Forgetting What You Know

My entry into art was haphazard. Beyond the general presence of images of art in my home (reproductions of Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso) and now-forgotten visits to museums at an early age, my first real encounters with art occurred at the movie theater, to which my parents would take me often. We would go without knowing what was playing in advance. Sometimes we would sneak a second screening. On occasion, they would drag me to one of the two art house cinemas surviving in Houston in the mid ‘00s (the Angelika or the River Oaks Theater) where I learned about the inscrutability of art watching Sideways at eight years old. The dialogue, indecipherable to me at that age, dissolved into rhythms of chatter punctuated by cries of elation, anger, and despair. I remember The Motorcycle Diaries as a sequence of beautiful landscapes—a drawn out montage of people and places in a distant land — that drove me into the aisles, utterly desperate with boredom. I didn’t think about movies as art then, and, despite their tastes, I don’t think my parents did either, although they clearly felt their importance, intuiting the need for aesthetic enjoyment as regulatory refreshment (following Dr. Baudelaire’s recommendation in his dedication “To the Bourgeois” of the Salon of 1846 — even if the results sometimes resembled the modernist pantomime of the nuclear family unit satirized by Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle). Still, these early experiences laid a foundation. Having little knowledge of its history but convinced of its importance, my parents approached art with an open mind, and I, for my part, gradually learned to give myself over to aesthetic experience. 

For many years my literary diet consisted largely of young adult fantasy novels and Japanese manga, with some sci-fi and historical fiction thrown in the mix. What attracted me to this kind of work was less the “lore” of the worlds in which the stories take place (which I treated as largely decorative) than how these other worlds resembled to my own, despite their transmutations. I was intrigued by their seemingly visionary quality — their symbolic approach to depicting reality, where semblance provides a cover for what is actually closest at hand (hence why every work of art is a self-portrait of sorts, though not of the artist exactly but of the moment to be experienced as art). My parents, guilty that their own faith had lapsed, sent me to Catholic school from grades 5 to 9. Religion made quite an impression on me at first. Really, it was my first philosophy, introducing me to conceptual thinking and abstract reason (making sense of the Trinity was perhaps my first attempt at a kind of dialectical thinking). And as my tastes and personality alienated me more and more from my classmates, the Catholic theology I was taught provided me with a way of understanding my suffering, upon which lay the path to eternal salvation. I identified strongly with Christ and felt righteous because of the confusion of feelings that I magnified in my pubescent fervor and let overwhelm my developing ego. My religious convictions were short-lived. The Church had given me permission to feel and judge passionately but the intensity of my moral rage soon turned against it as well, and I became an atheist lost in a land of believers. I discovered the distressed humanism of Orwell and Huxley and later the liberal amoralism of Camus and Anthony Burgess. My interest in visual art was largely undeveloped then, but I could draw well enough to be admitted to the local arts high school and be out from under the yoke of Vatican rule. I read Upton Sinclair and started flirting with Marx and Kropotkin. Then came the Beats, Kerouac mainly, the more Buddhist stuff, before May ‘68 became my dream of elysium, with Debord as my prophet (crudely printing and binding my own copy of Society of the Spectacle — which I later covered in resin as a conceptual artwork: critical thought as a relic). With the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street briefly reanimating the utopian visions of the radical left, I confused morality, politics, and aesthetics more thoroughly and committed my life to the world revolution. 

As an artist, I valued risk and experimentation above all. I became convinced that the proper mode for contemporary art was one of uncompromising confrontation — an antagonistic stance towards the viewer, the artist themselves (as a form of autocritique), and the conditions under which art is produced and distributed, but I could never go as far as to reject the virtual, metaphoric character of art in favor of direct propaganda, even if that should have been the logical conclusion of my convictions at the time. Against my own desires, I smuggled in hope for something else in art — not beauty, exactly, but something closely related (now I would say: the crisis of beauty; or modern beauty, convulsive beauty; the enigma of art as a form of unfree freedom; capital and the commodity-form of labor). My models — Godard, Bruce Nauman, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Crass — I took as crusaders against the sham rebellion of posers and wannabes (figures of Christ cleansing the Temple). In my own work, largely video and installation art, I was concerned with prosecuting the authenticity of my own ideals, adopting an ironical stance towards the things I believed as a way of admitting my guilt and complicity in the capitalism I despised (for one piece, I made a freestanding projection screen with stretched garbage bags on which I played a video of myself drunkenly singing and dancing to Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” in my bathroom at home — an image of youthful exuberance burning out to no effect). At the same time, I continued to hold on to a romantic idea of the life of an artist. I took nude figure drawing classes outside of school. I refused to learn how to drive and became a flâneur in the postindustrial sprawl of the South. I bashed my head against Nietszche in the garden of the Rothko Chapel and went with my love like pilgrims to watch twilight descend on James Turrell’s skyspace. 

