critique of universality (or, here, of the abstraction of generality). Gilroy likewise understands the issue of moral-political art that hangs in the balance in the relationship between particularity and universality when he argues that the biblical origins of the name “Shibboleth” may suggest the timelessness (universality or essence) of our encounter with otherness, “but the installation’s timely execution fixes these problems firmly in our own era” where, he continues, a deadly border similar to Salcedo’s crack in the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall “will soon run through every social space and institution” as governments around the world make fateful decisions about who is inside and who should stay outside.124 That is, while Shibboleth points to a problem that has a general scope, we have access to the problem of immigration only through the particular example of it that is enacted in this specific installation in a single institution. Talk about universals and essences, especially in combination with biblical references, has the effect of making this problem seem more metaphysical than political and, thus, more intransigent than Salcedo believes it really is. The more universal (general) the problem in Salcedo’s art seems (e.g., war or violence in general), the less any political action to address it seems possible, and, in turn, the less political her art can be, because art separated from the possibility of political action (recognition/satisfaction) cannot be political, as Sontag argues.125 In short, Salcedo’s art cannot succeed politically unless its aesthetics are properly calibrated and addressed to the particularity of the political reality that is making demands on her and, through her art, on us.

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Now, it is also true that Salcedo’s installations are temporary, yet the demands they enact are permanent. But each installation, if effective while open to the public, leaves its traces in viewers and thus remains present in its absence and is contemporary beyond the present. However, given the open nature of Salcedo’s art, specifically the fact that each work is completed only by the public that experiences it, only the long-term reception of her art will determine whether she can fully achieve and sustain its criticality. Shibboleth serves as a metaphor for all of Salcedo’s work on this issue because after the six-month installation ended (April 2008), the crack in Turbine Hall was deliberately repaired in a way that created a permanent scar, with all the sculptural material built into the crack in the floor buried beneath the newly sealed surface. As Borchardt-Hume comments in the catalog, Shibboleth is gone, but Tate Modern “will never be the same.”126 Future visitors will be able to see the scar, allowing them to see not only that something was enacted there in the past, but also that it continues to be enacted. Shibboleth’s contemporaneity outlives its own installation, its efficacy continuous, to be enacted in the future—though only if we oblige. So the scar serves in perpetuity to remind visitors to Tate Modern of the critical space once opened up there as a result of a crack in the floor, a space that was affective and aesthetic in its means, but critical, moral, and political in its goals. If seen in this way, Salcedo’s art can also continue to inspire us to recalibrate and regenerate aesthetics so it can contribute to the apprehension, recognition, and satisfaction of these goals. Although Salcedo’s work may be exemplary here, as is Richter’s, and although there are other artists who may be exemplary in related ways, the regeneration of aesthetics remains an open work for philosophers and other theorists to complete.

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NOTES

PREFACE

1. Robert Morris, Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1994), 118–119. Maurice Berger reports that Morris sold Litanies to Philip Johnson and later, after six months of not receiving any payment, issued the “Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal” (Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s [New York: Harper & Row, 1989]). So, possibly, Morris’s “Statement” was initially a symbolic gesture of making Litanies valueless, as if the withdrawal of aesthetic properties were a withdrawal of value. However, if Morris were truly against aesthetics, why would he assume that the value of Litanies was ever a function of its aesthetic properties? Did he believe that Johnson bought Litanies on that assumption, and thus that the withdrawal would undermine its value in Johnson’s eyes? In any case, Johnson eventually paid for Litanies and then also bought the “Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal.” Morris’s aesthetic withdrawal has taken on a life of its own as part of the anti-aesthetic lore. For example, Berger considers it part of Morris’s theater of negation (of aesthetics, of artistic norms, etc.). But this interpretation is not consistent with Morris’s persistent efforts in Critical Inquiry

and other venues to develop a way of thinking philosophically about art— that is, a way of developing an aesthetics calibrated to contemporary art. See Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). In addition, see his exchange with Donald Davidson in Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (1993), in Robert Morris: Blind Time Drawings, 1973–2000, ed. Jean-Pierre Criqui (Gottingen: Stedl, 2005), published in conjunction with a Morris exhibition at the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato. Even more relevant to the topic of the anti-aesthetic is Morris’s most recent book of essays, Have I Reasons: Work and Writings, 1993–2007, ed. Nena Tsouti-Schillinger (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). 2. Joseph Kosuth confirms the link between the anti-aesthetic stance and conceptual art when he argues in “Art After Philosophy” (1969) that it was necessary to separate aesthetics from art, as if viewers would be incapable of recognizing conceptual works as art without this separation (Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990 [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991], 13–32). 3. Robert Morris, “Toward an Ophthalmology of the Aesthetic and an Orthopedics of Seeing,” in Tsouti-Schillinger, Have I Reasons, 190. There is a brief dialogue interspersed throughout Morris’s article between art, aesthetics, and truth under a deflationary problematic that serves as an insightful, concise summary of the logic of the history of the anti-aesthetic as various attempts to deflate not just aesthetics, but art. 4. Ibid., 187. 5. While pointing to this cultural change, I realize there are many different, often overlapping, theoretical sources, political motivations, historical genealogies, concrete forms, and disciplinary homes for the anti-aesthetic, especially in connection with the histories of anti-art within modern and postmodern art. Although I will analyze only contemporary iterations of the anti-aesthetic linked to moral-political demands, I will sometimes discuss other iterations as contrasts. 6. The anti-aesthetic stance has a long history in modernity, so much so that some suggest it has been endemic in aesthetics since it began in the eighteenth century. For example, Margaret Iverson argues that the antiaesthetic in twentieth-century art is “a development of one of the defining features of the aesthetic itself”—that is, as a strategy for rendering aesthetic judgment universal by minimizing the influence of the irreducible subjectivity of art or aesthetic experience (“Readymade, Found Object, Photograph,” Art Journal 63, no. 2 [2004]: 48). In this scenario, the Kantian aesthetic of

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disinterestedness (a “moment” that opens up judgment’s universality) eventually becomes the Duchampian aesthetic of indifference that later morphs into the anti-aesthetic stance. Iverson bases her argument, in part, on the work of Thierry DeDuve, but she also quotes Arthur Danto’s After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 7. Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades’ ” (lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961), Art and Artists 1, no. 4 (1966). 8. Morris, “Toward an Ophthalmology of the Aesthetic,” 190. 9. Hence the return of aesthetics after Duchamp, to invoke Thierry DeDuve’s Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). 10. Barnett Newman, “Remarks at the Fourth Annual Woodstock Art Conference,” in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 245–246. For a good analysis of the context and implications of Newman’s comments, see also Paul Mattick, “Aesthetics and Anti-Aesthetics in the Visual Arts,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 2 (1993): 253–259. I say “allegedly” in the text because, for the record, what Newman says is that “even if aesthetics is established as a science,” something he emphatically does not want, “it doesn’t affect me as an artist. I’ve done quite a bit of work in ornithology, and I have never met an ornithologist who thought that ornithology was for the birds” (“Remarks,” 247). 11. Newman, “Remarks,” 243. 12. “What has happened as a result of the artist [and the aesthetician] getting involved in this anti-art situation . . . is that there has been an alliance of a good many artists and a good many institutions with the philistines. The philistines also believe that you can’t tell one thing from another and that a toilet is as good as a Titian” (Newman, “Remarks,” 246). 13. Richard Shiff, “Newman’s Time,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, ed. Melissa Ho (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2005), 162. 14. Lisa Saltzman, “Readymade Redux: Once More the Jewish Museum,” Grey Room 9 (2002): 90–104. 15. John O’Neill, Editor’s Note preceding Newman, “Remarks,” 242; Melissa Ho, “Talk and the Untalkable,” in Ho, Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 10. 16. For additional evidence of Newman’s hunger for aesthetics, consider that he wrote “Prologue for a New Aesthetic” after a 1949 visit to

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Ohio Indian mounds that greatly inspired him. See Shiff, “Newman’s Time,” 175n13. Newman’s hunger was more publicly confirmed once he and other abstract expressionists were embraced by the public and the art world of the 1950s because their work clearly embodied a new aesthetic(s). Others acknowledge the importance of Newman’s writings, though they may draw different conclusions about aesthetics from them. See, for example, Yve-Alain Bois’s comment that Newman’s documents are a “treasure trove for us art historians, in large part because of their retrospective quality”—that is, because Newman was trying “to set the record straight for younger, admiring ears” (“Newman’s Laterality,” in Ho, Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 29). 17. Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: New Press, 2002), xv. 18. Ibid. 19. Robert Kaufman, “Aura Still,” in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 123–124. Similarly, Jacques Ranciere argues that “The aesthetic regime . . . simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself” (The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill [New York: Continuum, 2004], 23). In a related vein, Gregory Jusdanis distinguishes two ideas of autonomy in connection with aesthetics: aesthetics as part of a relatively autonomous (i.e., separate) institution of art dating back to the eighteenth century and aesthetics as a timeless enterprise; the first idea is historical, whereas the second is not (“Two Cheers for Aesthetics Autonomy,” Cultural Critique 61 [2005]: 28; see also 36). Finally, for a discussion of autonomy recalibrated to Salcedo’s art, see chap. 4 in this volume. 20. Jacques Ranciere, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Polity Press, 2009), 6. 21. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). See also David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 22. For a richer account of the history of aesthetics within philosophy, art history, and many other art-related disciplines, see Michael Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), which is also included in Oxford Art Online: http://www.oxfordartonline

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.com/public/. An expanded and revised edition of the Encyclopedia is in progress. 23. Ranciere, Politics of Aesthetics, 10. 24. Foster, “Postmodernism,” xv. 25. Jean Baudrillard, “Towards the Vanishing Point of Art,” in The Conspiracy of Art, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodges (New York: Semiotext[e], 2005), 99. While the rejection of autonomy discussed earlier explicitly links the anti-aesthetic to traditional forms of iconoclasm because iconoclasts typically deny art’s autonomy as a way of reining in its power, the rejection of aesthetics links the anti-aesthetic to iconoclasm because iconoclasts realize that aesthetic strategies are the means to art’s power (as well as an expression of art’s disputed autonomy). Also, when anti-aesthetic theorists reject aesthetics, they undermine art’s power—hence the link between the anti-aesthetic stance and anti-art. For more on the meaning and relevance of iconoclasm here, see Michael Kelly, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 26. See, for example, Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vols. 1–4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986–1993); and Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 27. In contemporary art history, this dilemma sometimes manifests itself as a choice of allegiance, in effect, between the theoretical model represented by Michael Fried (aesthetics) and that represented by T. J. Clark (politics), a contrast captured by Fried’s own foundational distinction between absorption and theatricality: ethics and politics implicate the audiences of art by making moral-political demands on them, but such implication is a sure sign of theatricality and a barrier to absorption, which is the measure of art, according to Fried in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); for a discussion of absorption and theatricality in connection with more contemporary art, see Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008); and T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). 28. Bruno Latour, “What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press;

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Karlsruhe: Center for Art and Media, 2002), 25. In Ranciere’s words: “The main feature of what is called the ‘crisis of art,’ ” which is at the heart of the anti-aesthetic stance, “is the overwhelming defeat of this simple modernist paradigm which is forever more distant from the mixture of genres and mediums as well as from the moral-political possibilities inherent in the arts’ contemporary forms” (Politics of Aesthetics, 26).

INTRO DU CTI O N : THE DEW EY EF F E C T

1. James Meyer and Toni Ross, “Aesthetic/Anti-Aesthetic: An Introduction,” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (2004), 20. 2. See, for example, Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, and Tony O’Connor, eds., Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008). See also Peter de Bolla and Stefan Uhlig, eds., Aesthetics and the Work of Art: Adorno, Kafka, Richter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). For examples of the kinds of theorists who once established their identity by being anti-aesthetic—feminists, cultural theorists, multiculturalists, race theorists, political theorists—but who more recently have turned toward aesthetics to achieve often the very same goals that led them to the anti-aesthetic stance in the first place, see Penny Florence and Nicola Foster, eds., Differential Aesthetics: Art Practices, Philosophy, and Feminist Understandings (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000); Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne, eds., Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg, eds., Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Michael Bérubé, ed., The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005); Amelia Jones, ed., A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006); Christa Davis Acampora and Angela L. Cotton, eds., Unmasking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); and Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick, eds., Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 3. Meyer and Ross similarly propose that the renewed engagement with aesthetics is to avoid both the “anti-aesthetic suppression of aesthet-

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ics” and “a return to classical aesthetic theory unchanged” (“Aesthetic/ Anti-Aesthetic,” 23). In the same journal issue edited by Meyer and Ross, Anna Dezeuze argues that “the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, rather than being mutually exclusive, are sewn together like two sides of the same whirling fabric” (“Tactile Dematerialization, Sensory Politics: Helio Oiticica’s Parangoles,” Art Journal 63, no. 2 [2004], 71). 4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 342. 5. Ibid., 341 (emphasis added). 6. As David Raskin puts it, “Aesthetics versus critique is, I believe, a paralyzing dichotomy that has captured both today’s plurality and our thinking about art over the past few decades, trapping us within a closed system” (“The Dogma of Conviction,” in Halsall, Jansen, and O’Connor, Rediscovering Aesthetics, 67). By contrast, Alex Alberro expresses some anxiety about the regeneration of aesthetics in “Beauty Knows No Pain,” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (2004): 36–43. 7. Hinderliter, Kaizen, Maimon, Mansoor, and McCormick make a similar point about the need to resist both the return to beauty and the anti-aesthetic stance and, instead, to renegotiate the aesthetics/politics relationship (“Editors’ Introduction,” in Communities of Sense). 8. For examples of fields that recently have turned back to aesthetics, see note 2. 9. For an account of anti-art in the context of the history of the concept of art, see Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 10. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 108. 11. Ibid., 252; see also 245. 12. Boris Groys, “Iconoclasm as an Artistic Device: Iconoclastic Strategies in Film,” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; Karlsruhe: Center for Art and Media, 2002), 284–285. 13. Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 293–304. In her book on Sontag, Sonya Sayres comments in a similar vein that “criticism proudly compares itself to art, even boasts that it is more important” (Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist [New York: Routledge, 1990], 83). 14. Groys, “Iconoclasm as an Artistic Device,” 285.

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15. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 204. 16. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 5. If Krauss means to say only that meaning is unstable, let her join the chorus of philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic who have been making this point for decades. Since an unstable meaning is still a meaning, however, let her also identify the various unstable meanings that, say, Cindy Sherman’s photographs might have, instead of critiquing all the meanings others have identified, especially since some of those are recognized as being unstable by the critics (e.g., feminists) who have identified them. See Rosalind Krauss, Cindy Sherman, 1975– 1993 (New York: Rizzoli, 1993). For an analysis of Krauss’s interpretation of Sherman’s photography, see Michael Kelly, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 4. 17. For an example of antitheory in literary theory, see Michael P. Clark, ed., Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). I would add that the iconoclastic turn—not the picture turn or the theory turn—is what upsets most iconophiles. They see art threatened by critique-as-iconoclasm, often operating under the name of theory, and they sometimes express their concern in the form of a resistance to any and all theory. But I think the resistance is misplaced, as it is aimed at all theory (which is an impossible stance to maintain because all discussions of art have theoretical commitments) rather than at the particular type of theory that demonstrates excessively iconoclastic tendencies. 18. Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 63. I will not be discussing directly the reformulation of “meaning” here, but I think the later discussions about the meanings of Richter’s and Salcedo’s art would likely be part of such reformulation. 19. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 407 (italics added). 20. Ibid., 372 (italics added). Speaking of Richter’s paintings (as well as Robert Ryman’s), Jay Bernstein argues in a similar vein that they “can appear almost ceremonial, an ascetic exercise in remembrance of painting rather than the thing itself” (Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006], 200). Bernstein adds in a footnote that this may not be the best way

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to understand Richter’s paintings but, to my knowledge, he does not clearly articulate any alternative in this setting or elsewhere. For a comparable argument in literary theory, consider the words of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, who, when speaking positively about the art of Samuel Beckett, Mark Rothko, and Alain Resnais, describe modern art’s vocation as a failure and add this iconoclastic point: “[for art] to fail does not mean to represent successfully existential failures or existential meaningless[ness]; it means to fail to represent (either meaninglessness or meaning)” (Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993], 14). 21. Peter Osborne, “Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter’s Negatives,” October 62 (1992): 110. 22. As Desa Philippi points out in an essay on Richter, theorists have paid a high price for emphasizing art’s reflexivity: “the more successful a piece is in problematizing its own conditions of representation, the less it can be said to signify anything else” (“Moments of Interpretation,” October 62 [1992]: 118). 23. For an argument that art “becomes politically effective only when it is made beyond or outside the art market,” see Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 7. See also Boris Groys and Peter Weibel, eds., Medium Religion: Faith, Geopolitics, Art (Cologne: Walter König, 2009). 24. Jean Baudrillard speaks explicitly of “mourning aesthetics,” which mourns the image and the imagination; when adopted by art, this mourning leads “to the general melancholy of the artistic sphere, which seems to survive by recycling its history and its vestiges” (“Art Contemporary . . . of Itself,” in The Conspiracy of Art, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodges [New York: Semiotext(e), 2005], 89). See also Jean Baudrillard, “Aesthetic Illusion and Disillusion,” in Lotringer, Conspiracy of Art, 111. 25. Ranciere, Politics of Aesthetics, 9. 26. Bruno Latour, “What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?” in Latour and Weibel, Iconoclash, 22. 27. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006). See also Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). 28. Gregg Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001). Horowitz provides an insightful philosophical account of this mourning phenomenon, stretching from

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Immanuel Kant to the present, but in a way that is enabling for both artists and aestheticians. 29. The time frame, identity, and purpose of Pop have been controversial since it began. As Lawrence Alloway argued, Pop’s success was “combined with misunderstanding” on several levels: its definition; regarding which artists were included under the heading; the significance of its subject matter; whether it was critical of mass culture or legitimating it; and so on (American Pop Art [New York: Macmillan, 1974], 126, chaps. 1, 4). For one account of the political legacy of the 1960s, see Tom Hayden, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2009). 30. According to Phillip Lopate, “The straightforward humanism of Regarding the Pain of Others amends the prosecutorial zeal of On Photography” (Notes on Sontag [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009], 14, 67). 31. Rosalind Krauss, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” in The Critical Edge: Essay on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 24. Krauss also states: “By exposing the multiplicity, facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and copy, the first idea and its slavish copies” (22). Dairmuid Costello similarly argues that photography is “the privileged medium of the anti-aesthetic moment in recent art history” (“The Art Seminar,” in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins [New York: Routledge, 2007], 168). See also Eric Rosenberg’s claim that photography is “the ultimate art form of modernity” (“Photography Is Over, If You Want It,” in The Meaning of Photography, ed. Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press; Williamstown, Mass.: Clark Art Institute, 2008], 191). 32. Bonnie Marranca, “Art and Consciousness” (Susan Sontag interviewed by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta), Performance Art Journal 27, no. 2 (2005), 1. According to Deborah Eisenberg, “[Sontag’s] stature as a writer and the value of her work have been, and no doubt will continue to be, debated, but what is beyond dispute is that she suggested, monitored, and even, to an extent, determined what was to be under discussion” (“Becoming Susan Sontag,” New York Review of Books, December 18, 2008, 36). Also, Lopate argues that Sontag was “one of our foremost interpreters of the period through which she lived” (Notes on Sontag, 7). 33. Susan Sontag, “On Art and Consciousness,” Performing Arts Journal 2, no. 2 (1977): 30. See also Sayres, Susan Sontag, 20.

