Expressionism as Ritual and Religion
Andy Warhol's assault on the art world supplanted the clique of hard-nosed post-war artists settling more than a few arguments once and for all while establishing a novel syntax, a style of art commerce it poked fun at. Like a rigorous bacteria Pop Art proved more resilient than any of the isms the Moderns had come up with, once and for all extinguishing any vestige of transcendence just as Christianity vanquished the pagans. The ironic gesture of a box of Brillo pads on a pedestal was the falling domino at the end of what began with the shock of Duchamp's urinal. As funny a prank as it might have been, Warhol and his clique managed to undermine the gatekeepers, ultimately allowing wider participation in that world.
The public never really got on board with modernism. Despite easy punchlines, a familiar cache of subjects, those wacky artists of the 1960's never really managed to narrow the gap between artists and everyone else. Though most get the joke. Since then, the joke hasn't changed. At least it's a joke, yes? Rauschenberg, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and their cohort didn't have to lift a finger, really, to undermine a movement that wasn't a joke and whose participants exhibited little apparent sense of humor, at least subject-wise. Who doesn't want to burst a bubble inhabited by drunk middle aged white dudes consumed by their hermetic, ever darkening, daredevil scratching-at-the-ceiling attempt to deal with esoteric realms one can't possibly understand without a PHD and can't describe without submitting to German Wortbildung (word building), to come up with the territory into which the artist imagines himself exploring, the libenswelt (lifeworld), idiomatic only at an existentialist pissing contest, braggadocio when said in conversation, naval gazing if you're actually bothering to understand it. Unfair perhaps. Here's an expert's explanation of Jackson Pollock's Raison d'être:
(Pollock) hopes, perhaps, since death is inescapable and we must all face, that the 'here and now' will merge with a 'beyond', will transcend into a higher sphere, and that the ever imminent collapse, once it has happened, will restore man's experience, eliminating his sense of alienation by recovering...that historical flow of human existence. --Italo Tomassoni
In that American/European mid-century affliction for anything Japanese, the secret sauce begins with traditional calligraphy (Shodo), the epic performance of carpet sized sheets of rice paper slathered by the master and fude, the essence performed, manifest that time and place and the accident of existence, elevated to some extraordinary dimension***. Truth is, I admire the Abstract Expressionists and the obnoxious self-importance that comes with the cause they represent. That doesn't mean that I have any beef with their detractors, and won't waste time defending them or the narrow chauvinistic elitism their work emerged from. But whatever power and sway the artists and the critics and collectors had on that cultural moment pales in respect to the influence and domination of the Pop Artists and the potency of the cynicism evident in their wake. Art is a joke, or at least the public's relationship to the function of art is merely a joke.
I don't have a broad pallet in my tastes, though I've always enjoyed more than a passing interest in art, both as an amateur creator and spectator. I'm sure I might easily be characterized as a little provincial as a curator. I don't think I've acquired a particularly sophisticated level of taste. The dilettante's dismissal might apply even if I don't voice it: I know what I like. But in the range of things that attract me, or things that I find repellant, consistent aesthetic tendencies emerge, or particular questions form: I'm attracted to work that retains the effects of, or signs of, risk.
Induction after more than fifty years of looking reveals this tendency or habit. Attributes of a particular order, indexes of signals of a demand made on the materials by the hand of the artist survive in the final draft or finish. I see a mark of the knife or the stylus or charcoal as the human being's miraculous momentary spark of life as an instance of delight. Not only does this quality emerge in the plastic arts I'm attracted to, the quality finds its way into the music I collect and listen to, the literature I ingest, the very way I espouse walking through a world sticky with resistance, not fussing over viscosity, as evidence of risk. There seems to even be a conventional stylistic tendency in all these things that define both my taste and the actions I take as a writer and artist. My language is synonymous with expressionism.
