Hyper-subjectivism in Art : The Will to Self-Annihilation

by

Bruce Katz*

*Bruce Katz teaches languages in Montreal. He is one of the founding members of Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU) and a member of the CCCCH (Canadian Committee to Combat Crimes Against Humanity), an organisation devoted to the principle of putting an end to impunity. “ Hyper-subjectivism in Art “ was written in 1993 for the magazine, Cité Libre. The article has been translated from the original French.




What I affirm is that there is no culture
where there are no standards to which
our fellow-men can have recourse. There
is no culture where there are no principles
of legality to which to appeal. There is no
culture where there is no acceptance of
certain final intellectual positions to which
a dispute may be referred. There is no
culture where economic relations are not
subject to a regulating principle to protect
interests involved. There is no culture where
aesthetic controversy does not recognise the
necessity of justifying the work of art.

- José Ortega y Gasset
The Revolt of the Masses




Fyodor Doestoevsky once stated, almost in an off-hand way, that Beauty will save the world. Evidently inherent in Doestoevsky’s use of the word, Beauty is of a transcendent nature, cutting across regional and even national particularities to confirm itself in a universal though pluralistic cultural consensus. This is reflected in Goethe’s recognition of the similarities and universal themes of both Western and Oriental literature where transcendence, and hence cultural consensus rather than particularisms or cultural relativism, is the key. Ergo, art is not simply the expression of particular societies existing at particular times and influenced by particular technologies, but is the most profound expression of human existence. It is the attempt to give meaning to form and is the common bond which will necessarily link the cave-dweller to the most advanced technological societies of the future until time immemorial. No narrow historicism can defeat it.

/2
If it is true that art and beauty can be conceived of in such a way, this is only because a commonly-held hierarchy of values permits us to form the conceptual basis upon which meaning can be attached to form. When cultural relativism in art – the idea that any and all subjective expressions constitute “art” – defeats this cultural consensus, then we must yield to that tired adage: “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.” What does this mean in practical terms? It simply means that without the yardstick of social or cultural values, everything is an expression of “culture,” from popular kitsch (which literally means “cheap” or “worthless”) to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, from sitting on the toilet bowl and contemplating the universe to Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics. The result is that Form itself becomes its own “meaning” and its very existence is “Art,” though that “art” is no longer an expression of anything but the material of existence, having lost all of its transcendent and metaphysical content.

Plato first rescued Western culture from moral relativism when he overcame Protagoras’ doctrine of subjective reality. Protagoras, the first of the Sophists, held that objective truth did not exist, but only subjective concepts and opinions. “Man is the measure of all things,” is the apothegm attributed to Protagoras. Plato held that material objects had no reality in themselves but that meaning was imposed upon form by the human spirit which was itself incorporeal. For Plato the nature of the external world lies outside the knowledge of Man, as the essence of Reality belongs to a First Principle which exists outside Nature, hence always beyond the grasp of Man. This First Principle he calls Idea. Aristotle builds upon Plato to form his own concept of a transcendent Intelligence. Plotinus overcomes the crass materialism of the Epicureans by resurrecting Plato’s concept of the transcendent. This conflict between the subjective “will-to-power” and the transcendent concept of Idea, Intelligence, God will remain the dominant theme of Western philosophy from Plato and Protagoras right through to the modern era.

If Platonic–Aristotelian philosophy lies at the core of Judeo-Christian humanism such as it is reflected in Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, Protagorean subjectiveness lies at the core of anti-humanist particularism such as it is expressed by anti-humanist thinkers like Rousseau, Nietsche, Freud, and post-modernists like Derrida and Foucault. (See Luc Ferry’s and Alain Renault’s French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on anti-humanism, University of Massachusetts, 1990, or La pensée 68: Essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain, Gallimard, 1985, for an in-depth discussion of post-modernist anti-humanism such as it is expressed in Derrida and Foucault). Perhaps post-modernists believe that they have created something new. Nil novi sub sole. They are modern-day Epicureans steeped in hyper-subjectivism and authors of the crass materialism which results from it. Their subjectivism will not stand the test of time.

This cultural determinism such as it is expressed in the art and philosophy of much of the twentieth century, this idea of the return to Nature, is quite simply the return to pre-Socratic thought and the worship of the corporeal. If Man is anything at all, he is, as Luc Ferry has stated, the very essence of anti-nature. While rooted in the physical world, his thought and the expression of that thought – his art – necessarily transcend that same physical world. Neither is his essence nor his art a constant locked into the world of objects.