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34. For a good analysis of the philosophical significance of “Against Interpretation,” in combination with several other early Sontag essays, see Fred Rush, “Appreciating Susan Sontag,” Philosophy and Literature 33, no. 1 (2009): 36–49. 35. In Judith Butler’s words in an article on Sontag after her death, “there is no reason to be ‘against interpretation’ in the name of visual experience any more than there is reason to be in favor of interpretation in the face of visual experience” (“Photography, War, Outrage,” PMLA 120, no. 3 [2005]: 827). See also Butler’s critique of Sontag in “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag,” in Frames of War, 63–100. 36. Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation, 5; Sontag, “On Art and Consciousness,” 30. Contra Krauss, Sontag acknowledges that sometimes interpretation based on content is “a liberating act,” at least when it is under the guidance of a Marx or a Freud. It is just that at other times, interpretation focused on content or meaning in relative isolation from form and function “is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling” (“Against Interpretation,” 7). The 1960s were such a stifling time, according to Sontag, because by “reducing the work of art to its content [meaning] and then interpreting that,” critics tended to tame the work of art, as often happened with Pop art: “Interpretation makes the art manageable, conformable” (“Against Interpretation,” 8). In effect, interpretations of Pop that focus narrowly on meaning depoliticize it by taming its critical edge with a conformist, celebratory content. In a similar vein, Lucy Lippard’s aim in her early texts on Pop art was to show that, despite appearances, it was not about its popular subject matter (Pop Art [New York: Praeger, 1966]). 37. Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 10. 38. Ibid., 9. 39. Sayres states, “[Sontag’s method] means being first inside the force of a work of art, seduced by it, allowing it is power,” and then interpretation should show how a work “is what it is, even that it is what it is (erotics in tandem with hermeneutics)” (Susan Sontag, 21); see also Sontag, Against Interpretation, 14. In a 1985 essay, Sontag utilizes the notion of “thisness” (akin to “that it is as it is” or “quiddity”) in discussing the form of Mapplethorpe’s photographs in contrast to their content (i.e., the identities of the people portrayed, including Sontag) (“Certain Mapplethorpes,” in Robert Mapplethorpe, Certain People: A Book of Portraits [Pasadena, Calif.: Twelvetrees Press, 1985], 1–4). But Sayres argues that Sontag’s emphasis on “what is” may be in conflict with her commitment to the critique of art

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because, in the interest of accountability, it goes beyond “that it is as it is” (Susan Sontag, 12; see also chap. 3). On the point of Sontag’s interest in artistic process, Lopate makes a relevant, if unlikely, comparison between Sontag and John Dewey (Notes on Sontag, 28). 40. Sontag, Against Interpretation, viii. 41. Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writing and Interviews, 1962–1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Britt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 163. 42. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 359. 43. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Putnam, 1934), 14. 44. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 2. Spelman argues that “artistic renderings of human suffering . . . cannot help but suggest a way of understanding and responding to the suffering depicted. Our reaction to them involves an assent to or resistance to such an understanding” (153–154). 45. To see what is at stake with the issue of enacted hunger, and in turn the hunger for aesthetics, compare W. J. T. Mitchell’s recent inquiry into what pictures want, which he says leads “inevitably to a reflection on what picture we have of desire itself” (What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005], 57).

1. THE PO P EFFECT

1. For the differences between East Coast and West Coast Pop, see the respective chapters in Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art (New York: Praeger, 1966); see also Cecile Whiting, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 2. Lawrence Alloway, American Pop Art (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 5. He mentions that early on, Pop was also referred to as “anti-sensibility” (24). See also Ivan Karp, “Anti-Sensibility Painting,” Artforum 2, no. 3 (1963): 26–27. Alloway reputedly coined the phrase “Pop art,” which he says “reached print by the winter of 1957–58” (American Pop Art, 1). See also Lawrence Alloway, “The Arts and Mass Media,” Architectural Design 28, no. 2 (1958): 84–85. 3. Alloway, American Pop Art, 5, 3. Apparently, Alloway had not read John Dewey, whose theory of art as experience broke, long before the Pop artists emerged, with the very tradition of aesthetics Alloway criticizes.

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4. Stanley Cavell, “Music Decomposed,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, rev. ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 183. For example, the titles of articles published in the British Journal of Aesthetics from 1960 to 1970 reveal almost no evidence that modernism had even occurred, let alone that Pop had arrived, bringing with it the emergence of postmodernism. 5. Ibid. 6. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 5. 7. Arthur C. Danto, for example, worked on the philosophy of science in the 1950s (particularly that of R. N. Hanson), not on aesthetics. 8. Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 10 (1964): 571–584. 9. If the 1960s was the last major period when a number of aestheticians made a concerted effort to critique contemporary art, it is not that philosophers have stopped trying since then, though many have. Rather, it is that many of the theoretical strategies they employ today first emerged in the 1960s. The examples here could be American (e.g., Cavell, Danto, Nelson Goodman), English (e.g., Richard Wollheim), French (e.g., Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty), German (e.g., Theodor Adorno, Hans-Georg Gadamer), and Italian (e.g., Umberto Eco); and the list for each country would be much longer if we were to add theorists influenced by these and related philosophers. In short, to practice aesthetics effectively today, we have to understand its genealogy since the 1960s. Although almost any combination of philosophers from these groups could be assembled to make the case that aesthetics can indeed critique contemporary art, I chose Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco because individually they have been exemplary in their critique of art and collectively they represent a wide range of philosophical perspectives, indicating that there is no one way for aesthetics to critique art. 10. Carol Anne Mahsun includes three philosophers in her edited volume Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989), but only one essay is from the 1960s: Alexander Sesonke’s “Art and Idea,” which barely mentions Pop or any other art for that matter. The other two essays are Roland Barthes’s “That Old Thing, Art . . .” (1980) and Umberto Eco’s “Lowbrow Highbrow: Highbrow Lowbrow” (1971). Mahsun discusses Eco only briefly, and Barthes is mentioned just twice in passing, in Pop Art and the Critics (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press,

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1987). See also Steven Henry Madoff, ed., Pop Art: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), which includes only two philosophers: Danto (“The Artworld”) and Barthes (“That Old Thing, Art . . .”). These books on Pop art also make little or no mention of the philosophers writing on it in the 1960s: Alloway, American Pop Art; Barbara Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958– 1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1984); and Christin J. Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture: American Super Market (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). 11. Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (New York: Abrams, 1996). 12. Of the many philosophers actively engaged with 1960s art, Crow does mention Barthes, Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall McLuhan, Herbert Marcuse, and Sontag, but he only lists them in a timetable at the back of the book under a column called “Other Cultural Events,” where he also cites major political events, such as the Cuban missile crisis and the Kennedy and King assassinations, as well as scientific events, such as the launching of the first atomic-powered submarine and the first human landing on the moon. 13. Sarah Doris, Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Sylvia Harrison, Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 14. To be fair, since Danto’s “The Artworld” has been read in historicist terms by many others besides Doris, the problem of interpretation may lie with Danto, though he speaks directly to this problem in Art After the End of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). The issue is how we are to understand Danto’s notion of the “artworld”: Is it the institutional matrix of “critics, art historians, galleries, museums” who decide what art is, as Doris argues in Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture, 6, 154? Or is it the logical set comprising all works that satisfy the essentialist definition of art as “embodied meaning,” as Danto argues in Art After the End of Art, 194–195? Only the first Danto plays a part in Doris’s analysis—it is the second one who makes an appearance here. 15. Harrison, Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism, 172. 16. Crow believes that the model typically used to explain postwar American art up until the late 1950s, especially abstract expressionism, was centered on “the heroic model of artistic selfhood” (e.g., Jackson Pollack) that promises audiences “some form of spectacular self-revelation” (Rise of

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the Sixties, 9). The problem, as he sees it, is that this model is unable to account for much of the art created during (and since) the 1960s because it was not expressive in origin, individualistic in execution, or self-revelatory in effect. Haskell makes a similar argument in Blam! 17. Crow recognizes that the public’s plight has been a part of modern art since its inception in the nineteenth century, but he is interested in the particular form that it acquired in the 1960s while arguing that this plight continues to the present. He also argues that the public had an ambivalent response to 1960s art: audiences “cannot miss the aggression in the work [especially of dissident artists], yet its setting [exhibitions in established art institutions] speaks in a contrary voice of acceptance and reassurance. . . . The sharpening of that paradox is . . . the central subject of this book” (Rise of the Sixties, 13). See also Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 3–37. 18. Crow, Rise of the Sixties, 7. 19. Peter Sloterdijk, “Analytic Terror: Keyword for Avant-Gardism as Explicative Force,” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; Karlsruhe: Center for Art and Media, 2002), 353. 20. Leo Steinberg, “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1962, reprinted in his Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 21. Ibid., 207. 22. Ibid., 207, 208. 23. “Ed Ruscha, Interview with John Coplans,” in Pop, ed. Mark Francis (New York: Phaidon Press, 2005), 240. To offer another example from an artist echoing Ruscha’s comment, Andy Warhol said in 1966 that people who did not know much about art were the ones who embraced Pop. See Bruce Glaser, “Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Warhol: A Discussion,” in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 147. Lippard likewise confirms Ruscha’s point in Pop Art, 9, 80. 24. For this trope, see Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). 25. Perhaps the one who could most easily make this claim is James Harvey, who designed the Brill box cartoon later made famous by Warhol. 26. Max Kozloff, “ ‘Pop’ Culture, Metaphysical Disgust, and the New Vulgarians,” in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 30.

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27. Ibid., 32. See also T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), specifically chap. 7, “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism.” 28. Brian O’Doherty, “Art: Avant-Garde Revolt,” in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 42; Umberto Eco, “The Structure of Bad Taste,” in The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 215. See also Barbara Rose, “Dada, Then and Now,” 62, and Leo Steinberg (with Peter Selz, Henry Geldzahler, Hilton Kramer, Dore Ashton, and Stanley Kunitz), “A Symposium on Pop Art,” 72, both in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History; and Doris, Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture. 29. Clement Greenberg, “Where Is the Avant-Garde?” 263, and “AvantGarde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties,” 298, both in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). According to Greenberg, abstract expressionism was first rejected by the public and considered difficult because people were not able to appreciate its “quality.” Largely as a result of Greenberg’s own eloquent defense throughout the 1950s of the quality of abstract expressionism, the public came to recognize its quality, the difficulty subsided, and the art became popular. Unfortunately, this newfound popularity coincided with the “terminal stage” of abstract expressionism when, according to Greenberg, it became stereotyped, easily copied, and simply bad. Enter Pop art. It quickly became popular with the public. Ironically, in Greenberg’s mind, it became popular with the general public created by abstract expressionism (“Where Is the Avant-Garde?” 262; see also “Avant-Garde Attitudes,” 301). Greenberg’s account thus suggests that the real legacy of 1960s art is not the plight of the external public, as Crow argues, but the acceptance of the art by that public and thus the absence of a plight. Or, if there was any plight, it was only internal, as Steinberg argued and Greenberg epitomized. Greenberg’s view of the reception (and legacy) of Pop art was confirmed by a number of other critics, curators, and art historians active in the 1960s. See, for example, Peter Selz, “The Flaccid Art,” 85–87; Robert Rosenblum, “Jasper Johns” and “Pop Art and Non-Pop Art,” 11, 13, 134; Alan Solomon, “From Robert Rauschenberg,” 19; Henry Geldzahler (with Peter Selz, Hilton Kramer, Dore Ashton, Leo Steinberg, and Stanley Kunitz), “A Symposium on Pop Art,” 66; and Rose, “Dada, Then and Now,” 84—all in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History. More recently, Hal Foster seems to reconfirm the Greenbergian view in his recent survey of Pop art, in Francis, Pop, 14–41.

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30. Sidney Tillim, “Further Observations on the Pop Phenomenon,” in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 137, 135. Similarly, the first chapter of Mamiya’s Pop Art and Consumer Culture is called “The Rapid Success Story: The Establishment of Pop Art.” See also Peter Plagens, “Present-Day Styles and Ready-Made Criticism,” in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 163–166. For a brief charting of the meteoric rise of American Pop from 1961 to 1964, see Constance W. Glenn, “American Pop Art: Inventing the Myth,” in Pop Art: An International Perspective, ed. Marco Livingstone (London: Royal Academy of Arts; New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 30–39. Finally, as Doris argues in Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture, Pop’s genealogy of instant success is, in turn, the basis for the ambivalence, by artists as well as their audiences, about whether Pop is a critique or simply another manifestation of commodity culture. 31. Peter Selz (with Henry Geldzahler, Hilton Kramer, Dore Ashton, Leo Steinberg, and Stanley Kunitz), “A Symposium on Pop Art,” in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 65. 32. Even the collectors of Pop art were ones who, for the most part, had not been collecting abstract expressionism or other contemporary art, as Crow acknowledges: “The hostility to Pop expressed by many guardians of cultivated taste proved to be an open invitation to enthusiastic collectors from unconventional backgrounds” (Rise of the Sixties, 91). 33. Thomas Hess, “Mixed Mediums for a Soft Revolution,” in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 10; see also Mahsun, Pop Art, 5. 34. Hess, “Mixed Mediums,” 10. Crow recognizes the opportunity for audience participation, but he emphasizes, in connection with the public’s plight, the “disturbed cognitive comprehension” and “emotional and physical tension” of this participation (e.g., Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece [1964], where the audience was invited on stage, one by one, to cut away pieces of her clothing while she sat motionless) (Rise of the Sixties, 133). 35. Sidney Tillim, “Month in Review (February 1962),” in Mahsun, Pop Art, 11. 36. Hess, “Mixed Mediums,” 10. 37. Lawrence Alloway, “The Artists and the Mass Media,” in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 9. Elsewhere, Alloway provides a good, succinct definition of “popular culture” as “the sum of the arts designed for simultaneous consumption by a numerically large audience” (e.g., prints, movies, records, TV, interior design, etc.) (“Popular Culture and Pop Art,” in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 167). The ambivalent attitudes within and about Pop and its relationship to popular or consumer capitalist culture is one of

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the themes of the critical theory reception of Pop art; for example, see Andreas Huyssen, “The Cultural Politics of Pop: Reception and Critique of U.S. Pop Art in the Federal Republic of Germany,” New German Critique, no. 4 (1975): 77–97. 38. Steven Henry Madoff, “WHAM! BLAM! How Pop Art Stormed the High-Art Citadel and What the Critics Said,” in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, xviii. 39. Susan Sontag, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtapositions,” in Against Interpretation, 265, 273. For Greenberg, 1962 marks the end of abstract expressionism and the beginning of Pop art. See O’Brian, Clement Greenberg, 4:179, 215, 264, 281. 40. Sontag, “Happenings,” 265. 41. Ibid., 267–268, 273. 42. Ibid., 269. For more on Sontag’s view of surrealism, see chap. 2. 43. Crow discusses another one of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings (18 Happenings in 6 Parts) in a very similar vein (i.e., regarding the place of the audience) in Rise of the Sixties, 33–34. 44. Ibid., 33. 45. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in Against Interpretation, 276. She claims that Pop is “very different” from Camp because “Pop art,” when it is not just Camp, “is more flat and more dry, more serious, more detached, ultimately nihilistic” (292). According to Terry Castle, the more public Sontag became about her sexual preference, the less interest she showed in Camp because it had indirectly provided a cover for her sexuality (“Some Notes on ‘Notes on Camp,’ ” in The Scandal of Susan Sontag, ed. Barbara Ching and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor [New York: Columbia University Press, 2009], 30). 46. Cavell, “Music Decomposed,” 187. 47. Ibid. 48. In a similar vein, but with different conclusions, Crow describes how the absence of an audience for California Pop art, as distinct from its New York counterpart, “choked off promising developments or forced artists to rely on their inner resources alone” (Rise of the Sixties, 27). 49. Cavell, “Music Decomposed,” 188 (emphasis added). Cavell’s concern about art’s fraudulence has echoes in Theodor Adorno’s claim that nothing about art is self-evident anymore, not even its right to exist (Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], 1). 50. Cavell, “Music Decomposed,” 188.