Expressionism as a response to the industrial world, a reprisal of old techniques like the woodblock print, that waves a middle finger at the very spirit of seamless perfectionism guaranteed by the utility of a photograph, or the photograph's effect on painting and the Eakin's school of the scientific realism and the demand for fidelity and verisimilitude, or polish and rigor of control. The application of careful technique to the wild flirtations of atavistic sensibilities the probing of the rawness of interiority, of sexuality, and mortality that is at the heart of the German movement that came to occupy momentarily it's own language and domain. In all of it, the guarantee of failure and death is challenged, the awareness of the slippery edge of a line or a color, the blade cutting too deep, the possibility of breaking the block, of ruining a color, of overstepping the arena itself inherently drives the process and remains an integral part of the product. We see the marks of possible ruin. Darkness is subjected to inquiry this way, and darkness itself is risk.
Risk is a despised quality. A species of action akin to malaria that survives as an indicator of where hierarchically we sit in respect to one another. Allowances for risk or demands for its elimination underscore privilege and wealth. Control of risk is either a luxury or a privilege. Only in a sort of subversive way does the allowance of risk speak to privilege. "Slumming it," for instance, a phrase that describes behavior that adopts risk unnecessarily, commodifying it as a exquisite taboo, an accessory the wealthy can aspire to own and show off. But only the affectations of one's alienation from reality and the world may choose to live in a studio apartment in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, sharing their block with crack-addicts, street walkers, muggers and rapists. Risk is to be avoided in favor of safety.
And the causality of these successive scenarios quickly becomes a contrapuntal cliche, a predictable bouncing between dangers for the underprivileged and delights for the privilege.
But in all this it remains that risk is a dubious quality outside of the bounds of gamesmanship. One might take risks with their money, and as stupid as it might be to gamble away a life savings, it remains plausible to do so. One is not entirely surprised at the number of pawn shops in las Vegas, though one might still be shocked seeing a down and out homeless persons surviving 110 degree weather wearing shoes that cost more than I make in a month.
But For Risk:
Our impulse, an impulse we imagine is innate, though it's fabricated, is to avoid risk in every domain and dimension of our lives. We take it for granted that progress and development and technological advancement is the application of a universal principle as a motive, a universal necessity to eliminate risk. This and the gauge of what we think of as convenience are held to be self-evident material qualities that naturally should be either exhausted of or ever purposefully refined. I even lean into those romantic heroic gestures we call quixotic, certainly a archetype completely at odds with who we are today. What ethos is less lucrative than the quixotic? We're talking about failure here. Failure as a heroic episode.
No doubt, the giants had to fall. The school of thought those mid-century bros belonged to dominated dry all manner of competing styles, schools, and agendas. The closed door of a secret club, a self-asserting, self-aggrandizing cabal of a handful of artists and their rather heavy-handed supporters, patrons, and fans. The heavy-bottomed, dark, gooey world they asserted was dominant until it wasn't, overthrown by that ever-light, ever superficial prank of hand-painted Sunday funnies panels, soap boxes, and soup cans.
A striking coup, no doubt. The godfather of American Independent and Experimental film, Jonas Mekas, having been an intimate acquaintance with Warhol, referred to the artist as a "clown" but only in the most honorific manner: "clown" as jester, as trickster, as the hero of disorder. And the clown won, putting the old, cis-gender, grumpy dudes in their place and closing that musty period of American art history for ever save occasional sitcom jokes, "my kid could do that," only followed by the janitor's trash can sitting in the middle of the gallery, surrounded by effete fools gazing at the authentically dramatic instillation with loops and opera glasses, praising the unknown artist's brilliance, congratulating themselves on being at the very precipice of the avant garde, their ego's deflated only when the real-life custodian gruffly arrives with his overalls and drags the garbage away.
But for the most part, Pop Art won the war, or at least the battle, and we now suffer through the dourness of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Paola Pivi, Erwin Wurm, the Nendoroids of KAWS, and a host (army) of others. The spread of non-fungible tokens, AI-generated material, and the so relished, so ironic Metaverse Art Ecosystems that these chicks and fellas paved the way for. So colorful! So ironic!