This is not to give humanity carte-blanche to wreak havoc on the natural environment as witnessed through the savage and unfettered capitalism of the so-called “global economy,” but it is to state that Modernity is mankind’s cultural expression as carved out of Nature; it is meaning imposed upon form, a hierarchy of values rather than moral relativism, transcendence rather than particularism. The neutrality inherent in the moral relativism of anti-humanist thinking, since it finds its source in primitivism, is anathema to civilisation. It is the

/3

philosophical expression of the anti-civilisation. Ergo, it is the most desperate expression of nihilism, of the wish for self-effacement.

What is more, it leads us to an unavoidable conclusion. If hyper-subjectivism is seen as a force against civilisation, one must face the knowledge that in spite of its many apologists, the ideology of liberalism (as distinct from the concrete realisations of the liberal democratic state), based as it is on the individual’s will-to-power, is essentially an expression of the anti-civilisation. If that is so, then anti-humanism and classical liberalism move in a symbiotic relationship, not diametrically opposed as some might have us believe, but both working toward the demise of civil society. They constitute a dialectic. This means that any critique of liberalism is self-contradictory if it promotes particularism as an alternative. The clearest example of this may very well be Heidegger who, in response to the materialism of bourgeois society, slips back into cultural determinism or particularism and the idea of a “pure” German ethnicity and so becomes, as Luc Ferry has written, “the philosopher who says ‘yes’ to Hitler.” The art of Nazi Germany is no less void of cultural content than the degenerate art of bourgeois society. In both world views art is reduced to being a vehicle of material production.

Mickey Mouse Has Triumphed Over Shakespeare

I have presented the reader with this conceptual portrait of hyper-subjectivism so as to better view and understand several instances of the degeneracy and nihilism of hyper-subjectivism in art which I now relate to the reader. Last fall (not Original Sin but rather the season), my wife and I were strolling along Sherbrooke Street and we stopped into a large art gallery to look through the lithographs and admire the paintings.. As we wandered through the gallery we came upon a rather large canvas covered in layered orange paint, as one layers a pizza with various condiments. Below this formless mass one read the entitled inscription, “Référendum ’92.” The price tag was six thousand dollars. Like all good abstract art, this “piece” could have meant anything anyone wanted it to mean (this, of course, is the sophist’s way of lending “meaning” to that which is meaningless).

What factor could be working here, I thought, that such a formless mass of nothingness could have acquired the status of art? First, there had to be some sort of consensus somewhere. Among the people? Not likely. The people are generally cool to abstract art. No, it had to be something more like the story about the Emperor’s new clothes. Some con-artists in the guise of “thinkers” had succeeded in selling an overly-intellectualised and ultra-materialistic conception of art where one could rationalise mere objects like desks and toilet bowls as subjective expressions of “art.” This was a non-verbalised understanding among artistic elites, as among the Emperor’s ministers, all of whom were too afraid of being seen as hopelessly reactionary if they did not admit to seeing clothes where none existed. So a bond of gullibility and mediocrity were formed between the court elite and the population since the latter would not dare express their scepticism in the face of such “cultured” and “knowledgeable” courtiers. Such a process had produced “Référendum ’92.”

Some months later a still greater aberration was announced on the evening news. A certain William Kirby had bought, on behalf of the National Arts Council, a large canvas by American artist Mark Rothko consisting of two rectangles on an orange and scarlet background. The price paid? An astounding 1.8 million dollars! A “steal” according to William Kirby. This brings to mind another chef d’œuvre that the same William Kirby

/4
acquired a few years ago for the National Arts Council. This was a huge canvas by the artist Barnett Newman, also at the cost of 1.8 million dollars (another steal), consisting of three large vertical stripes which infants in a kindergarten class could have done with a paint roller had they steady hands. My initial reaction was to take the plate of cherry pie which I was eating and hurl it at the television screen. I didn’t. After all, given the mores of the day, a plate of cherry pie could well be considered a work of art and it would have been a sacrilege to destroy it. I would also have been destroying another sacred art object - the television – and would have stained a third sacred piece of art – the carpet. I might even have ruined still a fourth work of art – my shirt.