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51. Although Cavell’s examples in “Music Decomposed” are largely from music, he claims that people who experience any contemporary art cannot avoid such experiences of fraudulence and betrayal, albeit combined with an embrace of the new and eagerness for the future. 52. For an exchange between Cavell and Danto on their respective philosophies of art, especially in their early years (i.e., in the 1960s), see Stanley Cavell, “Crossing Paths,” in Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto, ed. Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 24–37; Danto responds to Cavell in the same volume, 37–42. 53. This definition—which is, of course, Hegelian in spirit (art qua the idea in sensuous form)—is not made explicit by Danto until later. See Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). But he argues today that it is implicit in this early essay. 54. See, for example, Michael Kelly, “Essentialism and Historicism in Danto’s Philosophy of Art,” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 37 (1998): 30–43. 55. Danto, “Artworld.” Barthes also analyzes Pop art in ontological terms, so even if one were to abandon American philosophers in favor of their French peers, one would still have to deal with ontology. 56. Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in Open Work, 5, 20. 57. Ibid., 12; see also 19. 58. Ibid., 13. 59. Ibid., 17–18. See also Umberto Eco, “The Open Work in the Visual Arts,” in Open Work, 87–93. Eco adds a word of caution: he is not suggesting that the structure of contemporary works of art mirrors the structure of the world; rather, he is making a comparison between the poetics of contemporary art and certain scientific methodologies, or systems of describing the world (Open Work, 252). 60. Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Against Interpretation, 298. 61. Eco, “Poetics of the Open Work,” 22. 62. Ibid., 22–23. 63. Eco does not propose an unrestrained openness or relativism, however, even though he describes the contemporary work of art as “a field of open possibilities,” for a “work of art can be open only insofar as it remains a work” (“Open Work in the Visual Arts,” 86, 100). As for the incomplete work, it’s to be understood as completed by the audience, again

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as a collaborative act, as was the case with the Happenings analyzed by Sontag (and as will be the case for Doris Salcedo in chap. 4 of this volume). For more on Eco’s account of the philosophical restraints placed on the openness of the modern work of art, in addition to the other essays in The Open Work, see Umberto Eco, with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-Rose, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and On Literature, trans. Martin McLaughlin (New York: Harcourt, 2002). 64. Eco, “Poetics of the Open Work,” 4. 65. Anna Dezeuze, “The 1960s: A Decade Out-of-Bounds,” in A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, ed. Amelia Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 39. 66. For a discussion of the link between Pop art and ordinary-language philosophy in the work of Cavell, as one example of the relationship between the contemporaneity of philosophy and that of art in the 1960s, see Gordon C. F. Bearn, “Staging Authenticity: A Critique of Cavell’s Modernism,” Philosophy and Literature 24, no. 2 (2000): 294–311. 67. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “White Metaphor: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Allan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 207–271. 68. John Coplans, “The New Paintings of Common Objects,” in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 43. 69. Ibid. 70. See, for example, the catalog for the New American Realism exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum (February 18–April 4, 1965), which begins with a series of quotations from various artists (Rauschenberg, Johns, Jim Dine, Warhol, and others) who reject theory/aesthetics while demanding it anew. At the same time, another important factor here is that although Pop artists may have been antitheoretical in appearance or in substance, minimalist and conceptual artists who emerged after Pop provided their own theories of art, thereby displacing philosophers—or so some may have imagined. 71. Harrison, Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism, 1. 72. Similarly, Kenneth E. Silver interprets Pop art in terms of gay issues that, though present in the 1960s, were not explicitly part of the historical record in the same way they are today in “Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop,” in Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955–62, ed. Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992), 179–203.

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73. If Cavell is an essentialist at all, it is not in the way that Danto is, but he does argue that the threat of fraudulence evident in new music is essential to the experience of all modern art (or even all art, though it may be explicit for the first time only in modern art) (“Music Decomposed,” 188–189). In this, Cavell echoes Steinberg’s claim that artists’ (and critics’) resistance to innovation in 1960s art is systematic in the history of modern art and anticipates Crow’s claim that all modern art is marked by a tension with its public(s) (negation versus accommodation). Cavell is a modernist who, like Greenberg, believes, that self-critique is what defines modernity (i.e., both modern philosophy and modern art). The fraudulence that Cavell analyzes is a form of self-critique. One reason that he seems ultimately not to favor Pop art is that he sees modernist selfcritique coming to an abrupt stop in Pop. By contrast, Danto traces the same self-critique through the history of modern art and sees its teleological culmination in Pop art. Cavell’s “stop” is Danto’s “end.” 74. Even if the philosophers discussed herein did elide the ethical and political context of Pop art, and even if that is why they are not included in the standard art-historical accounts of that movement, we need to be fair to these philosophers. There is little consensus among art historians about the ethics and politics of Pop art: Is it critical or celebratory of popular culture? Look, for example, at the recent debate about Warhol’s Disaster Series: art critics, theorists, and historians cannot agree whether those works are critical, celebratory, indifferent, or something else. See Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945–1964 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 311–331 (with a discussion at the end involving Crow, Thierry DeDuve, and an audience); Anne Wagner, “Warhol Paints History, or Race in America,” Representations 55 (1996): 98–119; Hal Foster, “Death in America,” October 75 (1996): 36–59; Paul Mattick, “The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (1998): 965–987; Douglas Crimp, “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” Social Text 59 (1999): 49–66; and Jennifer Dyer, “The Metaphysics of the Mundane: Understanding Andy Warhol’s Serial Imagery,” Artibus et Historiae 25, no. 49 (2004): 33–47. Nevertheless, since ethics and politics were major issues in the 1960s, philosophers then and now can still be expected to deal with them as substantial parts of the aesthetic response to Pop. I am not going to pursue this point here by asking whether there is something endemic to Cavell’s, Danto’s, Sontag’s, or Eco’s aesthetic theories that explains why their accounts of

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Pop may elide these other vital areas. This is an important question, but the answers would take us in the direction of extensive analyses of their respective writings. Nor am I going to try to defend these philosophers by attempting to show that they were more attentive to the ethics and politics of 1960s art than they may be given credit for. Sontag is generally considered to be the most political of the group (because she openly traveled to Vietnam in 1968, for example), and Eco has become increasingly political in his writings since the 1960s. Likewise, I do not intend to supplement what the philosophers left out by expanding on Crow’s art-historical account of Pop in combination with similar studies of this period. Others, such as Doris and Harrison, have already provided such supplements. Rather, now that it is clear that aestheticians can indeed critique contemporary art, I want to move forward and analyze some specific examples of how ethics, politics, and aesthetics are intertwined in contemporary art.

2. THE SO NTAG EFFECT

1. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977); Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). 2. Eliot Weinberger recently said that Sontag was “a Roland Barthes who dreamed of being a Walter Benjamin, and moreover, a Walter Benjamin who dreamed of being a Russian novelist. But she was born too late, and in the wrong place” (“Notes on Susan,” New York Review of Books, August 16, 2007; Weinberger’s article is a review of Sontag’s posthumous At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). 3. Sontag, On Photography, 149. There are numerous examples in contemporary art of photographs that seem like film stills (e.g., the work of Cindy Sherman), paintings (e.g., the work of Jeff Wall), and digital imagery (e.g., the work of Andreas Gursky); at the same time, there are many examples of nonphotographic artworks that look like photographs (e.g., Gerhard Richter’s paintings). The point of these examples is not that all art is reduced to photography, whatever that could possibly mean other than it all can be photographed (but people, for example, are not in any meaningful sense reduced to photographs of themselves). Rather, the point is that all contemporary art, including photography, operates under similar historical,

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philosophical, aesthetic, artistic, ethical, political, and other conditions, despite the specificity among the various art mediums. 4. Of course, Sontag wrote several novels and plays, as well as numerous essays on various modern and contemporary writers, whom she regarded as moral agents: “a fiction writer whose adherence is to literature is, necessarily, someone who thinks about moral problems [and who educates our capacity for moral judgment]” (“At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning: The Nadine Gordimer Lectures,” in At the Same Time, 213). But I will discuss only her writings about the visual arts since her ambivalence about aesthetics seems more pronounced in that realm and thus needs to be addressed accordingly. For recent essays on Sontag’s own art, as well as her theoretical work, see Barbara Ching and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, eds., The Scandal of Susan Sontag (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), in which all the contributors present different but compelling cases that Sontag embodied “a way of engaging with the world and with art that was simultaneously aesthetic and ethical” (Ching and Wagner-Lawlor, “Introduction: Unextinguished, Susan Sontag’s Work in Progress,” 2). 5. Sontag, On Photography, 20. See also Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 24, where she refers to this same example, but in a less personal context and manner (i.e., she discusses the historic significance of such images for the history of photography, not just for herself). 6. Sontag, On Photography, 24. 7. “Neglected” in part because Sontag seems genuinely and deeply conflicted about aesthetics, so much so that when she does defend aesthetics, she does so uneasily. Sonya Sayre states that Sontag is searching for “an aesthetic at home with her sense of moral action and moral reflection, yet keeping art unapproachable by the usual reflection and mediation theorists” (Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist [New York: Routledge, 1990], 83). 8. Susan Sontag, “Godot Comes to Sarajevo,” New York Review of Books, October 21, 1993, 53–59, reprinted as “Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” in Performing Arts Journal 16, no. 2 (1994): 87–106, and in Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 299–322. 9. Susan Sontag, “An Argument About Beauty,” in At the Same Time, 11. 10. Sontag, On Photography, 3. Sontag’s sense of the power of photographs is clear if we just consider some of the verbs she uses to discuss them. On a largely positive note, photographs capture, collect, acquire,

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appropriate, furnish, memorialize, beautify, scrutinize, reveal, disclose, change, transform, certify, convert, give shape to, abet, stimulate, awaken, and enhance. On a more negative note, photographs also intrude, exploit, shock, violate, deaden, corrupt, disassociate, anesthetize, possess, deny, and depersonalize. The objects of such positive and negative verbs include: reality, nature, experience, people, things, the past, desire, norms, conscience, perception, and more. This list of objects is striking in that it seems to have no boundaries because anything can be photographed, the whole world is material (149). As photographs sometimes have negative (even aggressive) effects on the objects they capture, however, photography’s democratic drive, which Sontag claims has been extended to all the arts, does not always have egalitarian effects (7). 11. Ibid., 24. 12. For Theodor Adorno’s account of the term semblance character of art, see Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). See also Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds., The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). 13. Sontag, On Photography, 129, 69. 14. Ibid., 122, 163. 15. Ibid., 78, 137. 16. Ibid., 16. 17. For just some examples of photography’s duality, see ibid., 10, 15, 24, 59, 67, 69, 78, 122, 137, 163, 167. 18. Ibid., 90; see also 27, 31. 19. Ibid., 52. 20. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:518, 511–512. 21. Ibid., 512. 22. Ibid., 510. Benjamin’s notion of the “tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now” is related to Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum. But I find the latter of little philosophical value in understanding the moral-political potential of photography, because even Barthes commentators cannot seem to agree on what role the punctum should have in any theory of photography. For the many voices of the punctum, see James Elkins, ed., Photography Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Geoffrey Batchen, ed., Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).

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23. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510. 24. Sontag, On Photography, 6. 25. Ibid., 165; Susan Sontag, “Photography: A Little Summa,” in At the Same Time, 124. 26. Sontag, On Photography, 154. 27. Ibid., 180. 28. Ibid., 164. 29. According to Sontag, photographs are also a way of controlling the very reality that they depict, most obviously in cases of police or military surveillance but also in science (medicine, astronomy, microbiology, etc.) (ibid., 156). Sontag argues that reality is not just rendered in photographs in these cases; it is actually redefined in the process of being rendered, thereby establishing a new relationship between image and reality in which the two are now complementary (158, 160). 30. Ibid., 179. 31. Ibid., 24. 32. Ibid., 23–24. 33. By contrast, Sontag clearly states that a photograph of suffering is not supposed “to repair our ignorance about the history and cause of the suffering it picks out and frames” (Regarding the Pain of Others, 117). 34. Sontag, On Photography, 156. 35. Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson state, “Trust in photography, once vested in its indexicality, must now be lodged in its ability to facilitate social commitments that recognize the traffic between the burgeoning image world and the social and political realities in which it is materialized” (“Introduction: Photography’s Double Index [A Short History in Three Parts],” in The Meaning of Photography, ed. Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press; Williamstown, Mass.: Clark Art Institute, 2008], xiv). 36. Of course, moral knowledge is different from moral action because of the classic problem of akrasia—that to know what is right or wrong is not the same as to act according to this knowledge. But such knowledge is a necessary (though not sufficient) step for such action; so, too, moral demands in art are necessary, though not sufficient, for political demands for action. 37. For Adorno’s views on semblance, see Aesthetic Theory; and Huhn and Zuidervaart, Semblance of Subjectivity. 38. Here, I disagree with Judith Butler’s critique of Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, for Butler thinks that Sontag does not ever really

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resolve her ambiguity on this score. See Judith Butler, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag,” in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). 39. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 26. See also the discussion of witnessing in Doris Salcedo’s art in chapter 4 of this volume. 40. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 76. 41. Ibid. 42. Sontag, “Photography: A Little Summa,” 126. 43. Sontag captures what is at stake here by observing that the alleged treachery of aesthetics cuts two ways: socially engaged photography is “reproached if it seems too much like art,” whereas photography considered art is reproached for deadening any concern about a horrifying event “that we might deplore” (ibid., 126–127). 44. Speaking of literature, Sontag emphasizes its dual nature, too, which gives novelists an ethical task even while—perhaps because—they shrink reality (“At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning: The Nadine Gordimer Lectures,” in At the Same Time, 211, 228). In the words of Kelsey and Stimson, photography is marked by a “double indexicality, that is, its peculiar pointing both outward to the world before the camera and inward to the photographer behind it,” combining a trace of the world with a comportment (sensibility or point of view) (“Introduction: Photography’s Double Index,” xi). 45. As David Campbell puts it in his review of Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, she finally recognized that the dual powers of photography—to generate documents and to create works of visual art—are what enable photographs to have moral power, notwithstanding, and perhaps because of, their “structural undecidability” (“Representing Contemporary War,” Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 2 [2003]: 101). 46. Sontag, On Photography, 19. 47. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 8. See the discussion of pain in connection with Salcedo’s art in chapter 4 of this volume. 48. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 114. 49. Ibid., 43. She cites Jacques Callot’s etchings The Miseries and Misfortunes of War. 50. Ibid., 44–45. For an analysis of the contrast between Francisco de Goya’s etchings and later photographs of related content, see 46–47. 51. Ibid., 81. 52. See also the section “The Critique of Compassion” in this chapter. For a concise and insightful discussion of the critique of compassion within

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philosophy, yet tied to the contemporary issue of terror, see Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion and Terror,” in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 53. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 95–98. She also says: “To suffer is one thing; another is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them” (On Photography, 20). And she even adds here that images anesthetize, so that “after repeated exposure to images it [the event depicted] also becomes less real” (20). 54. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers or Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 30. 55. Herta Wolf, “The Tears of Photography,” Grey Room 29 (2009): 83. This article began, in part, as a response to Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. 56. I analyze Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings in chapter 3 with an eye to this same issue of particularity in order to demonstrate that the paintings have a moral effect. 57. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 9. 58. Ibid., 12. 59. Ibid., 35–36. 60. Another example of the concrete effect of a shift from “all war” to “this war” can be seen in the early 1970s when the U.S. Army changed the standard for conscientious objector status, which determined whether draft-age males could be exempted from service during the Vietnam War. The army stipulated that potential draftees no longer had to prove they were against all war, even all violence, to object to serving in the particular war in Vietnam. Moreover, the objection could be based on facts and principles related to the Vietnam War, and the principles could be moral rather than strictly religious, as had been required earlier. 61. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 79. 62. Ibid., 112–113. 63. Ibid. 64. In Sontag’s own account of her production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo in 1993, while the city was under siege, she chose to direct a play (rather than engage in one of the other types of art she practiced: novels, plays, and films) because it was the type of art that would be most particular in the sense that it was “something that would exist only in

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Sarajevo, that would be made and consumed there” (“Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” 87). As for why she chose Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, she says it was an apt, even realistic illustration of the particular affects experienced by the Sarajevans at the time: “bereft, hungry, dejected, waiting for an arbitrary, alien power to save them or take them under its protection” (97–98). 65. Erina Duganne, “Photography After the Fact,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 65. See also Martha Rosler, “in, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography),” in 3 Works (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1981), 83n1. 66. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 108–109. 67. Sontag, On Photography, 180; Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 108. 68. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 101. 69. Ibid., 117. 70. Ibid., 78 (emphasis added). 71. Ibid., 79. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. See the discussion of spectacle in chapter 4 of this volume. 76. To view these images, visit Alfredo Jarr’s Web site: www.alfredojaar .net/. 77. Whether such beauty is intrinsic or extrinsic, as Arthur Danto tries to discern, is not really the issue, for the disturbing issue is that beauty is ever present at all in images of suffering. See Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court, 2001). 78. Mark Reinhardt, “Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique,” in Reinhardt, Beautiful Suffering, 24–25. 79. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 7. 80. Kelsey and Stimson, “Introduction: Photography’s Double Index,” xxiv–xxv (emphasis added). They add that the double indexicality of the photograph (its pointing to the world and to the photographer) now takes on a “secular ritual form, as a post-postmodern salah or Shabbat or wafer and wine, ever-renewing a social commitment to an enlightenment never achieved and the reality-based community we must still become” (xxv–xxvi). 81. Sontag, On Photography, 17.