Boy Cries Wolf
It's my fate to scream foul and expect my complaints to go no further than the Jeremiad, the cliche that whatever is young and precocious, novel and new, is likely to receive a proper thrashing from an old white guy like myself, a pathetic last gasp emerging from a previously relevant-now-obsolete player. The fallacy is, of course, that ageism is an approved of bias, and that an appeal to tradition, coming from someone over fifty, serves Argument ad Populum, and the naysayers answer yes.
Over the years, I've been well acquainted with different Avant-Gardes, mostly as a filmmaker, partially as an amateur artist. The constant pressure that exists at the edge of new ideas is an exciting and confusing place to spend time. But being on that edge means one is constantly in touch with, intimate with traditions that came before. I've always had a problem with novelty for novelty's sake, perhaps because my father was a sociologist well acquainted with Veblen, so that by the age of four I had a tacit understanding of what Conspicuous Consumption meant, and was educated to see the spoils of capitalism as a tragic inheritance rather than an entitlement. We were early adopters of recycling, members of GRIP, (Group for Recycling in Pittsburgh), spending one Saturday a month wearing goggles and work gloves and smashing beer bottles with a ball peen hammer, and hyper aware of our relationship to the natural world, natural beauty, and the coming catastrophe.
Without the foundation of tradition, what good are rebellions, Avant-Gardes, shifts in aesthetics, or any cultural remodeling that we seem to believe is the final and only virtue of expression? Amidst the "hectic activity" of Paris in the late 1920's the master furniture maker, George Nakashima, faced an existential crisis as it dawned on him that all of it, all the making and breaking of schools, isms, manifestos and Avant-Gardes in painting, literature, music and all the arts were a superfluous, pointless "game--one to be played out, but one which, rootless, eventually would die." The aspiration and assignation that art is only justifiable as novelty, as the undermining of whatever is present, has always seemed to me to be a pointless game, and one that somehow justifies all the other currents of consumption that we lazily affirm, all of which lead us to the devastation we're about to suffer.
Of course, there are multiple discursive instances of backtalk, backlash, and acts of courage in the face of this maelstrom, doggy paddles from what seems inevitable, but once again quixotic efforts. But efforts at what? I have a sense of what this means, a (dare I say) criteria or ideal, a means of stealing back what's valuable that I believe I've always ascribed to in one way or another, a ethos I can ascribe to, follow in my pursuits, my pedagogy, and see throughout my career as an artist and a writer, one flexible enough to encourage growth and novelty, yet remain true to some noble source.
On the opposite end of this spectrum are the proponents of everything that stands in the way of this affirmation, call it an ethos. Remarkably, the profiles of the dramatis personae that affirm the antithesis of what I'd think of as important, valuable, "noble" that ethos that's currently quickening in my thoughts, are the keepers at the gate of all our destinies.
I spent several years in the company of a few inspired Silicon Valley enfants terrible, citizens of that utopia assigned to the design of that future in the company of like peers at famed Interval Research, the boilerplate, incubator research corporation set up by Paul Allen and David Little in the 1990's and dissolved in 2000. The inhabitants of this groovy environment had big dreams about designing a future for us all, implementing all sorts of wondrous new developments instigated by the notion that the chip become omnipresent in every mode and space that life occupies. A fully wired house ala the Jetsons? Why not? Many of the practitioners, artists, scientists and designers had truly ambitious and thoughtful experiments to bring to life, all of them wrought from Ivy League style, Montessori-conditioned notions of appropriation and application. Just as Andrew Carnegie left libraries to workers who would never find a free hour to crack open a book, nor the grooming required to even know how to read a book past the words on the page, or even the social context in which such an activity would seem anything but a waste of time. Hence, beautiful, aspirational technology spins into existence and its audience and user all within that hermetically sealed bubble of Palo Alto. A perfect circle.