From Houston I found my way to Chicago, where my fantasies of bohemian life (somewhere between Zuccotti Park and the European Graduate School) encountered the reality of entering art school in the midst of Obama’s second term, which is to say, during the peak of liberal self-satisfaction: an intellectual wasteland. Many (if not most) of my peers were unmotivated, unwilling to read, silent during discussions in class, making work more as an after-thought than out of artistic compulsion. And who could blame them? The education they were receiving seemed to insist that art was a hopeless endeavor. That the radical artist was the one who most adamantly disclaimed their own authorship, who acknowledged the inherent violence of representation, and who practiced art with the aim to destroy it, preferring instead the lifestyle- based culture (at the “intersection” of fashion, entertainment, and art) now come to fruition. Art school was the first and only time in my life that I felt pressure to adopt a racial identity, that it was somehow expected of me as a minority — otherwise what could be the point of my work? Fanon disabused me of the notion, but others were not so lucky. In the end, my education was only salvaged by a chance encounter with the Last Marxist, Chris Cutrone, who became my initiator into the via negativa of critical thought, the immanent dialectical critique of necessary forms of appearance according to the conditions of possibility for change contained within their self-contradiction (as he would remind us each class). It was from Chris that I learned to decode the oracular messages-in-a-bottle left to us by Adorno and Benjamin. I became interested in understanding the avant-garde and delved into Dada and Bauhaus before working my way back through the the 19th century, first Delacroix and David then Manet and Courbet, with forays into Symbolism (particularly Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Gide) and the Baroque origins of genre painting (the vehicle of the avant-garde from the Barbizon School to Picasso — and still there as a shadow to Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, however much denied). In the process, I felt the relationship I had with my own practice becoming more and more tenuous. It was obvious to me that returning to the past was impossible, yet at the same time I could clearly feel that the kind of art made by my professors and peers was a sorry substitute for what should be possible given the available means. 

It was only after leaving art school that I felt unencumbered enough to take up painting, teaching myself in fits and starts through a drawn out process of trial and error. It took longer still to admit to my being an artist (including the requisite sojourn to law school). Caesura was the impetus for my rebirth, born again into the glory of art. What now? I wandered the streets of Hollywood today, carried along by my legs as a ghost. Above the “stars” of the 20th century, I looked up at the empty balconies of the five-over-ones that stand at each corner, their visions of urban life now turned to premature ruin — not even cities of death but empty husks that never were, built only to bleach in the sun, for the sake of nothing better to do. Everything calls for a break. An open field. A new beginning. The first quarter of the 21st century has passed without consequence. History continues to move yet our ability to make sense of it grows weaker. Lenin imagined it as a spiral, a tessellating sequence of cycles in which, as Adorno picked up, “[t]he new does not add itself to the old but remains the old in distress, in its hour of need.” The trajectory of the avant-garde over the course of the 20th century was one of increasing denial of art’s status as art — a discrete, luxury commodity whose sole use-value lies in the aesthetic experience it offers the viewer — and thus of avoiding the particular problem it poses, even as the market ballooned like never before while dealers figured out how to sell the unsalable. Politically committed art not only failed as art but as politics (our ability to change the world is no greater now than a hundred years ago and probably much less), and so a whole realm of human activity was abandoned for the vanity of a few artists’ conscience. I, for one, refuse to concede the autonomy of art, virtual though it may be, suffused with the aura of the commodity-form. I believe I’m vindicated by Trotsky and Breton in this when they, in the midst of fascism, wrote: “To those who urge us, whether today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula complete freedom for art.” It’s the utopian character of art — its being for nothing else — that gives it meaning. Everything else is racketeering, compromised thought. If art is going to survive the 21st century as more than a ghost, then artists need to forget the “positions” of the last 60 years and re-establish a relationship to the deeper past in which the problem of art originates. History has to be harnessed for its own transformation. Modernism is not an artifact but a task: “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” The critical spirit is a form of love (and thus hate) for the world, ruthlessly seeking its splendour—its promesse du bonheur.