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82. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 117. 83. Ibid., 38. 84. Sontag also acknowledges that the Bosnian war was ended in the 1990s partly because of the attention that images of it received in the international media and that the Vietnam War ended in the 1975 partly because of the effect that war photographs had on the American public. See also the work of artist Martha Rosler on her Web site: http://home.earthlink.net /~navva/photo/index.html. 85. For evidence of these investigations and the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, see Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 86. Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” in At the Same Time, 131. This sense of identity was confirmed in January 2009 when newly inaugurated President Barack Obama issued an executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay because it is not who we are, because we do not torture prisoners (at that time, 245 detainees remained there). Although the closing has still not taken place (as of late 2011), the normative demand for the closing has been articulated clearly at the presidential level. The moral-political power of the Abu Ghraib photographs is not a function only of the torture that is enacted in them or of our moral response to them. As Sontag emphasizes, “the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken—with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives” (132). The photographs were not just evidence of torture, they were very much part of the performative act of torture because the taking of photographs was itself an act of humiliating the nude prisoners in front of their fellow prisoners and before an audience of American soldiers (who took the photographs, committed other acts of torture, or simply looked on) and ultimately before a worldwide audience. We know from the official Bush policy, made public in January 2002, that Al Qaeda and the Taliban prisoners were deemed to have no rights under the Geneva Convention; that is, the human rights protections afforded prisoners of war were deemed inapplicable to any prisoners declared by the U.S. government, without a formal trial, to be terrorists. So the Abu Ghraib prisoners had no legal protection against the kinds of treatment depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs, which were condoned, possibly even authorized. The taking of these photographs is a consequence and thus a symptom of the lack of protection. Moreover, to return to the issue of accountability, insofar as this lack can

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be traceable to President Bush, our commander-in-chief at the time, all Americans are implicated. The act of taking the photographs, not just their content, determines our complicity and hence our shared accountability. 87. Sontag critiqued her earlier theoretical and political views about photography after September 11, though the initial prompt for some change in her views clearly came in Sarajevo. But for all these theorists, the Abu Ghraib images were a turning point in their thinking about photography. As Kelsey and Stimson suggest, the watchful eye of the hermeneutics of suspicion now needs to be turned toward the claim that photography can point only to its own discursive formations, for if that claim is true, photography cannot possibly have any critical impact on the world. The Abu Ghraib images clearly have had an impact on the public discussion of the Iraq War, both in the United States and abroad. So the current model of critique has to change to account for such impact, especially to ensure that it is critical rather than affirmative. See also Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). 88. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 76. 89. Ibid., 116–117. 90. Ibid., 114. 91. Ibid., 101; see also 100. 92. For a discussion of apprehension in such cases, see Butler, Frames of War.

3. THE RI CHTER EFFECT

1. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, eds., “Introduction,” in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 2. 2. Gerhard Richter, War Cut (Cologne: Walter Konig, 2004). Only 2,400 copies of the book were published in the first edition, with 200 (Roman numbered) reserved for the authors, 150 signed, and 50 published as a special edition. A second edition of 70 copies was recently issued, with a new cover painted by Richter. 3. In “Notes, 1983,” Gerhard Richter ambivalently observes that there is a “deep-seated hostility to art manifested by those who are professionally concerned with it as administrators, educators, and sponsors; the hostility of the museums, exhibition venues, galleries, etc., etc., etc.—I am coming

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to the conclusion that this is inborn in us, as a counterweight; so there may be a point to it after all” (The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962–1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Britt [London: Anthony d’Offray Gallery; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995], 103–104; see also 107). 4. The 1986 interview between Benjamin Buchloh and Richter provides a good example of the anti-aesthetic interpretation of his art because Buchloh typically accentuates art’s deficiencies, but Richter, while recognizing the limits placed on art by society, always emphasizes what art is capable of doing despite them. See “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,” in Richter, Daily Practice of Painting, 132–166, reprinted in Gerhard Richter: Writings, 1961–2007, ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2009), 163–187. For a related discussion of this interview, see Michael Kelly, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 2. See also H. D. Buchloh, “A Note on Gerhard Richter’s 18. Oktober 1977,” in Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977 (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and Anthony d’Offray Gallery, 1989), 49–51, also published in October 48 (1989); and “Benjamin Buchloh/Gerhard Richter Interview, November 2004,” in Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 2003–2005 (Cologne: Walther Konig, 2005), 59–70. 5. Yve-Alain Bois says of Henri Matisse, “he was probably one of the most articulate writers on art ever, and he was certainly the best analyst of his own work—so good that it is very difficult for anyone wanting to address his painting to stray very long from his own explanations” (“Newman’s Laterality,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, ed. Melissa Ho [Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2005], 29). 6. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 280. 7. Gilles Deleuze, “The Diagram,” in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 81. 8. Richter’s work could be interpreted, as it is by Charles W. Haxthausen, as resisting the anti-aesthetic stance in various mediums throughout his career. But his work that deals explicitly with political content is, according to the advocates of the anti-aesthetic stance, the most distant from aesthetics. If I can show that his political work is successful only because it employs aesthetic strategies, it should then be easier to make the case about the aesthetics of the rest of his work, though I will not be doing that here.

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9. For a catalogue raisonné of Richter’s work from 1962 to 1993, see Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné, 1962–1963, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 1993); and from 1993 to 2004, see Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné, 1993–2004 (New York: D.A.P./Richter Verlag, 2005). See Richter’s Web site for more on his art: www.gerhard-richter.com/. For discussions of Richter’s art beyond the works to be featured here, see, for example, Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, ed. Elizabeth M. Solaro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002); and the numerous articles and books referenced throughout these notes. 10. Gerhard Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977,” 194, and “Text for Catalogue of Documenta 7, Kassel, 1982,” 100, both in Daily Practice of Painting. 11. The exhibition then traveled to Frankfurt (April–June 1989), London (August–October 1989), Rotterdam (October–December 1989), St. Louis, Mo. (January–February 1990), New York (March–April 1990), Montreal (May–June 1990), Los Angeles (July–August 1990), and Boston (January–March 1991). For an account of the initial reception of Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series, see Hubertus Butin, Zu Richters Oktober-Bildern (Cologne: Walther Koenig, 1991), 32–42. For a bibliography of reviews of the Baader-Meinhof series as it toured, see Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000). Also see Presseberichte zu Gerhard Richter “18. Oktober 1977” (Cologne: Walther König, 1989), published on the occasion of the exhibition of the BaaderMeinhof series at Portikus in Frankfurt in 1989; there are 130 pages of reviews and articles on the paintings (thanks to Charles W. Haxthausen for this reference). Finally, see the Web site on Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series for references to various exhibitions, publications, and the like connected to this work: http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/gerhardrichter/ bib_oktober.html. Richter returned to the Baader-Meinhof theme in an artist’s book called Stammheim (1995), comprising twenty-three paintings on paper, using pages torn from Pieter H. Bakker Schut, Stammheim. Der Prozeß gegen die Rote Armee Fraktion: Die notwendige Korrektur der herrschenden Meinung (Stammheim: The Case Against the RAF) (Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein Nachfolger, 1995), a popular exposé on the Baader-Meinhof trials. For a comprehensive account of other enactments of the Baader-Meinhof legacy in art, see Klaus Biesenbach, Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF-

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Austellung, vols. 1 and 2 (Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Steidl, 2005). 12. Richter originally worked on nineteen paintings, but only fifteen are included in the final series; he describes them all in “Notes for a News Conference, November–December 1988,” in Daily Practice of Painting, 175. For a history of the RAF, see, for example, Stefan Aust, BaaderMeinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F., trans. Anthea Bell (1985; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Aust’s book, which Richter knew well, is the basis for the movie The Baader-Meinhof Komplex (2008; Uli Edel, director). See also the video Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn) by Heinrich von Böll et al. (Los Angeles: World Artists Home Video, 1978/1994) (for a full list of credits, involving eleven directors and thirteen writers, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077427/fullcredits#directors); and the DVD Todesspiel: Die dramatischen Wochen des Deutschen Herbstes 1977, a docudrama by Heinrich Brelder (2003). For a comparison between the RAF and the Weather Underground in the United States, see Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 13. Another Baader-Meinhof member, Irmgard Möller, was seriously injured on that same day but she survived. Subsequent generations of the RAF were active while Richter painted the series and while the series was on tour; for example, the group murdered Alfred Herrhausen, the CEO of Deutsche Bank, while the paintings were on exhibition in Rotterdam in late 1990. The Baader-Meinhof group was active as late as 1998, though the last major action was in 1991 at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn during the first Iraq War. According to Jeremy Varon, forty-three people were killed in connection with Baader-Meinhof violence by late 1978: twenty-eight were victims, and fifteen were group members (more were killed after 1978) (Bringing the War Home, 198). 14. Astrid Proll, Baader-Meinhof/Pictures on the Run, 67-77 (New York: Scalo, 1998). Proll left the RAF in 1971 and went to England, where she was captured and extradited in 1978, and subsequently imprisoned until 1988. So she was free during the time of the Stammheim deaths. Her brother, Thorward, was involved with Baader and others in the 1968 Frankfurt department store fire; he served eleven months in prison but left the movement when he was released in 1971.

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15. Ibid., 007. On the same page, Proll wrote: “I was unable to look at [the pictures of dead comrades] for many years.” Elger makes the same basic point: “Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings were based on shocking images, rendered tolerable only through Richter’s transformation” (Gerhard Richter, 300). 16. Many Baader-Meinhof members were artists or writers: for example, Ulrike Meinhof was a writer, an editor (of a journal called konkret), and, briefly, a playwright; Thorwald Proll was a poet; and Holger Meins was a filmmaker. See Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils, eds., Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008). This volume contains excellent essays on the history of the critical treatment of the Baader-Meinhof legacy in film, theater, literature, and visual arts in Germany and elsewhere. Some argue that the art backgrounds of the RAF contributed not only to their self-identity but also to their strategies of action. For example, in his essay “Armed Innocence, or ‘Hitler’s Children’ Revisited,” Gerd Koenen argues, “the symbolic meanings of the RAF story . . . [largely] outweigh any actual political impact” (24; see also 37). 17. Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schutz,” in Daily Practice of Painting, 207. 18. Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 1985,” in Daily Practice of Painting, 119 (emphasis added). 19. Richter’s relationship to the RAF was very personal as well because his wife in the 1970s, Isa Gentzken, was very sympathetic to the group, even to the point that an identification card of hers that she reported stolen in the early 1970s ended up in the hands of an RAF member. Richter was not sympathetic to the RAF, and the couple reportedly argued about the group. See Elger, Gerhard Richter, 309. 20. Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977,” 189 (emphasis added). Richter’s appeal to grief is, I think, similar to Judith Butler’s argument that apprehending a life as grievable is a necessary condition for recognizing that life at all. See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). 21. Don DeLillo, “Looking at Meinhof,” Guardian, August 17, 2002, 27. 22. As interpreters have pointed out, Richter’s painting Betty, of his daughter, was done in 1988 while he was working on the Baader-Meinhof series. See, for example, Elger, Gerhard Richter, 307–308; and Anthony J.

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Cascardo, “The Matter of Memory: On Semblance and History in Richter and Adorno”; Marc Redfield, “Faces, Traces: Adorno, Kafka, Richter”; Stephen Melville, “Ecce Pinctura: A Note on Betty’s Mastered Irony”; and Peter de Bolla, “Facing Betty’s Turn”—all on Betty—in Aesthetics and the Work of Art: Adorno, Kafka, Richter, ed. Peter de Bolla and Stefan Uhlig (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). 23. Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977,” 203, 200. Richter does say, however, that when he started the Baader-Meinhof series, he envisioned something that had more to do with “the subjects’ lives” (“Interview with Sabine Schutz,” 209). His focus and aim changed as he worked on the paintings, for reasons he does not explain. 24. Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977,” 205. 25. Although the Vietnam War was over by 1977, the other issues taken up by the RAF, which were more particular to (West) Germany—such as the Nazi backgrounds of some business and political leaders and questions of social and economic justice—proved to be more intractable. 26. Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Rolf Schon,” in Daily Practice of Painting, 74. 27. Richter, “Notes for a News Conference,” 173. 28. Richter, “Interview with Rolf Schon,” 74. 29. Richter, “Notes for a News Conference,” 174, 175; Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977,” 189, 190, 200. Elsewhere, Richter adds that he paints not as a substitute for reality, but “as a tool” (“Interview with Rolf Schon,” 73). If we ask, “a tool for what?” I think the answer is “a tool for enacting reality,” again, both to endure and to understand it. 30. Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977,” 190. 31. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1934), 91. 32. Gerhard Richter, “From a Letter to Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,” in Daily Practice of Painting, 84 (emphasis added). 33. Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Amine Haase,” in Daily Practice of Painting, 92. 34. Richter, “Notes for a News Conference,” 174; also “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977,” 198, 205.

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35. Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977,” 197–198. 36. The Baader-Meinhof “Komplex,” as it is called, is still very much alive in Germany. See notes 12 and 16. 37. Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 1964–1965,” in Daily Practice of Painting, 37. 38. Gertrud Koch, “The Richter Scale of Blur,” October 62 (1992): 142, reprinted in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ed., Gerhard Richter (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). 39. This reaction is evident in the comments made by some critics of the Baader-Meinhof series. For example, Hilton Kramer accused Richter of making heroes or martyrs out of the terrorists, as if he were promoting the cause of the RAF, in “Telling Stories, Denying Style: Reflections on MoMA 2000,” New Criterion 19, no. 5 (2001). But I presume that these same critics would never say that the photographs of the Baader-Meinhof deaths made heroes out of the group. So what explains the alleged celebratory effect of Richter paintings, especially given the blurring issue? 40. Koch, “Richter Scale of Blur,” 42. 41. Proll, Baader-Meinhof, 007. 42. Ibid. 43. For a concise account of Richter’s use of the blurring strategy in his other paintings, see Charles W. Haxthausen’s review of the 2002 Richter Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art: “Gerhard Richter: New York and Chicago,” Burlington Magazine 144, no. 1191 (2002): 384–385. And for a discussion of how the blur differs in the Baader-Meinhof series, see Emily Apter, “Thinking Red: Ethical Militance and the Group Subject,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). Apter says that sometimes a subject’s features are blurred, suggesting “the vanishing of revolutionary idealism” (Ensslin images); sometimes the blur seems to be a form of its own that could spring into legibility with the right light (Burial); and sometimes the blur “presents an ethical militance unto death, rather than . . . a terrorist ‘cult of death’ ” (most of the paintings) (310–311). 44. According to Charles W. Haxthausen, based on his March 1995 interview with Richter (reported to the author), part of the controversy was actually that Richter “had apparently never informed any German museum, including the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, that he was willing to sell them. They were never given that option.”