These are the heroes, perhaps, of this daunting, all-encompassing movement, the Model Major Generals of the opera that present their own version of the archetype. The villains cut quite a different silhouette. Elon Musk's rise and fall made the general public aware of the level of crazy that pilots our trajectory forward, but now faded, his acid-burned aspect is all but forgotten, and with it the feeling that he ever had a hold on anything. Meanwhile, the like-minded pull the strings and chart a future in which we don't exist. The sociopath Peter Thiel, the whiny shapeshifter cum-proxy-Nazi Mark Zukerberg are at the top of the marquee, but the supporting cast and extras number in the tens of thousands, not to mention the layers of distance the industry employs in a scheme to shield them and their antics.
The shield is institutional. It comes with the territory of ascribing genius to oneself and her peers, and following a metaphor supplied by the mechanism they sustain: the illusion of distance between the virtual and physical world, that sought after idealism of a space unoccupied by rules, regulations, and any kind of governmental influence what-so-ever, the polemic of freedom grossly exaggerated by idealists and anarchists in the last part of the 20th century. Becoming a part of that institution demands acceptance of the unexamined constructs, Ayn Randian myths that corroborate ideas of absolute individualism in the sense that whatever an individual does, creates, or destroys with the tools or within the domain and space of that world, serves a future we all share. They're talking about the future, one can make any excuse based on a shallow conceit towards some kind of pluralism, a tenuous understanding of history, all asserting that one never knows how a particular shift in the trajectory of technology, or behavior, is going to manifest itself in the grayscale fuzzy rubric of ethics. The introduction of a tool that proves catastrophic today might turn out beneficial a few decades from now. The score is settled. Intentions mean nothing.
So lax is the sense of duty and so absolute the threshold imagined between their ministering in that electromagnetic container and the living world that one can press play on experiments that would otherwise be denounced, the creators censored, or fired, and the material content impounded and boxed. Yet in 2008, researchers followed through with a mind experiment that proposed a technique for using cell phone technology to interrupt the workings of a pacemaker, sabotaging the device and killing the (human) user. The presenters, the scientists, presented their research at an internet security conference called Blackhat unapologetically blaming the company, Medtronic, the makers of the life-saving device, for not taking the time to worry about their customers being murdered by remote control, stating that "if Medtronic had just put that time into making a fix they could have solved a lot of these issues."
From the outside point of view, even with thin-sliced scrutiny, such activities should seem absurd. That a group of researchers could proceed with such an experiment in the somewhat public environment of Amherst University (and the University of Washington), and that, as Jaron Lanier states, "if the same researchers had done something similar without digital technology, they would at least have lost their jobs." Lanier goes on to propose imagined examples of how a scientist outside of the digital realm could invent mechanisms to kill people: rigging a washing machine to poison clothing, for instance, and how inexpugnably repugnant and unethical such an experiment would be, and how swiftly those involved would be shut out of their profession and open themselves up to countless lawsuits.
Jaron Lanier is informally known as Silicon Valley's prophet, the region's steadfast ethical touchstone. In his book, You Are Not a Gadget," Lanier uses the above incident (*which really happened) to illustrate the ideological point of view, which he calls "cybernetic totalism" from which such ideas and such activities emerge. He lends voice to this ideological position, which I imagine asserts itself indirectly everywhere. Note the tone of apology:
"All those non-technical, ignorant, innocent people out there are going about their lives thinking that they are safe, when in actuality they are terribly vulnerable to those who are smarter than they are."
I guess I could jump over the razor wire around the reservoir that holds our drinking water and dump in a substance that would be harmless but turn the water black in order to show how vulnerable the average person is to being poisoned along with their neighbors. Lanier's satirical tone is, in truth, hardly satirical at all except that he's invented and fictionalized the apology. Lanier continues:
"Therefore, we smart people ought to invent ways to attack the innocents, and publicize our results so that everyone is alerted to the dangers of our superior powers. After all, a clever evil person might come along."