Recently I have come across an article in Actualité (15 octobre 1993, 72-73) written by Luc Chartrand in which the author mentions the National Arts Council’s acquisition of the Rothko and Barnett works. The article is entitled, “ L’art est-il malade?” (Is Art Sick?) The answer to the question is a resounding “yes.” Art is sick because the society which has produced it is profoundly sick, culturally moribund as a matter of fact. Of particular interest in the Chartrand article are the attitudes expressed by certain members of our artistic elite. Curators of museums go to great lengths to stress the artistic content of contemporary “art” objects like beds, chairs, bicycles, etc. They invent a type of artistic “double-speak” to add an air of pseudo-intellectual claptrap to the public presentation of the most mundane of objects. (See the Chartrand article.) Take a certain Louise Poissant of the Université du Québec à Montréal who is scandalised by the very idea of traditional tendencies in art, such as landscapes. “What would we look like,” (to strangers, ergo foreign artistic elites), wails Louise Poissant, “if we were to exhibit landscapes at the Museum of Contemporary Art? Peasants!” (Chartrand, p.75)

Could a more servile, colonial attitude exist? What is it that surfaces in Ms. Poissant’s lamentation? The need to conform to a standard of nihilism in art born of the most profound primitivism in philosophy known as post-modernism. Ms. Poissant’s attitude is Lilliputian in scope. It is she and and her ilk and not the “peasants” who are steeped in mediocrity. As Albert Camus states so succinctly in his book, L’homme révolté ( The Rebel ), the process of art is being undertaken today with the embarrassing complicity of artists and intellectuals devoted to the calumny of their art and their intelligence. “In this struggle between Shakespeare and the shoemaker,” writes Camus, “it is not the shoemaker who damns Shakespeare or beauty, but on the contrary, the one who continues to read Shakespeare and chooses not to make boots . . . The artists of our time resemble those repentant gentlemen of nineteenth century Russia; their uneasy conscience is their excuse.” (Camus, L’homme révolté, Gallimard, 1951, p.319) I would say that our intellectual elite, couched in a phony and indolent aestheticism, resemble that collection of German “aesthetes” who allowed the same spirit of primitivistic nihilism to destroy the Weimar Republic while they played their lyres safe within the cocoon of their aesthetic pretentions. Let Ms. Poissant put up a landscape by Marc-Aurèle Fortin in the museum and let the people choose between it and one of her “art” objects. We will see soon enough who the real “peasants” are.

An art student named Bernard Lebleu tells Luc Chartrand that he was forced to go to Italy to study drawing because the study of the Great Masters has been abandoned. “I wasn’t satisfied with my formation at Concordia,” says Lebleu, “centred on contemporary art and where the study of the great masters has been more or less abandoned.” (Chartrand, p.76) In effect, any art student who aims at transcendence in his or her art will likely have to go elsewhere, especially since if their art is not abstract they will likely get no subsidies from our ministries of “Culture.” In order to survive, they would have to be part of a little clique of politcially correct artists who get their subsidies from politically correct ministries, who form their own little artistic juries the mission of which is to sustain and justify a conceptualisation of art which can only be termed as being overwhelmingly contemptuous of artistic traditions.


/5

The definition of idolatry is the worship of the finite. To worship objects is to lose all sight of the transcendence of the human spirit. To reduce art to the narrow expression of the material world is to take the highesy expression of the human mind and spirit and equate it on a level with inanimate rocks. Beware those who wuld enslave the mind to the physical world. They will finish by destroying humanity. Who am I to say such a thing? I am one of the peasants, one of those people who feels that it is important to make boots and even more important to know that a pair of boots does not measure up to Shakespeare though I would relinquish neither the boots nor Shakespeare. I am the little boy in the crowd who dares to look at the parade of fools, naked to the world, and pointing at them in derision, shouts, “The Emperor has no clothes!”


Postscript

Since the writing of this article another artistic “event” has taken place. The Turner Prize, an award for artistic achievement given out in Britain, has short-listed two “works” of art for the prize. One work is entitled, Untitled (Room), by Rachel Whiteread. Ms. Whiteread has taken a condemned Victorian row-house and literally cast it in cement. All of the rooms were filled with concrete. Once the concrete was set, the walls and the windows were removed. Voilà, instant art! Just like instant mashed potatoes.

The second selection is one which our local trend-setting experts would undoubtedly love. It is an example of modern “installation” art by Vong Phaophanit consisting of seven tonnes of rice neatly arranged in seven rows and lit underneath by six strips of pink neon lighting. Requiescat in pace!