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45. See, for example, Alexander Roob, Drawing Richter: Alexander Roob Draws the Exodus of the Stammheim Cycle by Gerhard Richter from the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt/Main (Frankfurt: Museum für Moderne Kunst, 2001). For a recent account of the German and American reception of the sale of Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings to MoMA, see Frances Guerin, “The Grey Space Between: Gerhard Richter’s 18. Oktober 1977,” in Guerin and Hallas, Image and the Witness, 124–126. 46. These affiliations dated back to the early 1970s, when some members of the RAF in exile received training in Jordan, and continued into the fall of 1977 when members of a Palestinian group hijacked a plane to Somalia with the hope of gaining the release of the Baader-Meinhof members in prison (this happened just before the Stammheim deaths in October 1977). For a discussion of these affiliations, see Koenen, “Armed Innocence,” 24–38. 47. Guerin, “Grey Space Between,” 126. 48. Evidence of the contemporaneity of the Baader-Meinhof series is the controversy that erupted in February 2007 when the German court decided to release Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a Baader-Meinhof member who had served twenty-four years in prison for her involvement in several murders, including that of Hanns-Martin Schleyer. Mohnhaupt was imprisoned in the 1970s but released in 1977, only to become the group’s leader for about seven years before returning to prison. This contemporaneity has raised the expectation that Richter should be clear about his judgment of the content and his place in this evolving, volatile context. If the blurring really did neutralize all content, as some critics claim, this expectation would have no traction because, by this account, the blurring would eliminate any possibility of judgment or position. The content will not go away, despite the blurring, nor will the context, despite the changes it has undergone. So Richter does not have the option to remain completely detached from the content or context, even if he wanted to. 49. Eric Kligerman, “Transgenerational Hauntings: Screening the Holocaust in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 Paintings,” in Berendse and Cornils, Baader-Meinhof Returns, 41–63. As his title indicates, Kligerman links Richter’s paintings with the Holocaust, following up on a long-term link first made infamous by Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang (London: Joseph, 1977), which is a critique of the German New Left for adopting fascist terror strategies inconsistent with their stated intentions. The Becker book appeared before the Stammheim deaths.

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50. Guerin, “Grey Space Between,” 114. 51. Susan Sontag, “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 177, 179. 52. Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Jonas Storsve,” in Daily Practice of Painting, 226. 53. While I might place more of an emphasis on reflection at this juncture, I do not mean to suggest that the experience of Richter’s BaaderMeinhof series is mainly a cognitive matter, for it is very much an affective affair, as the emphasis on compassion should make clear. Reflection without affect is not of this earth, whereas affect without reflection is too earthy. What Richter achieves is historical understanding and compassionate involvement, apprehension, and satisfaction. 54. Guerin, “Grey Space Between,” 118. 55. On the complex relationships between painting and photography in Richter’s work, see, for example, Botho Strauss, Siri Hustvedt, and Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs, ed. Markis Heinzelmann (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009). 56. Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977,” 189–190. 57. Richter, “Interview with Rolf Schon,” 74. 58. Guerin, “Grey Space Between,” 116–117. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Gregg Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 156, 141. 62. Quoted in Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977, 140. For his part, Storr claims, “In photographs we can see death with a nakedness no other medium affords. But photography does not allow us to contemplate death” (242 [emphasis added)]. Contemplation is akin to what I’m calling enactment that enables reflection. 63. Although the paintings have always been exhibited as a group, they have been hung in different sequences; regardless of the curatorial sequence, viewers can in turn experience them in different sequences. I am pointing to the combined effect of the paintings as a group, regardless of the sequence in which they are exhibited or experienced. 64. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981), 85, 34.

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65. Desa Philippi, “Moments of Interpretation,” October 62 (1992): 122. 66. Rainer Rochlitz, “ ‘Where We Have Got To,’ ” in Rainer Rochlitz, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Jean-François Chevier, and Armin Zweite, Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on Atlas (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporanani de Barcelona, 2000), 120 (emphasis added). 67. Varon, Bringing the War Home, 254. 68. Ibid., 263 (emphasis added). 69. Quoted in Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003), 56. 70. For a contrast, see the recent work of Hans-Peter Feldmann, specifically The Dead (1993), which includes more than 100 images of all the people killed (whether terrorists or their victims) during the twenty-sixyear period that the RAF was active. 71. Some critics argue, however, that Richter’s paintings, precisely because they appear blurred, express moral ambiguity or uncertainty on a topic—terrorism—that allows no room for being on the fence. This is a serious issue. But I think the view that terrorism eliminates moral choice by simplifying all choice to “for or against” is one that closes off discussion on an important, complex set of moral-political issues. Even if there is any moral certainty and consensus about terrorism among the general public, at least among all those other than the terrorists, there still should be room for discussion here. Those who have such certainty should be able to handle discussion, if only to articulate and defend their certainty. 72. I am also unconvinced by Hal Foster’s account of the alleged performative contradiction in Richter’s art practice between “cynical pastiche” and “progressivist critique,” in “Semblance According to Gerhard Richter,” Raritan 22, no. 3 (2003): 161–162, 175, 177. Foster merely repeats the placeholder version of the anti-aesthetic stance while asserting that aesthetics would require that the contradictions in Richter’s work be resolved. Richter continues to resist this kind of interpretation of his work in terms of contradiction and negation: “Far beyond such tasks of negation and criticism, all I am only interested in any longer is the aesthetic accomplishment of art” (“Benjamin Buchloh/Gerhard Richter Interview, November 2004,” 68 [emphasis added]). 73. In Michael Brenson’s review of the exhibition of the Baader-Meinhof series at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University in early 1990, he makes an even stronger claim: Richter’s paintings “oblige the public to

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answer the questions they raise,” and he adds that Richter “is probably the only artist who could have used paint to open the door on this gang and the issues” (“A Concern with Painting the Unpaintable,” New York Times, March 25, 1990, reprinted in Butin, Zu Richters Oktober-Bildern, 61, 64 [emphasis added]). 74. Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977,” 194–195. 75. Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker on the Work WAR CUT, 2004,” in Gerhard Richter: Writings, 1961–2007, 462. See also Sven Beckstette’s review of Richter’s War Cut, in Texte zur Kunst 14, no. 55 (2004): 189. 76. Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker on the Work WAR CUT,” 456. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 463. 79. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), 10, 24, 167. 80. Ibid., 18. 81. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), 65; see also 90–91 for specifics regarding the My Lai massacre. 82. Ibid., 38. 83. Sontag, On Photography, 19. 84. For an interpretation of Richter’s paintings as photographs, see Dairmuid Costello, “After Medium Specificity chez Fried: Jeff Wall as a Painter; Gerhard Richter as a Photographer,” in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 75–89. 85. Richter, “Text for Catalogue of Documenta 7,” 100. 86. Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Peter Sager,” in Daily Practice of Painting, 69. 87. Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977,” 194–195.

4. THE SALCEDO EFFECT

1. Doris Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo in Conversation with Doris Salcedo,” in Nancy Princenthal, Carlos Basualdo, and Andreas Huyssen, Doris Salcedo (London: Phaidon, 2000), 10.

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For more on Doris Salcedo, especially her most recent work not discussed here, see Alexander and Bonin’s gallery Web site: http://www.alexander andbonin.com/artists/salcedo/salcedo.html. 2. The violence of the past two decades has been perpetrated by at least the following groups: the leftist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas and Ejército Liberación Nacional; the right-wing Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia; the Cali and Medellin drug cartels; and to some extent the Colombia government, which numerous times has suspended the rule of law under emergency circumstances. 3. Paul Gilroy, “Brokenness, Division, and the Moral Topography of Post-Colonial Worlds,” in Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth, ed. Achim BorchardtHume (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), 27. 4. Achim Borchardt-Hume, “Sculpting Critical Space,” in ibid., 17. 5. Marcia Tucker, “Introduction,” in Doris Salcedo (New York: New Museum, 1998), 6. 6. Dan Cameron, “Inconsolable,” in ibid., 10. I focus on English-language writings by and about Salcedo because that is where issues related to the anti-aesthetic stance are most clearly played out. 7. Michael Kelly, “Aesthetics and Politics: The Case of the 1993 Whitney Biennial,” in Aesthetics and Politics in the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 221–263. 8. Cameron, “Inconsolable,” 9. 9. According to Jacques Ranciere, “The proliferation of voices denouncing the crisis of art or its fatal capture by discourse, the pervasiveness of the spectacle or the death of the image, suffice to indicate that a battle fought yesterday over the promises of emancipation and the illusions and disillusions of history continues today on aesthetic terrain” (The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill [New York: Continuum, 2004], 9). Or, as Susan Sontag puts it, if we could only do something about what traumatic or disturbing images show, we might not “care as much” about the kinds of issues associated with the anti-aesthetic (Regarding the Pain of Others [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003], 117). 10. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, Calif.: University Press, 2005), 2. Although Bennett analyzes four contemporary international artists, I think Salcedo best enacts the aesthetics-politics she envisions. 11. Ibid., 152. In this light, Mieke Bal’s recent identification of nine aesthetic strategies in Salcedo’s art will make even clearer how she succeeds

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in engaging contemporary political issues through the aesthetics of her art (“Earth Aches: The Aesthetics of the Cut,” in Borchardt-Hume, Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth, 42–63). The aesthetic strategies, which will be discussed or at least identified in this chapter, are (1) anthropomorphism, (2) translation, (3) duration, (4) installation, (5) site-specificity, (6) monumentality, (7) scale, (8) labor, and (9) language. See also Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), which, unfortunately, I have been unable to take into account here as it was published after my manuscript went into production. Bal’s new book is an in-depth study of Salcedo’s aesthetic project “to transform both what can be experienced through the senses and that which politics has rendered insensible” (21); in this context, aesthetics itself is “a political tool” (4). 12. Charles Merewether, “To Bear Witness,” in Tucker, Doris Salcedo, 16–17 (emphasis added). Later in the same essay, Merewether says, “Salcedo’s practice is an explicit critique of aesthetic forms of representation dominant in Colombian museums and galleries” (22). See also Charles Merewether, “The Anonymity of Violence,” in Doris Salcedo: Atrabiliarios (Wichita, Kan.: Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, 1997), unpaginated. Merewether, like other critics, links Salcedo’s Unland series to Robert Smithson’s notion of the “nonsite” because she “creates an environment that lacks its site . . . and a house . . . where something has been removed” (Anonymity of Violence”). Also, Borchardt-Hume refers to Salcedo’s use of the neologism “Unland,” which he says alludes “to a geopolitical terrain defined by what it is not” (“Sculpting Critical Space,” 15). The fact that Salcedo herself refers to Smithson’s “non-place” is just another example of her use of anti-aesthetic language that I think cannot explain the success of  her work. See Natalia Gutierrez, “Conversation with Doris Salcedo,” Art Nexus 19 (1996): 49. 13. Andreas Huyssen, “Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic,” in Princenthal, Basualdo, and Huyssen, Doris Salcedo, 92–102. He thinks Salcedo is largely successful in avoiding the “always present danger of aestheticization,” but then he adds, “And yet [there is a] compelling beauty” in her work that could revive this problem. Here is how he concludes: “The veil [of beauty over Salcedo’s sculptures], however, is indispensable in order for us to come face to face with the trauma and to become witnesses of a history we must not ignore” (102). 14. Rod Mengham, “Doris Salcedo’s Un-forms,” in Doris Salcedo (London: White Cube, 2007), 25 (emphasis added). The concept of the “un-

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form” originates with George Bataille but has been made popular more recently. See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). On “meaninglessness,” see Rod Mengham, “ ‘Failing Better’: Salcedo’s Trajectory,” in Doris Salcedo: Neither (London: White Cube, 2004), 9–11. 15. Carlos Basualdo, “A Model of Pain,” in Doris Salcedo: Neither, 30 (emphasis added). He later describes what happens in another of Salcedo’s works involving chairs, Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, as the “very impossibility of naming, recovering, preserving in memory” (33, emphasis added). 16. Bal, “Earth Aches.” 17. Ibid., 61. 18. Ibid., 44, 63. According to Bal, “With an impressive optimism, Salcedo allows us to see the unseeable, in order for the scar of the earth to heal” (63). 19. In two books on her work, Salcedo included excerpts from texts that have inspired her (Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others). Many of the same authors, or the excerpts from their works, are central in the contemporary history of the anti-aesthetic stance, as they, too, concern the impossibility of poetic existence, the need to undo images, and so on. She may utilize that language simply because the anti-aesthetic has been the lingua franca for the last twenty-five years, a period that coincides with her formative and early productive years. Salcedo earned her M.A. in sculpture at New York University in 1984 and began exhibiting widely only in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 20. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 26. 21. Doris Salcedo, “Proposal for a Project for the Triennial of Contemporary Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2005,” in Borchardt-Hume, Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth, 119. 22. Borchardt-Hume, “Sculpting Critical Space,” 15. 23. Salcedo, “Proposal for a Project for the Triennial of Contemporary Art,” 119. 24. Doris Salcedo, “Proposal for a Project for White Cube, London, 2004,” in Borchardt-Hume, Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth, 109. 25. See also Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, in which she rightly claims, “To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breath-taking provincialism” (99–100). 26. Charles Merewether, “An Interview with Doris Salcedo,” in Unland: Doris Salcedo (San Francisco: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), unpaginated (emphasis added).

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27. Bal, “Earth Aches,” 44. 28. Doris Salcedo, “Interview with Charles Merewether, 1988,” in Princenthal, Basualdo, and Huyssen, Doris Salcedo, 142 (emphasis in original). 29. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 18. 30. Salcedo, “Proposal for a Project for White Cube,” 109. 31. Ibid. 32. Merewether, “Interview with Doris Salcedo.” 33. Gutierrez, “Conversation with Doris Salcedo,” 49. 34. Shibboleth was the eighth installation in the Unilever Series, an annual commission for a single artist to make a work of art especially for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. To see images of Shibboleth and watch an interview with Salcedo, visit Tate Modern’s Web site: www.tate.org.uk/modern /exhibitions/dorissalcedo/default.shtm. 35. Doris Salcedo, “Proposal for a Project for the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 2007,” in Borchardt-Hume, Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth, 65; Tate Modern’s video of Salcedo speaking of Shibboleth is on Tate Modern’s Web site. 36. Salcedo, “Proposal for a Project for the Turbine Hall,” 65. 37. Salcedo, “Interview with Charles Merewether,” 134. 38. Merewether, “Interview with Doris Salcedo.” 39. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 17; also 27, 141. See also Gutierrez, “Conversation with Doris Salcedo,” 48. 40. Bal, “Earth Aches,” 44. 41. Nancy Princenthal, “Silence Seen,” in Princenthal, Basualdo, and Huyssen, Doris Salcedo, 57. 42. Salcedo, “Interview with Charles Merewether,” 140. 43. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 14. As Gerhard Richter says about the process of painting the Baader-Meinhof series, Salcedo says about the process of sculpting: “At the time of creating a sculpture, I am the victim in the simultaneous act of telling and living their story” (Gutierrez, “Conversation with Doris Salcedo,” 48). See also Merewether, “Interview with Doris Salcedo,” in which Salcedo says, “These victims live within me and remain in me even after the work is finished.” 44. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 17 (emphasis added). 45. Gutierrez, “Conversation with Doris Salcedo,” 49. In her early work at least, Salcedo also typically uses only tools accessible to the victims of the pain her work enacts. 46. In doing so, Salcedo creates what Olga M. Viso aptly describes as “a place where ritual is possible rather than imposed” and where, as a result

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of the ritual, the mourning for those who have suffered enters the public sphere (“Doris Salcedo: The Dynamic of Violence,” in Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s [Washington, D.C.: Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1996], 95). 47. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 17–18. 48. Ibid., 13. 49. Salcedo, “Interview with Charles Merewether,” 137. 50. Merewether, “Interview with Doris Salcedo.” 51. For a video of Doris Salcedo discussing Atrabiliarios, see the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Web site: www.sfmoma.org/msoma /artworks/8398.html. 52. Princenthal, “Silence Seen,” 55. 53. Or, in Holland Cotter’s words from an early review of La Casa Viuda (The Widowed House), Salcedo “seems intent upon distilling the physical emptiness and psychological desolation that results” from the political violence the disappeared have experienced (New York Times, April 15, 1994, C24). 54. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 16. On the floor in the same installation are roughly twenty-five boxes, each the size of an average footlocker, that are made of the same cow bladder and surgical thread used to shroud the shoes buried in the niches of the gallery walls. According to Salcedo, the boxes are receptacles for shoes likely to be generated by future events of violence. 55. Jill Bennett, “Art, Affect, and the ‘Bad Death’: Strategies for Communicating the Sense Memory of Loss,” Signs 28, no. 1 (2002): 333–351. Bennett points out that the furniture, shoes, and other objects in Salcedo’s art do not constitute visual analogies for the victims of the suffering, whether the disappeared or others; rather, the objects enact the effects “of the way things change when loss is experienced” (345). 56. Bal, “Earth Aches,” 46. 57. Gutierrez, “Conversation with Doris Salcedo,” 48. 58. See, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 59. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 13. 60. For more on the concept of “delay,” Nachtraeglichkeit, in relation to Salcedo, see Daniel Birnbaum, “Nachtraglich, Like Kissing the Hand of History,” in Unthought Known (London: White Cube, 2002), unpaginated. 61. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 27; see also 134 (emphasis added).