While careful, as an insider, not to piss anyone off, Lanier characterizes the general mindset of his cohort in not-so-friendly terms, ideologically bent towards the most egregious and cynical positions regarding human beings and the natural world a person can have. He's careful to end the book with a chapter that reaffirms that positive, humane, perhaps even nostalgic spirit that he was a part of back in the early days of the technology (Lanier coined the phrase, "virtual reality, was one of the domain's earliest experimenters, had a great deal to do with the scale and shape that the internet took in the 1990s, and has a long CV of involvement in groundbreaking achievements over the decades). Lanier doesn't go as far as condemning the ideology that begets cybernetic-totalism, choosing a sort of punch in the shoulder dare he disown his friends, but how such a philosophy in spirit and practice not be commensurate with other ideologies that espouse dehumanization, destruction, and violence? The difference may be that a polemic of power historically gains traction by identifying a demographic that can be easily scapegoated, dehumanizing them as to further clarify what a "real" human being looks and smells like. Tom Lehrer said that everybody hates the Jews, which seems true given the accessibility of the Alt-Right and Neo-Nazis (thanks social media!), but of course, even Jews are capable of hating Arabs, Muslims, black people, or queer people. It was John Lennon who saw through the haze and could pinpoint the most dehumanized group of all, the one that everyone can hate to one degree or another, women. I won't quote that song here, but you can look it up (thanks Google!).
What the Cybernetic Totalists and their ilk hate is a little difficult to assign a target too. But if you step back far enough it becomes clear as a Mail Pouch tobacco sign on the side of a barn. People--they hate people. This is far more acceptable in its pluralistic ambiguity because it doesn't really single anyone out, though of course it does for, as Lanier points out above, there is a very real distinction between us and them. Killing one person is murder but a million, policy. The target seems to somehow negate itself because it seems so incomprehensible. The technophile hates people. Perhaps even more estranged and fuzzy might be the more precise calculus that determines that what they hate is life itself. It's just that people are what stand in their way.
Problematic as the Western tradition of Art has been, particularly since the Moderns damned the conventions of the Academy and reject bourgeois standards of decency and succumb to our atavistic, "primitive" nature. The peak of this potent idealism sought a path forward by recovering what they believed had been lost: at its best a revolutionary adjustment to a changing world, versatile, passionate, enlightened, and at worst an even more sanctified relationship with the market.*** The market being only one accessory to the institutions, the ideals, the values of world on the precipice of disaster. Rather than the Marxist interpretation, let's refer to this amalgam of class, money, idealism, brutality, technology, and exploitation, as Mario Savio did, and simply call it, The Machine.
As an optimist, I'm excited by the potential of The Machine in that it provides both a target and an enemy that otherwise is so dispersed as to be invisible. The opportunity is a reclamation of our time as it's victimized by The Machine's requirements. Time supersedes all in value. Time is our inheritance and the commodity we freely accept as currency against The Machine. No cashing in. No 401K. We give it and what we give we never get back. But time is liquid in and of itself, an excipient, a medium, which makes it even more conditionally volatile . What we do with our time, or how we spend it adds value. The elemental and expendable surface on which art is created is what animates philosopher John Dewey's foray into aesthetics in his influential book, Art as Experience (1934), a work that begot the varied and confused directions American art has since wandered through. A synopsis skews the virtue of process against product, serving a classic indictment of the marketplace and the dollar sign as expected. What matters then, as exemplified by Jackson Pollock, is the act of painting, not the painting itself which merely serves as an index of that action, a footprint of the artist's passage through. Then we get performance art, the antics of the Conceptualists,
The most obvious signal of culture's defeat by The Machine is the satisfaction these Cybernetic Totalists glean from the mass adaptation of generative AI, a long-awaited conclusion between the hegemony of product and the attenuation of process as a value or virtue in and of itself. The final battle is probably lost, as is the war. There is no distinction between product and hierophant (the prompt engineer). The "maker" the prompt engineer, will soon be the incidental threshold between.
Envision the following, two gloriously fat vintage cathode ray tube televisions in a screen-to-screen somewhat obscene embrace. No hands, of course.
The work of the nineteenth century writer and art critic John Ruskin articulated something that I could feel, could see, but had no language to express or comprehend.
Perhaps the failure begins in a peculiar type of miseducation, the autodidact's hazardous, spotty acquisition of knowledge dropping them right up against the effect described by Dunning and Krueger, that wonderfully expansive sentiment one gets reading a bit of this and that and allowing ourselves the freedom to make up the rest. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't a dearth of such characters around, sustained on contempt for public education, formal cannons of literature, and foundational (i.e. "traditional) knowledge. Hence dipping into Nietzsche or Rand or William Burrows or Brian Eno, the anti-cannon cannon, begets a quasi-libertarian, mildly anarchist with hints of Buddhism or Confucianism species of creed--a shallow caricature perhaps, trapped in decades past, though I wouldn't be surprised if today's acolytes don't bother to worry over anything as tedious as a book to map out their relationship to the world beyond. An unkind, mean-spirited portrait, but not unmerited. Further, it doesn't take much negativity to poison what might otherwise be a generous collective mindset. Just look at social media.
When the zeitgeist has absorbed an ideology, it quickly subsumes its role outside of the dominant texture of thought and language and becomes so deeply woven into discourse that we hardly see it anymore. Contempt for "the human" (I'm not entirely comfortable with the term) follows that genre of appealing sophomoric cynicism that all manner of discourse subsists on. Contempt survives all political and ideological schisms and can be traced in discourse on both sides of the table, the Left, Right, and up and down. The environmentalist drops a misanthropic quip as easily as the anarchist (or antinatalist), an almost orthodox tenet that eventually curves around to disparaging existence itself. We are comfortable with the presumption, or the opinion, that human beings, so fraught with a desire to self-destruct, so capable of violence and injury, or so pathetically outfitted as sentient organisms that we deserve to die either one at a time or in some cataclysmic collective punishment, or simply because the organism holds no inherent value and is now easily replaceable, or soon will be, a guarantee of the supremacy of the ideology that motivates the color of such discourse. A self-fulling prophecy.
All of this ignores, as is so often the case, the role of culture. The word here is applied in a broad sense that encompasses the complex of epistemological frameworks that support our myths, ideologies, values, ethics, and everything "soft" that makes civilization at all civil. Culture here begins with the range and depth of the civilization's literature, the currency of its evaluation of truth, the rigor with which it yields to scientific, ethical, moral, and intellectual rigor, and the value it places on the enculturation, the education of its members as a privilege or a right. Culture is indeed the complex tapestry of what a collective people value and the very distinct hierarchy of what's important, or not. The word itself is burdened with shame, as you're receiving a guest into the home of a close relative who also happens to be a reality show-worthy hoarder. Embattled scientists can't help but throw their compatriots under the bus when confronted by fashionable anti-intellectualism. The fuzzy, unpredictable humanities are likely to contaminate the spotless body of knowledge obtained by the scientific method. Surely the most religious of intellectuals in the contamination by the fuzzy impurities of literature and the humanities the need to throw the humanities under the bus to ensure the affectation of purity claimed by the scientific method. beyond criticism purity to the addressing the obligation that questions have to their context, that a scientist frames an idea within the context of his civilization, argues for the merit of the hypothesis in confluence with funding apparatus and the culture he shares with his peers who also have ideological concerns, agendas, and direction to which they point themselves. (I say this yet have to conceded that DeGrasse Tysons's book, Accessory to War, written in collaboration with Avis Lang, is a rich and brilliantly executed history of the difficult bedfellows science has always had to endure.
***see Tomoko Kawo,