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62. Merewether, “Interview with Doris Salcedo.” 63. Salcedo, “Interview with Charles Merewether,” 140. 64. Ibid. 65. Bennett, Emphatic Vision, 60. 66. Birnbaum, “Nachtraglich.” See also Edlie L. Wong, “Haunting Absences: Witnessing Loss in Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios and Beyond,” in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, ed. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 173–188. Wong says that silence in Salcedo’s work becomes a site of shared collective engagement that preserves the painful inarticulateness of loss” (179 [emphasis added]). 67. See, for example, Gutierrez, “Conversation with Doris Salcedo.” 68. Elsewhere, Salcedo quotes Rene Girard’s comment that violence accelerates our perception of the passing of time, and then she adds that art “can slow down this process” (Gutierrez, “Conversation with Doris Salcedo,” 50). 69. Consider Kevin Carter’s photograph of a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture as she tried to make her way to food. A South African involved in the anti-apartheid movement, Carter won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography but was heavily criticized for his apparent moral indifference, his failure to act to help the child instead of taking a picture. Carter committed suicide shortly after winning the Pulitzer. 70. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing our Attention to Suffering (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 3. 71. Merewether, “Interview with Doris Salcedo.” 72. Bal, “Earth Aches,” 49. The Unland series comprises The Orphan’s Tunic (1997), Audible in the Mouth (1998), and Irreversible Witness (1995–1998). 73. Salcedo, “Interview with Charles Merewether,” 137. 74. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” and “Interview with Charles Merewether,” 11, 22, 137. 75. Tucker, “Introduction,” 6 (emphasis added). 76. Jacques Ranciere, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” in The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 109–138. 77. Ibid., 110. 78. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 67. 79. Merewether, “To Bear Witness,” 20. This installation was part of the Eighth International Istanbul Biennial in 2003. This piece and the ones at

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the House of Justice in Bogotá and Tate Modern are also examples of the fifth aesthetic strategy—site-specificity—that Bal identifies. 80. Gregg Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford, Calif.: University Press, 2001). 81. Cameron, “Inconsolable,” 9 (emphasis added). 82. Gutierrez, “Conversation with Doris Salcedo,” 48. 83. Salcedo, quoted in Princenthal, “Silence Seen,” 40. Salcedo also says that art is impotent when confronting absolute power, but this truism is not a point about art in particular because everybody and every practice is impotent when confronted with absolute power. Finally, Salcedo claims that she is an activist only as an artist; she does what she “has to do,” which is at the same time what she “can possibly do” as an artist (“Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 17, 35). 84. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 40. 85. Bal, “Earth Aches,” 55–57. This points to the sixth aesthetic strategy that Bal identifies: monumentality. 86. Andreas Huyssen, “Sculpture, Materiality and Memory in an Age of Amnesia,” in Displacements (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1998), 39–40. It seems appropriate to appeal to Huyssen here because Salcedo says that he inspired her work because of his writings on historical memory, mostly in the German or American context (“Artists Acknowledgements,” in “Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic,” in Princenthal, Basualdo, and Huyssen, Doris Salcedo). 87. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 88. Salcedo, “Interview with Charles Merewether,” 137, 142. 89. Bennett, Emphatic Vision, 13. 90. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 16. See also Vera Mackie, “Doris Salcedo’s Melancholy Objects,” PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. According to Mackie, when Salcedo’s work is exhibited in a public art gallery, the traces and memories enacted in it are “brought out of the realm of private contemplation and into a space of public spectatorship” (11). 91. Bennett reports that Salcedo accepts this account because she, too, has “a certain discomfort with the notion of identification and the implication that one can move into the place of the primary witness” through the substitution Salcedo herself describes above (Emphatic Vision, 66, 165n35). 92. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 11–12.

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93. Bal, “Earth Aches,” 49. 94. Quoted in Merewether, “To Bear Witness,” 19. 95. Cameron, “Inconsolable,” 12. 96. Scarry, Body in Pain, 11; Bennett, Emphatic Vision, 48. 97. Scarry, Body in Pain, 13. 98. Ibid., 52 (emphasis added). 99. Ibid., 290. 100. Ibid., 9. 101. Ibid., 56. 102. Ibid., 289, 326. 103. Merewether, “Interview with Doris Salcedo.” 104. Salcedo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo,” 145. See also Doris Salcedo, “Proposal for a Project for the Palace of Justice, Bogotá, 2002,” in Borchardt-Hume, Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth, 83. 105. Gutierrez, “Conversation with Doris Salcedo,” 50 (emphasis added). 106. Merewether, “Interview with Doris Salcedo” (emphasis added). 107. Ibid. (emphasis added). 108. Jessica Bradley, “Introduction” in Displacements, 28 (emphasis in original). 109. Two other critics, Louis Grachos and Kathryn Kanjo, also defend an internationalist interpretation of Salcedo’s art, in “The Anxiety of the Unknown,” in Sleeper: Katherina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Guillermo Kuitca, and Doris Salcedo (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995). 110. Mengham, “Doris Salcedo’s Un-forms.” Mengham calls this style “international regionalism”—local production (Bogotá) combined with international reception. In the beginning of this catalog essay, Mengham captures the local/international or particular/universal tension in Salcedo’s work, but he does not resolve it. 111. Wong, “Haunting Absences,” 182 (emphasis added). On the point about Salcedo’s new emphasis, Wong quotes Bennett, “Art, Affect, and the ‘Bad Death,’ ” 340–341. 112. Gilroy, “Brokenness, Division, and Moral Topography,” 26–27. 113. Viso, “Doris Salcedo: The Dynamic of Violence,” 94. 114. Birnbaum, “Nachtraglich,” 1. 115. Salcedo, “Proposal for a Project for the Turbine Hall,” 65. 116. Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contin-

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gency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 15. 117. Borchardt-Hume, “Sculpting Critical Space,” 21. See also 19, where he describes what is inside the cut in the floor. 118. Ibid., 19. 119. Tanya Barson, “ ‘Unland’: The Place of Testimony,” Tate Papers 1 (2004), available at http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers /04spring/ (emphasis added). 120. Merewether, “Interview with Doris Salcedo.” On the relevance of tragedy to modern and contemporary art, see Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett, trans. James Phillips (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 121. Bal, “Earth Aches,” 46–49. See also Huyssen, “Sculpture, Materiality and Memory,” 31. 122. But nor did Salcedo use heaps of shoes to invoke what has been called the “Holocaust effect,” a reference to the mountains of shoes left behind after a genocide. So she resisted the tendency to universalize or generalize the violence enacted in her work. 123. Bal, “Earth Aches,” 46. At the same time, Salcedo is careful to avoid turning each shoe or pair into a fetish object on display to be experienced for the imaginary pleasure it provokes. She avoids this effect by shrouding each shoe or pair behind fiber made from cow bladder, as we have discussed, so that it is distantly and thus respectfully displayed—more like a body in a casket during a wake than a new style of shoes displayed in a Fifth Avenue window. 124. Gilroy, “Brokenness, Division, and Moral Topography,” 26. He also makes it clear why it is appropriate and effective for Salcedo to be making a crack in an art museum because cultural institutions help to build and sustain the contemporary securitocracy. 125. Huyssen, “Sculpture, Materiality and Memory,” 31. In making a contrast between Salcedo’s “memory sculptures” and monuments or memorials, Huyssen helps to clarify the point here about the particular/individual and universal/general. Her art is different from a monument or memorial because its site of installation is more local, usually installed in a museum or a gallery, and the installation is always temporary rather than permanent (e.g., at the Palace of Justice in Bogotá). At the same time, her work is about individuals and addressed to individuals rather than like a monument or memorial that is, by contrast, about a nation and addressed to a people.

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Furthermore, in being about and addressing individuals, Salcedo’s art has to relate to the human body in a different way; she has to “speak” in a more affective, bodily language for her work to be effective. 126. Borchardt-Hume, “Sculpting Critical Space,” 21.

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INDEX

absorption, 158, 179n27 abstract expressionism, 51, 177n16; audience for, 190n29; model for, 188n16; Pop art and, 34, 36, 41, 42 Abstract Painting No. 848-2 (Richter), 115–116 Abu Ghraib, 10, 79, 80–81, 125, 203nn86–87 Abyss (Salcedo), 133 accountability: for audience, 158, 164; with photography, 78–79, 80–81, 82–83, 149, 203n86, 210n39, 220n69; with suffering, 78–79, 80–81, 82–83, 156–157, 164, 186n44, 199n33, 215n9 Adorno, Theodor, xvi, 2, 6, 11; on art, 20, 192n49; on

materialism, 7; on representation, 153; on semblance, 65 aesthetics: art as needing, 11, 51–52; artists and, xviii–xix, 5, 20; autonomy and, 178n19; contemporaneity of, 25, 44, 47–48, 49; as critical thinking, xviii; critique and, xvi–xvii, xix, 4–6, 11, 16, 29–31, 48, 54–55, 181n6; ethics and, xiv, xv, xvi, xix–xx, 54; goal of, 22–23; history of, 187n9; of indifference, 176n6; interpretation and, 18–19, 185nn35–36, 185n39; in modernity, xv, 179n28; mourning, 10, 183n24; norms of, 32–39; openness in, 46–47;

aesthetics (continued) photography and, 16, 57, 184n31; as political tool, 215n11; and politics, 138, 180n2, 210n43, 215n7; Pop art and, 13–14, 25, 26, 27–29, 30–36, 37, 38–39, 40, 41, 51–52, 194n70; regeneration of, 1–12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 23, 48–49, 52, 87, 131–132, 173, 180n3; removal of, xiii–xv; from scientific model, xv, xvi; self-critique in, 2–3; strategies of, 86, 123, 130, 131, 132–133, 134, 140–142, 143–144, 150–151, 157–158, 160–161, 164, 165–166, 171, 215n11, 220n79; theoretical, 47; treachery of, 18, 200n43; universality and, xvii–xviii, 13, 53, 176n6 Afghanistan, 116 “Against Interpretation” (Sontag), 18–19 Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Bernstein), 182n20 akrasia, 199n36 Al Qaeda, 101, 203n86 Alloway, Lawrence, 26–27, 36–37, 184n29, 186nn2–3, 191n37 America, 17; California, 192n48; censorship in, 118–119; conscientious objector status in, 201n60; Embassy, 207n13; Pop art from, 26 American Pop Art (Alloway), 184n29

INDEX

American Society for Aesthetics and the Woodstock Artists Association, xv Annäherung, 100 anti-aesthetic (stance), xiii–xx, 1–23, 25–39, 50–54, 56–58, 66, 71–72, 74, 81, 83–86, 115, 118–119, 123–124, 127, 129–157, 162, 164, 175, 176nn1–3, 176–177nn5–6, 178n17, 179n25, 180n28, 180nn1–2, 181n3, 181n7, 184n31, 205n4, 205n8, 213n72, 215n6, 215n9, 216n12, 217n19 Anti-Aesthetic, The:: Essays on Postmodern Culture, xvi, xvii, xviii, 178n17 anxiety, 77 apathy, 73–74, 134 apprehension, 21–23, 66–68, 73, 77, 82–83, 87, 91-92, 112, 124, 126–127, 134, 150, 156–158, 160, 162–163, 165, 173, 204n92, 212n53. See also recognition; satisfaction art: absorption with, 158, 179n27; Adorno on, 20, 192n49; autonomy of, xvi–xvii, 9–10, 128, 134, 135, 136, 138–140, 157, 178n19, 179n25; with censorship, 113, 118, 119, 122; contemporaneity of, 15, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 38, 40, 44, 47–48, 49, 50–51, 53, 99, 102, 173; context of, 127–128, 134–135, 143, 223n125; crisis of, 131, 180, 215n9; as

226

critique, 4–5, 7, 18, 98–99, 125, 128; critique of, 3–5, 5–6, 49, 181n13; duality in, 60; efficacy of, 3; as enactment, 20–23, 62, 73, 91–92, 95–98, 123, 124, 128, 133, 135, 139, 140, 141, 145–146, 152, 154, 163, 186n45, 209n29; environment and, 21, 62; ethical-political relationship with, 36, 195n74; ethics of, 14–15; as experience, 124, 132, 133, 135, 170, 212n53, 213n73; as expressive, 144, 152; fraudulence of, 40–43, 192n49, 193n51, 195n73; futurity of, 29; historicity of, 29, 69–70; as hunger enactment, 20–23, 62, 73, 91, 98, 123, 128, 186n45; impotence of, 221n83; intelligibility of, 3, 6; internationalization of, 167–168; interpretation of, 18–19, 185nn35–36, 185n39; limits of, 156–157; meaning through, 7–8, 95–96, 126, 127, 132; moral-political power of, 11, 12–13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19–20, 21–22, 36, 48, 55, 56, 57–58, 63, 64–65, 67–68, 69, 70, 71–75, 76, 77–83, 84, 85, 86, 97, 101, 113–114, 118, 122–123, 124, 125–126, 127, 128, 133, 134, 150, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 179n27; as needing aesthetics, 11, 51–52; negation of, 9; nonaesthetic, 130–132;

227

ontology of, 14–15, 42, 43, 44, 47, 69–70, 149, 193n55; openness in, 45–48, 136; originality of, 61; particularity in, 71, 75, 76, 79, 96, 97, 126, 171, 223n125; philistines and, 177n12; photography as, 57, 59, 61, 200n43; as placeholder, 8, 10, 213n72; political, 131–132, 139; push/pull in, 103, 105, 106; representation in, 114–115, 122, 152–155, 156, 183n22; Richter on, 87, 115, 127–128, 204nn3–4, 213n72; right of, 192n49; Salcedo on, 221n83; as semblance, 62–64, 65, 124; suffering in, 21–22, 57, 58, 67–77, 78, 79, 80, 81–82, 83, 84–85, 139, 141–142, 143–144; time in, 8, 220n68; universality of, 53, 126. See also audience; specific artworks; specific genres of art “Art After Philosophy” (Kosuth), 176n2 “Art and Idea” (Sesonke), 187n10 Art as Experience (Dewey), 21 art history, 5–6, 53 art theory, 6; iconoclasm and, 182n17; mourning in, 11; paintings in, 126–127; popularization of, 7; time in, 8–9 artists: aesthetics and, xviii–xix, 5, 20; double bind of, 10; ethical-political relationship of, 36; role of, 98–99; as self-conscious, 25; Sontag on,

INDEX

artists (continued) 25, 55; words of, 85–86. See also specific artists “Artworld, The” (Danto), 30–31, 42–43 Atget, Eugène, 61–62 atmosphere of theory, 43 Atrabiliarios (Salcedo), 142, 143; materials in, 142, 143–144, 171, 219nn54–55, 223nn122–123; subject of, 165; suffering in, 139, 154 audience: for abstract expressionism, 190n29; accountability for, 158, 164; Crow on, 31–32, 34, 35, 36, 39, 43–44, 189n17, 191n32, 191n34, 192n48; paradox for, 189n17; of Pop art, 31–33, 34, 35, 36–37, 38–39, 41, 42–44, 48, 189n23, 190n29, 191n32, 192n48, 195n73 Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, 215n2 autonomy, xvi–xvii, 9–10, 128, 157; aesthetics and, 178n19; iconoclasm and, 179n25; politics and, 138–139; Ranciere on, 178n19; rejection of, 179n25; Salcedo and, 134, 135, 136, 138–140; in suffering, 139 avant-garde, 34–35 Baader, Andreas, 87, 104, 105 Baader-Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67—77 (Proll), 88, 95 Baader-Meinhof Group: backgrounds of, 208n16;

INDEX

death in, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94–96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 104, 104, 105, 107, 108–110, 111, 112, 207n14; enactment of, 17, 88, 90–92, 95–98, 100, 103–104, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114–115, 141, 208n15; generations of, 207n13; leadership of, 211n48; legacy of, 106, 108; martyrdom of, 101, 210n39; terrorism by, 99, 102, 207n13, 208n16, 209n25; training of, 211n46; victims of, 113–114, 207n13, 213n70; Vietnam War resistance by, 87, 112. See also specific group members Baader-Meinhof Group painting series (Richter), 207n12; aesthetic strategies in, 86, 123; blurring with, 95, 98, 99–101, 102–103, 104, 105, 106–108, 110–111, 210n39, 210n43, 211n48, 213n71; closure with, 108–109, 111–112; contemporaneity of, 211n48; content of, 211n48; death in, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94–96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 104, 104, 105, 107, 108–110, 111, 112; enactment in, 17, 88, 90–92, 95–98, 100, 103–104, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114–115, 141, 208n15; exhibition of, 87, 206n11, 212n63; experience of, 212n53, 213n73; focus in, 209n23; images, 88, 89, 94, 104, 105, 111; indeterminacy with, 106, 108, 110–112,

228

213n71; martyrdom with, 101, 210n39; sale of, 101–102, 210n44. See also Richter, Gerhard; specific paintings Bacon, Francis, 85 Bal, Mieke, 215n11; on Atrabiliarios, 144, 171; on politics, 138, 157; on Shibboleth, 132–133; on time, 160–161; on Unland series, 151 Barson, Tanya, 171 Barthes, Roland, 56, 109, 187n10, 198n22 Basualdo, Carlos, 132 Baudrillard, Jean, xix, 74, 183n24 Beautiful Suffering, 77 Beautiful Suffering (Duganne), 72 beauty: in photography, 61; return to, 181n7; Salcedo and, 216n13; suffering as, 76, 202n77; universality of, 76 Beckett, Samuel, 58, 201n64 “Becoming Susan Sontag” (Eisenberg), 184n32 Benjamin, Walter, 56–57, 62, 198n22 Bennett, Jill: on enactment, 162; on experience, 131; on materials, 146, 219n55; on suffering, 159–160; on witness, 221n91 Berger, Maurice, 175n1 Bergman, Ingmar, 160 Bernstein, Jay, 182n20 Bersani, Leo, 182n20 Betty (Richter), 208n22 Birnbaum, Daniel, 146, 168

229

blurring: with Baader-Meinhof Group painting series, 95, 98, 99–101, 102–103, 104, 105, 106–108, 110–111, 210n39, 210n43, 211n48, 213n71; in paintings, 106–107; in photography, 107; Richter on, 106–107; by Salcedo, 143 Body in Pain, The (Scarry), 160 Bois, Yve-Alain, 177n16, 205n5 Bonn, Germany, 207n13 Borchardt-Hume, Achim, 216n12; on Abyss, 133; on Shibboleth, 170, 173; on witness, 129–130 Borges, Jorge Luis, 148 Bosnia, 58, 71, 82, 83, 201n64, 203n84 Bradley, Jessica, 167 Brazil, 74, 76 Brenson, Michael, 213n73 Bresson, Robert, 103 Brillo Box (Warhol), 29, 30–31 British Journal of Aesthetics, 187n4 Buchloh, Benjamin, 205n4 Bush, George W., 203n86 Butler, Judith, 10, 69, 185n35, 199n38, 208n20 Cali drug cartel, 215n2 California, 192n48 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 56 Cameron, Dan, 130, 155 Camp, 39–40, 192n45 Campbell, David, 200n45 capitalism, 86 Capitalist Realism, 86 Carter, Kevin, 220n69 Castello di Ravioli, 133

INDEX

Castle, Terry, 192n45 Cavell, Stanley, 27–28, 40–41; Crow and, 42, 43–44; Danto and, 49, 195n73; Eco and, 45; on fraudulence, 193n51, 195n73; as modernist, 195n73 censorship, 113, 118, 119, 122 Chouinard Art Institute, 33 Christ, 68 Clark, T. J., 8, 8–9, 11, 179n27 Colombia, 140, 216n12; Palace of Justice in, 155; terrorism in, 165, 215n2 compassion, 19–20, 22, 71, 75, 82; anxiety as, 77; critique of, 77–78, 126; through detachment, 103, 105, 106; as nonaesthetic, 140; reflection and, 212n53; for Salcedo, 140, 141–142, 159; suffering and, 72–74, 77; terror and, 141; transitivity of, 97; triggers for, 141; universality of, 127 concentration camps, 57 conscientious objector status, 201n60 contemplation, 212n62 “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public” (Steinberg), 32 context, 127–128, 134–135, 143, 223n125 Coplans, John, 51 Costello, Dairmuid, 184n31 Cotter, Holland, 219n53 Courbet, Gustave, 32 Cries and Whispers (Bergman), 160 Critical Inquiry, 175n1

INDEX

critique: aesthetics and, xvi–xvii, xix, 4–6, 11, 16, 29–31, 48, 54–55, 181n6; by art, 2–5, 98–99; of art, 3–5, 5–6, 49, 181n13; art as, 4–5, 7, 18, 98–99, 125, 128; -asiconoclasm, 182n17; of compassion, 77–78, 126; of October 18, 1977 series, 102; of Regarding the Pain of Others, 199n38; self-, 2–3, 195n73; of Shibboleth, 132–133, 158, 170, 172, 173; of universality, 172 Crow, Thomas: on abstract expressionism, 188n16; on audience, 31–32, 34, 35, 36, 39, 43–44, 189n17, 191n32, 191n34, 192n48; Cavell and, 42, 43–44; on Happenings, 39; philosophy for, 38; Rise of the Sixties, The: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, 29, 31–34, 35, 36, 39, 43–44, 188n12 culture, 36–37, 38, 42, 43, 54, 191n30 cynicism, 73–74, 82 Danto, Arthur, 14, 15, 27; on artworld, 188n14; “Artworld, The,” 30–31, 42–43; on beauty, 202n77; on Brillo Box, 29, 30–31; Cavell and, 49, 195n73; Doris on, 29–30; essentialism of, 45, 47, 53 Dead, The (Feldmann), 213n70 death: in Baader-Meinhof Group, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94–96, 97,

230

98, 99, 103, 104, 104, 105, 107, 108–110, 111, 112, 207n14; enactment of, 109; in photography, 212n62, 213n70; universality of, 95 Debord, Guy, 74 delay, 146, 147, 148–149 Deleuze, Gilles, 85 DeLillo, Don, 92–93 demand: for accountability, 78; for action, 148, 156; for aesthetics, xviii, xix, 52; answer, 99, 123; for apprehension, 20–21, 62, 67, 71, 74, 77–78, 87, 126; art, xx; for art critique, xix, 11; by art, xvii, 156, 162; and Dewey, 21; for inquiry, 123; for meaning, 96; moral, 21–22, 62, 67, 71, 74–75, 77–78, 80, 82–83, 87, 157, 162; on art, xvi; political, 21–22, 62, 67, 71, 75, 77–78, 80, 82–83, 87, 126, 157, 162; for recognition, 21, 62, 157–158, 166; response, 128; for satisfaction, 21, 62, 67, 71, 77–78, 80, 82, 87, 91, 124, 126, 156–158, 162, 166, for understanding, 112 democratic drive, 197n10 Derrida, Jacques, 50 desensitization, 201n53 detachment, 103, 105, 106 detention camps, 135 Dewey, John, 20–21, 62, 91, 186n3; on art as enacted hunger, 21–23, 62, 73, 80, 91, 95, 98, 123–124, 186n45; on grief, 96; Sontag and, 185n39

231

Dewey Effect, 20–23 Dezeuze, Anna, 48, 180n3 Disaster Series (Warhol), 195n74 Disasters of War, The (Goya), 68 Doris, Sarah, 29–30 draftees, 201n60 duality, 59–60, 63, 65–66, 200n44, 200n45, 202n80 Duchamp, Marcel, xiv–xv, 6 Duganne, Erina, 72 Dutoit, Ulysse, 182n20 East Germany, 86 Eco, Umberto, 27, 187n10; Cavell and, 45; influence of, 47–48; on kitsch, 35; on openness, 45–47, 193n59, 193n63; as political, 195n74; Sontag and, 45, 46, 47 Eight International Istanbul Biennial, 220n79 Eisenberg, Deborah, 184n32 Ejército Liberación Nacional, 215n2 Elger, Dietmar, 208n15 Embassy, U.S., 207n13 Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Bennett), 131 enact, 11–12, 18, 71, 83, 91–93, 95–96, 98, 106–107, 114, 119, 122–123, 128, 146, 154–156, 162, 164, 173, 219n55. enacted, 9, 15, 18, 20–21, 52–53, 68, 76, 81, 83, 93, 95–96, 98–99,104, 111, 122–124, 134, 139–141, 144–146, 152, 154–156, 158–165, 172–173,

INDEX

enacted (continued) 186n45, 203n86, 221n90, 223n122 enacting, 12, 22, 61, 68, 70–71, 92–93, 95, 98, 140, 144, 146, 155–156, 158, 162, 209n29 enactment: art as, 20–23, 62, 73, 91–92, 95–98, 123, 124, 128, 133, 135, 139, 140, 141, 145–146, 152, 154, 163, 186n45, 209n29; in BaaderMeinhof Group painting series, 17, 88, 90–92, 95–98, 100, 103–104, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114–115, 141, 208n15; Bennett on, 162; of death, 109; hunger, 20–23, 62, 73, 91, 98, 123, 128, 186n45; Richter on, 209n29; by Salcedo, 154–155, 156–157, 159, 161, 162–163, 165, 171 endurance, 154–155, 156, 160–161, 162 Enemies, The, 148 Ensslin, Gudrun, 87 environment, 21, 62 Ernst, Max, 51 essentialism, 45, 47, 53, 195n73 ethics, xiv, xv, xvi, xix–xx, 14–15, 54 Feldmann, Hans-Peter, 213n70 film, 19, 196n3 form, undoing of, 6 Foster, Hal, xvi, xviii, 178n17, 179n24,190n29, 195n74, 213n72 fraudulence, 40–43, 192n49, 193n51, 195n73

INDEX

Fried, Michael, 158, 179n27 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas, 215n2 Fuller, Buckminster, xv futurity, 29 gay issues, 194n72 Geneva Convention, 203n86 genocide, 82–83 Gentzken, Isa, 208n19 Germany, 93, 99, 101, 110; Bonn, 207n13; East, 86; Krefeld, 87; West, 86. See also Baader-Meinhof Group; Baader-Meinhof Group painting series Gilroy, Paul, 129, 172, 223n124 Girard, Rene, 220n68 God, 152 Goldberg, Whoopie, 58, 83 Goodman, Nelson, 28 Goya, Francisco de, 68 Greenberg, Clement, 27, 35, 41, 51, 189n23 grief, 68–69, 71, 93; as necessary, 208n20; particularity in, 96–97; universality of, 96 Groys, Boris, 6–7 Guantanamo Bay, 203n86 Guerin, Frances, 84, 102, 103, 105 Haiti earthquake, 72 Hallas, Roger, 84 Hanson, R. N., 28 Happenings, 38–39, 193n63 “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition” (Sontag), 29

232

Harrison, Sylvia, 29, 53; on postmodernism, 52; on Sontag, 30 Harvey, James, 189n25 Haxthausen, Charles W., 205n8, 210n44 Hegel, Georg W. F., 8, 13 Herrhausen, Alfred, 207n13 Hess, Thomas, 35–36 Hinderliter, Beth, 181n7 historicity, 29, 69–70 Ho, Melissa, xvi Holocaust effect, 223 Horowitz, Gregg, 109, 155, 183n28 Hughes, Langston, 11–12 human rights, 203n86 humanity, normative concept of, 170 hunger: for aesthetics, xiv, xvi–xvii, xix–xx, xxii, 2–3, 12, 14, 18–19, 21–23, 52, 56–57, 128, 177n16, 186n45; art as enacted (Dewey), 21–23, 62, 73, 80, 91, 95, 98, 123–124, 186n45 Hussein, Saddam, 116 Huyssen, Andreas, 132, 158, 216n13, 221n86, 223n125 Iconoclash, 10 iconoclasm, 6–7, 32, 84–85, 153; autonomy and, 179n25; critique-as-, 182n17 Image and the Witness, The: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (Guerin and Hallas), 84 immigration, 136, 139, 172

233

indeterminacy, 106, 108, 110–112, 153, 213n71 indifference, 176n6 intentionality, 134, 135–136, 137 International Committee of the Red Cross, 80 international regionalism, 222n110 internationalization, 167–168 interpretation, 18–19, 185nn35–36, 185n39 “Introduction: Photography’s Double Index” (Kelsey and Stimson), 78, 199n35, 200n44, 202n80 Iraq, 116 Iraq War, 17, 82, 116–117; Abu Ghraib, 10, 79, 80–81, 125, 203nn86–87; censorship in, 118–119; experience of, 124; first, 207n13; photography of, 10, 79, 80–81, 125–126; understanding of, 118–119, 123 Istanbul, 154 Iverson, Margaret, 176n6 Jarr, Alfredo, 76 Johns, Jasper, 32–33 Johnson, Lyndon, 125 Johnson, Philip, 175n1 Jordan, 211n46 Joy of Life, The (Matisse), 32 Jusdanis, Gregory, 178n19 Kaizen, William, 181n7 Kaprow, Allan, 38 Kaufman, Robert, xvi

INDEX

Kelsey, Robin, 78, 199n35, 200n44, 202n80 Kennedy, Jacqueline, 113 Kennedy, John F., 113 kitsch, 34, 35, 36–37 Klein, Yves, 51 Kligerman, Eric, 103 Koch, Gertrud, 100, 110 Koenen, Gerd, 208n16 Korea, 125 Korean War, 125 Kosuth, Joseph, 176n2 Kozloff, Max, 34 Kramer, Hilton, 210n39 Krauss, Rosalind, 6; on meaning, 182n16; on photography, 15–16, 184n31 Krefeld, Germany, 87 Kuhn, Thomas, 28 La Casa Viuda I (Salcedo), 147 La Honduras, 165 La Negra, 165 Langer, Suzanne, xv Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais), 19 Latour, Bruno, xx, 10 Leibovitz, Annie, 58, 83 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso), 32 Levinas, Emmanuel, 144 Lippard, Lucy, 185n39 Litanies (Morris), xiii, 175n1 literature, 50, 200n44 “Looking at Meinhof” (DeLillo), 92–93 Lopate, Phillip, 184n30, 184n32

INDEX

“Lowbrow Highbrow: Highbrow Lowbrow” (Eco), 187n10 Lowe, Paul, 71 Mackie, Vera, 216n13, 221n90 Mahsun, Carol Anne, 187n10 Maimon, Vered, 181n7 Manet, Edouard, 32 manifestos, 40 Mansoor, Jaleh, 181n7 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 185n39 Marranca, Bonnie, 18 materialism, 7 materials: Bennett on, 146, 219n55; for Pop art, 35–36; of Salcedo, 140–141, 142, 143–144, 146, 151–152, 171, 218n45, 219nn54–55, 223nn122–123; in War Cut, 115–116, 119 Matisse, Henri, 32, 205n5 McCormick, Seth, 181n7 meaning: through art, 7–8, 95–96, 126, 127, 132; Krauss on, 182n16; in photography, 109–110; Ranciere on, 7–8; as unstable, 182n16 Medellin drug cartel, 215n2 Meinhof, Ulrike, 87, 208n16 Meins, Holger, 87, 208n16 Mengham, Rod, 132, 222n110 Merewether, Charles, 132, 216n12 Meyer, James, 1, 180n3 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 87 Mitchell, W. J. T., 186n45 modernity, 187n4; aesthetics in, xv, 179n28; as failure, 182n20; manifestos in, 40;

234

photography as, 184n31; self-critique for, 195n73 Mohnhaupt, Brigitte, 211n48 Möller, Ingrid, 207n13 Mondrian, Piet, 51 morality, 199n36 moral-political unconscious, 62–63 Morris, Robert, xiii–xiv, 2, 25, 175n1, 176n3 mourning, 10, 183n28; in art theory, 11; ritual for, 218n46 mourning aesthetics, 10, 183n24 Museum für Moderne Kunst, 210n44 Museum Haus Ester, 87 Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), New York City, 35, 101, 102 music, 40–41; fraudulence in, 195n73; openness in, 45–46 “Music Decomposed” (Cavell), 40–41, 45 Muybridge, Eadweard, 61 negative space, 7, 8, 132, 136 negativity, 132–133 Neither (Salcedo), 135, 167–168, 169 New American Realism Exhibition, The, 194n70 New Museum, 168 New York City, 35, 101–102 Newman, Barnett, xv, xvi, 2, 177n10, 177n16 “Newman’s Laterality” (Bois), 205n5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 150

235

non-place, 216n12 “Notes on ’Camp’ ” (Sontag), 29 Notes on Sontag (Lopate), 184n30, 184n32 Noviembre 6 y 7 (Salcedo), 132 Obama, Barack, 203n86 October 18, 1977, Dead I (Richter), 111 October 18, 1977 series (Richter), 17, 85, 86, 87, 90, 101, 102; Confrontation 2, 88, 88; Funeral, 93, 94; Hanged, 88, 89; Man Shot Down I, 104, 104, Man Shot Down 2, 104, 105; O’Doherty, Brian, 34–35 Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Bal), 215n11 Oldenburg, Claus, 42 On Photography (Sontag), 15, 16, 18, 58, 59–60; compassion in, 72–73; influence of, 56–57; Platonic theory in, 62–63 “One Culture and the New Sensibility” (Sontag), 29 O’Neill, John, xvi open work, 45–48, 136, 193n59, 193n63 openness, 45–48, 136, 193n59, 193n63 optical unconscious, 62 Osborne, Peter, 8 Other: over time, 152; for Salcedo, 144–145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152; suffering of, 144, 145–146, 150–151, 154–155, 160, 162

INDEX

pain, 163 paintings: in art theory, 126–127; blurring in, 106–107; as representation, 114–115. See also specific paintings Palace of Justice, 155 particularity: in art, 71, 75, 76, 79, 96, 97, 126, 171, 223n125; in grief, 96–97; in photography, 71, 75, 76, 79; of Salcedo, 165–167, 170, 171, 172, 223n125; of suffering, 70–71, 72, 75, 76, 79, 96–97, 160–161, 164, 165, 166–167, 171 perceptual, xvii Philippi, Desa, 110, 182n22 philistine, 33 philosophy: contemporaneity of, 28, 29, 50–51; Pop art and, 13–14, 25, 26, 27–29, 30–32, 37–40, 42–51, 52, 53, 54, 187n9, 194n70, 195n74; Sontag on, 28 Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 13 photography: accountability with, 78–79, 80–81, 82–83, 149, 203n86, 210n39, 220n69; aesthetics and, 16, 57, 184n31; as art, 57, 59, 61, 200n43; beauty in, 61; blurring in, 107; of concentration camps, 57; concerned, 72; contemplation and, 212n62; control by, 199n29; death in, 212n62, 213n70; democratic drive of, 197n10; duality in, 59–60, 63, 65–66, 200n44, 200n45, 202n80; film-like, 196n3; of

INDEX

Iraq War, 10, 79, 80–81, 125–126; Krauss on, 15–16, 184n31; meaning in, 109–110; mediation of, 107–108, 110; as modernity, 184n31; moral-political power of, 16, 56, 57–58, 59, 64–65, 66–67, 69, 70, 71, 73–75, 76, 77–83, 84, 198n22, 203n84, 203n87; ontology of, 15; particularity in, 71, 75, 76, 79; punctum and, 198n22; ritual of, 202n80; as semblance, 62–64, 65; Sontag on, 57–58, 59–67, 68–69, 74–75, 84, 197n10, 199n29, 199n33, 200n43, 201n53, 203n87; spectacle in, 75–76, 203n86; suffering in, 67–68, 70, 71, 72–75, 80, 81–82, 83, 203n86; as surrealism, 61–62; trust in, 199n35; in Vietnam War, 79–80, 124–125; of World War I, 67 “Photography: A Little Summa” (Sontag), 66, 200n43 Picasso, Pablo, 32 Plato, 62, 63 plays, 201n64 “Poetics of the Open Work, The” (Eco), 45 politics: aesthetics and, 138, 180n2, 210n43, 215n7; autonomy and, 138–139; Bal on, 138, 157 Pop art: abstract expressionism and, 34, 36, 41, 42; aesthetics with, 13–14, 25, 26, 27–29, 30–36, 37, 38–39, 40, 41,

236

51–52, 194n70; from America, 26; audience of, 31–33, 34, 35, 36–37, 38–39, 41, 42–44, 48, 189n23, 190n29, 191n32, 192n48, 195n73; California, 192n48; Camp and, 192n45; contemporaneity of, 38, 40, 47–48; as culture, 36–37, 38, 42, 43, 54, 191n30; definition of, 184n29, 186n2; development of, 26–27; fraudulence of, 40–43, 195n73; gay issues and, 194n72; Happenings, 38–39; interpretation of, 185n39; as kitsch, 34, 35, 36–37; materials for, 35–36; Museum of Modern Art panel on, 35; music and, 40–41; philosophy and, 13–14, 25, 26, 27–29, 30–32, 37–40, 42–51, 52, 53, 54, 187n9, 194n70, 195n74; postmodernism from, 52; self-critique with, 195n73; Sontag on, 192n45 Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue (Mahsun), 187n10 Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture (Doris), 29 Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism (Harrison), 29 “ ‘Pop’ Culture, Metaphysical Disgust, and the New Vulgarians” (Kozloff), 34 Pop Effect, 13–14, 19, 25–55, 56 Popper, Karl, 28 popular culture, 191n37 postmodernism, 52, 73–74

237

presence, 153, 154–155 Princenthal, Nancy, 139, 143 prisoners of war, 203n86 Proll, Astrid: life of, 207n14; Richter and, 17, 88, 90–92, 95, 96, 100, 208n15 Proll, Thorward, 207n14, 208n16 “Prologue for a New Aesthetic” (Newman), 177n16 publicity condition, 78–79, 162 Pulitzer Prize, 220n69 punctum, 198n22 Ranciere, Jacques: on autonomy, 178n19; on crisis of art, 131, 180, 215n9; on meaning, 7–8; on mourning, 10; on universality, xviii; on unrepresentable, 152–153 Raskin, David, 181n6 Raspe, Jan-Carl, 87 Rauschenberg, Robert, 42, 51 “Readymade, Found Object, Photograph” (Iverson), 176n6 recognition, 21–23, 68, 73, 82–83, 87, 91, 112, 124, 134, 148, 150, 157–158, 160, 162–163, 167, 172–173. See also apprehension; satisfaction reflection, 212n53 Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag), 15, 16, 20, 56, 57–58; critique of, 199n38; moral-political influence in, 73, 74, 75–76; Wolff in, 67 Reinhardt, Mark, 77

INDEX

“Remarks at the Fourth Annual Woodstock Art Conference” (Newman), 177n10 representation, 183n22; of censorship, 122; paintings as, 114–115; unrepresentable, 152–155, 156 Resnais, Alan, 19 Richter, Gerhard, 16, 19; Abstract Painting No. 848-2, 115–116; aesthetic strategies of, 123; on art, 87, 115, 127–128, 204nn3–4, 213n72; Bernstein on, 182n20; Betty by, 208n22; on blurring, 106–107; on enactment, 209n29; political work by, 205n8; on power, 20; Proll, A., and, 17, 88, 90–92, 95, 96, 100, 208n15; victims and, 113–114, 207n13, 213n70; War Cut, 17, 85, 86, 115–116, 117, 118–119, 120, 121, 122–124, 127, 204n2; wife of, 208n19. See also BaaderMeinhof Group painting series; October 18, 1977 series Richter Effect, 17, 85–128 Rise of the Sixties, The: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (Crow), 29, 31–34, 35, 36, 39, 43–44, 188n12 ritual: for mourning, 218n46; of photography, 202n80; around suffering, 140–141 Rochlitz, Rainer, 112 Rosenberg, Eric, 184n31 Rosler, Martha, 72 Ross, Toni, 1, 180n3

INDEX

Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). See Baader-Meinhof Group Ruscha, Edward, 33 Rush, Fred, 185n34 Salcedo, Doris, 16, 18; Abyss, 133; aesthetic strategies of, 130, 131, 132–133, 134, 140–142, 143–144, 150–151, 157–158, 160–161, 164, 165–166, 171, 215n11, 220n79; on art, 221n83; Atrabiliarios, 139, 142, 142, 143, 143–144, 154, 165, 171, 219nn54–55, 223nn122–123; autonomy and, 134, 135, 136, 138–140; Bal on, 132–133, 138, 144, 151, 157, 215n11; beauty and, 216n13; Bennett on, 131, 146, 159–160, 162, 219n55, 221n91; blurring by, 143; compassion for, 140, 141–142, 159; context for, 134–135, 143, 223n125; delay for, 146, 147, 148; education of, 217n19; enactment by, 154–155, 156–157, 159, 161, 162–163, 165, 171; exhibition of, 173, 221n90; expression and, 144, 152; Huyssen and, 158, 216n13, 221n86, 223n125; intentionality for, 134, 135–136, 138; international regionalism of, 222n110; La Casa Viuda I, 147; materials of, 140–141, 142, 143–144, 146, 151–152, 171, 218n45, 219nn54–55, 223nn122–123; Merewether

238

on, 132, 216n12; negativity of, 132–133; Neither, 135, 167–168, 169; nonaesthetic factors, 130–132, 140; Noviembre 6 y 7, 132; Other for, 144–145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152; particularity of, 165–167, 170, 171, 172, 223n125; process of, 144–145, 218n43; publicity of, 162; purpose of, 219n53, 221n83; Shibboleth, 129–133, 136, 137, 139, 158, 170, 172, 173, 218n34, 223n124; silence for, 220n66; Sontag and, 20; spectacle for, 133–134, 167; universality of, 136, 139, 163–164, 165–166, 168, 170, 171, 172; Unland series, 151, 151, 161, 161, 165, 216n12; unrepresentable for, 153, 154, 156; Untitled, 146, 165; victims for, 135–136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 154, 156, 159, 164, 171, 218n34, 218n45; as witness, 129–130, 159, 160, 221n91 Salcedo Effect, 18, 129–173 Salgado, Sebastio, 74–75 Saltzman, Lisa, xvi Sarajevo, 58, 71, 82, 83, 201n64 satisfaction, 4, 10, 21–23, 62, 66, 68, 73, 77, 82, 87, 91, 112, 124, 134, 150, 156–158, 160, 162–163, 167, 172–173, 212n53. See also apprehension; recognition Sayres, Sonya, 18, 181n13, 185n36, 185n39, 197n7

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Scarry, Elaine, 160, 162, 163–164 Schleyer, Hanns-Martin, 211n48 Secret Miracle, The (Borges), 148 securitocracy, 168, 223n124 Selz, Peter, 35 semblance, 62–64, 65, 124 September 11, 2001, 101, 116 Serra Pelada, 74 Sesonke, Alexander, 187n10 Shibboleth (Salcedo), 129–131, 137, 218n34, 223n124; critique of, 132–133, 158, 170, 172, 173; as experience, 170; universality of, 136, 139, 170, 172 Shiff, Richard, xv shoes, 142, 142, 143, 143, 144 Signac, Paul, 32 silence, 220n66 Silver, Kenneth E., 194n72 Sloterdijk, Peter, 32 Smithson, Robert, 216n12 Somalian War, 71 Sontag, Susan, 7, 14; on Abu Ghraib, 203n86; on artists, 25, 55; Butler on, 199n38; on Camp, 39–40, 192n45; on compassion, 71–73; on desensitization, 201n53; Dewey and, 185n39; Doris on, 29; on duality, 59–60; Eco and, 45, 46, 47; on experience, 124; on Happenings, 38–39; Harrison on, 30; influence of, 27, 56–57; interpretation for, 18–19, 185nn35–36, 185n39; on literature, 200n44; Lopate on, 184n30, 184n32; mediums

INDEX

Sontag (continued) of, 197n4; on openness, 46; on philosophy, 28; On Photography, 15, 16, 18, 58, 59–60; on photography, 57–58, 59–67, 68–69, 74–75, 84, 197n10, 199n29, 199n33, 200n43, 201n53, 203n87; Platonic theory for, 62–63; as political, 195n74; on Pop art, 192n45; Regarding the Pain of Others, 15, 16, 20, 56, 57–58; Salcedo and, 20; Sayres on, 18, 181n13, 185n36, 185n39, 197n7; on spectacle, 74–76, 217n25; on suffering, 67–70, 71, 72–73, 74, 75–76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 215n9; on surrealism, 39, 61–62; Weinberger on, 196n2. See also specific works Sontag Effect, 16, 19, 57–83 Spain, 68 Spanish Civil War, 70 spectacle, 179n27; in photography, 75–76, 203n86; for Salcedo, 133–134, 167; Sontag on, 74–76, 217n25; suffering as, 75–77, 132, 133–134, 167 Spelman, Elizabeth V., 21–22, 150, 186n44 Spring Happening, A (Kaprow), 38 Stammheim prison, 87, 110, 207n14 “Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal” (Morris), xiii, xiv, 25, 175n1 Steinberg, Leo, 32–33, 195n73

INDEX

Stimson, Blake, 78, 199n35, 200n44, 202n80 Storr, Robert, 103, 212n62 Students for a Democratic Society, 87 suffering: absent, 153–154; accountability with, 78–79, 80–81, 82–83, 156–157, 164, 186n44, 199n33, 215n9; analogies for, 219n55; in art, 21–22, 57, 58, 67–77, 78, 79, 80, 81–82, 83, 84–85, 139, 141–142, 143–144; in Atrabiliarios, 139, 154; autonomy in, 139; aversion to, 150, 162–164; as beauty, 76, 202n77; Bennett on, 159–160; compassion and, 72–74, 77; delay of, 148–149; desensitization to, 201n53; endurance of, 154–155, 156, 160–161, 162; essence of, 171; globalizing, 75; of Other, 144, 145–146, 150–151, 154–155, 160, 162; particularity of, 70–71, 72, 75, 76, 79, 96–97, 160–161, 164, 165, 166–167, 171; in photography, 67–68, 70, 71, 72–75, 80, 81–82, 83, 203n86; reasons for, 150; revival of, 155–156; ritual around, 140–141; shared, 156; Sontag on, 67–70, 71, 72–73, 74, 75–76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 215n9; as spectacle, 75–77, 132, 133–134, 167; time with, 152, 160, 161; universality of, 70–71, 141, 164, 165, 166, 167, 171; witness to, 129–130,

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159, 160, 221n91. See also grief surrealism, 39, 61–62 Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Horowitz), 183n28

Triennial of Contemporary Art, 133 Tucker, Marcia, 130, 152 Turbine Hall, 136 Twentysix Gasoline Stations (Ruscha), 33

Taliban, 116, 203n86 Target with Four Faces (Johns), 32–33 Tate Modern, 129, 136, 139, 170, 173, 218n34, 223n124 “Telling Stories, Denying Style: Reflections on MoMa 2000” (Kramer), 210n39 terrorism: by Baader-Meinhof Group, 99, 102, 207n13, 208n16, 209n25; in Colombia, 165, 215n2; discussion with, 213n71; ethics-politics of, 101–102; rights with, 203n86. See also specific acts of terrorism Testadura, 42–43 “That Old Thing, Art . . .” (Barthes), 187n10 Thirteen Most Wanted Men (Warhol), 113 Tillim, Sidney, 35, 36 time: in art, 8, 220n68; in art theory, 8–9; Bal on, 160–161; Other over, 152; with suffering, 152, 160, 161; with violence, 220n68 torture, 80, 203n86 “Toward an Ophthalmology of the Aesthetic and an Orthopedics of Seeing” (Morris), xiii, 176n3

universality: aesthetics and, xvii–xviii, 13, 53, 176n6; of art, 53, 126; of beauty, 76; of compassion, 127; critique of, 172; of death, 95; of grief, 96; Hegel on, 13; Ranciere on, xviii; of Salcedo, 136, 139, 163–164, 165–166, 168, 170, 171, 172; of Shibboleth, 136, 139, 170, 172; of suffering, 70–71, 141, 164, 165, 166, 167, 171; of violence, 165, 223n122 Unland series (Salcedo), 151, 151, 161, 161, 165, 216n12 unreality, 153 unrepresentable, 152–155, 156 Untitled (Salcedo), 146, 165 urban unconscious, 62

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Varon, Jeremy, 113, 207n13 victimization, 18, 132 victims, 71; of Baader-Meinhof Group, 113–114, 207n13, 213n70; presence of, 154–155; Richter and, 113–114, 207n13, 213n70; for Salcedo, 135–136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 154, 156, 159, 164, 171, 218n34, 218n45 Vietnam War: Baader-Meinhof Group resistance to, 87, 112;

INDEX

Vietnam War (continued) conscientious objector status in, 201n60; end of, 203n84; photography in, 79–80, 124–125 violence: in Colombia, 165, 215n2; in protest, 112–113; time with, 220n68; torture, 80, 203n86; universality of, 165, 223n122 Viso, Olga M., 168, 218n46 vulgarity, 34–35 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 58, 201n64 war, 70, 79–80. See also specific wars War Cut (Richter), 124, 127; images from, 117, 120, 121;

INDEX

materials in, 115–116, 119; moral-political power of, 17, 85, 86, 118, 122–123; publication of, 204n2 Warhol, Andy, 29, 30–31, 113, 189n23, 195n74 Weinberger, Eliot, 196n2 West Germany, 86 White Cube Gallery, 135, 167–168 witness, 159, 160, 221n91 Wolf, Herta, 69 Wolff, Virginia, 67 Woman with Umbrella (Richter), 113 Wong, Edlie L., 167, 220n66 Worcester Art Museum, 194n70 World War I, 67

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CO LU MBI A THEMES I N P HI LO SO P HY , SO CI AL CRI T I C IS M , A ND TH E A RTS

Lydia Goehr and Gregg M. Horowitz, Editors Advisory Board J. M. Bernstein T. J. Clark Noël Carroll Arthur C. Danto Martin Donougho David Frisby Boris Gasparov Eileen Gillooly Thomas S. Grey Robert Hullot-Kentor Michael Kelly Richard Leppert Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts presents monographs, essay collections, and short books on philosophy and aesthetic theory. It aims to publish books that show the ability of the arts to stimulate critical reflection on modern and contemporary social, political, and cultural life. Art is not now, if it ever was, a realm of human activity independent of the complex realities of social organization and change, political authority and antagonism, cultural domination and resistance. The possibilities of critical thought embedded in the arts are most fruitfully expressed when addressed to readers across the various fields of social and humanistic inquiry. The idea of philosophy in the series title ought to be understood, therefore, to embrace forms of discussion that begin where mere academic expertise exhausts itself, where the rules of social, political, and cultural practice are both affirmed and challenged, and where new thinking takes place. The series does not privilege any particular art, nor

does it ask for the arts to be mutually isolated. The series encourages writing from the many fields of thoughtful and critical inquiry. Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds., The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, edited by Santiago Zabala, translated by Luca D’Isanto John T. Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions Richard Eldridge, Life, Literature, and Modernity Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett, translated by James Phillips György Lukács, Soul and Form, translated by Anna Bostock and edited by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis with an introduction by Judith Butler Joseph Margolis, The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism Herbert Molderings, Art as Experiment: Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance, Creativity, and Convention

P H I L O S O P H Y, S O C I A L C R I T I C I S M , A N D T H E A R T S

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Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media, translated by Carsten Strathausen

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P H I L O S O P H Y, S O C I A L C R I T I C I S M , A N D T H E A R T S