Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity, and the (Post)Modern ''Third Aesthetic'' (Postmodern Studies)

Making Strange Postmodern Studies 42 Series edited by Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens Making Strange Beauty, Sublimit...

Author: Herbert Grabes

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Making Strange

Postmodern Studies 42 Series edited by

Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens

Making Strange Beauty, Sublimity, and the (Post)Modern 'Third Aesthetic'

Herbert Grabes

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Cover image: Salvador Dalí, Schlaf (50 x 77 cm), ca. 1937 © 2004 A. Francke Verlag Tübingen und Basel English translation by Marc Colavincenzo from Einführung in die Literatur und Kunst der Moderne und Postmoderne: Die Ästhetik des Fremden (Tübingen & Basel: Francke, 2004), with further editing by Gordon Collier. Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2433-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2008 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

List of Colour Plates Introductory Note

ix xi

1 The Aesthetic of the Strange Not Beautiful, but Strange Not Sublime, but Strange The Aesthetic of the Strange

1 7 11

2 The Strange Art and Literature of Modernism Radical Strangeness in Early Modernism 1 ALTERNATIVE REALITIES PRESENTED IN UNUSUAL WAYS The Unfamiliar Metaphors of Expressionism; The Strange Objectivism of the Cubists; The Estranging Montage of the Heterogeneous in the Collage; The Wholesale Break with Tradition: Abstract Art; The Provocative Expansion of the Definition of Art: Dada and Ready-Mades; The Strange World of Surrealism; Stream of Consciousness

19 22

2 THE WIDENING OF EXPERIENCE

43

Experiments with Form and New Modes of Perception; The Need for Explanatory Theory

3 THE UTOPIA OF RENEWAL

46

The Renewal of Art; The Renewal of Literature

Varieties of Strangeness in the Later Phase of Modernism

54

1 THE INTENSIFICATION OF EARLY MODERNIST TENDENCIES IN ART Abstract Expressionism; The Elite Artistic Status of the Trivial; Kinetic Art and Op Art

55

2 THE CONTINUATION AND INTENSIFICATION OF

LITERARY CONCEPTS

62

The Theatre of the Absurd and the ‘nouveau roman’; German Followers of Brecht, Concrete Poetry, American Anti-Formalism of the Beat Generation

3 The Strange Art and Literature of Postmodernism New Radicalness in the Early Phase of Postmodernism 1 THE RELATIVIZATION OF THE FAMILIAR

67 69

Irony, Parody, Travesty; The Mixture of Styles and Genres; The Expansion of the Realm of Art and Literature

2 THE CELEBRATION OF TRANSIENCE AND THE ARBITRARY

81

The Shift From the Work to Process; The Construction of the Contingent and Arbitrary; The Reduction to Pure Possibility

3 THE HORROR GAME The Strange as Subtle Difference in the Later Phase of Postmodernism 1 VARIATION AND INTERTEXTUALITY “Neo” Art and the Post-Avantgarde; Realist Narrative Made Strange; The Return to Earlier Dramatic Genre Conventions; The Aesthetic of Subtle Difference

98 102 105

2 RECOURSE TO THE NEW MEDIA AND FOREIGN CULTURES

115

New Media and Foreign Cultures in Art; New Literary Utopias and Cultural Hybrids

3 THE COMPETITION OF THE SIMULTANEOUS

119

4 The Aesthetic of the Strange as the Aesthetic of Modernism and Postmodernism

125

5 Theoretical Foundations of the Aesthetic of the Strange

133

Disinterested Pleasure; Universal Pleasure and the Free Play of the Imagination; Aesthetic Processes; The Release of the Imagination Through Boundedness; The Beautiful, The Ugly, and the Alienating; Kant’s “Aesthetic Ideas”; Beautiful Art, Nature, and Alienating Art; The Beautiful as a Symbol of the Morally Good and the Strangeness of Art as a Symbol of the Unstable Distinction Between Subject and ‘World’, Culture and ‘Nature’

Works Cited

165

List of Colour Plates (after page 132)

Figure 1

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Liegender blauer Akt mit Strohhut [Reclining Blue Nude with Straw Hat] (68x72 cm; oil on cardboard, 1909). Sammlung Franz Burda, Offenburg.

Figure 2 Georges Braque, Violin et palette [Violin and Palette] (91.7x42.8 cm; oil on canvas, September 1909). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Figure 3 Pablo Picasso, Verre et bouteille de Suze [Glass and Bottle of Suze] (65.4x50.2; collage: pasted paper, charcoal and goauche, November/December 1912). Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis, Missouri. Figure 4 Wassily Kandinsky, Schwarze Linien Nr. 189 [Black Lines No. 189] (129.5x130.2 cm; oil on canvas, December 1913). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Figure 5 Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm (121x35.5 cm; readymade: snow shovel, wood, and galvanized iron, 1915). Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Indiana Figure 6 Salvador Dalí, El sueño [Sleep] (51x77; oil on canvas, 1937). Private collection. Figure 7 Mark Rothko, Untitled (183x153 cm; oil on canvas, 1959). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 8 Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Home So Different, So Appealing? (26x25 cm; collage, 1956). Kunsthalle Museum, Tübingen, Germany. Figure 9 Claes Oldenburg, Two Cheeseburgers With Everything (17.8x21.6 cm; burlap soaked in plaster, painted with enamel, 1962). Museum of Modern Art, Philip Johnson Fund, New York. Figure 10 Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive I (213.4x152.4 cm; oil and silkscreen ink on canvas, 1964). Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Figure 11 Gilbert and George, The Singing Sculpture (photograph of performance, London, 1970). Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London. Figure 12 Laurence Weiner, # 278 (variable dimensions; language sculpture/ film installation, 1972). Figure 13 Walter Dahn, Asthma I (200x150 cm; emulsion paint on canvas, 1982). Private Collection. Figure 14 Mimmo Paladino, Chimera (165x264 cm; oil on canvas, 1982). Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek. Figure 15 Bruce Naumann, Anthro/Sicio (video installation, Hamburg Kunsthalle, 1991). Figure 16 Shirin Neshat, from the series Women of Allah (mixed media: photograph, calligraphy, 1994/95).

Introductory Note

may, thanks to their novelty, appear somewhat strange to us at the time of their first appearance is not surprising. But it is a curious fact that much of the literature and art from the periods of Modernism and Postmodernism continues to feel strange to the wider public even today. This alienation of many people from much of the artistic production of their time is a regrettable circumstance, one that has been interpreted as a deplorable side-effect of constant experimentation with new concepts, new forms, and new materials. In contrast to this view, I consider the ‘making strange’ that can be observed in the work of Modernist and Postmodern writers and artists to be a reason for celebration – of both the creative process and our reception of its fruits – and it will thus constitute the main focus of attention in the pages that follow. Indeed, I shall be endeavouring here to show that it is precisely the strangeness emanating from (and, to a great degree, constituting) such works that has made possible a kind of aesthetic experience that is decidedly different from those with which we have long been familiar – that of the aesthetic of the beautiful, and that of the aesthetic of the sublime. To the extent that the present demonstration proves successful, it should open up an avenue of understanding and, ultimately and consequently, enjoyment in our experiHAT WORKS OF LITERATURE OR ART

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encing of Modernist and Postmodernist literature and art, even for those who feel defeated or put off by sheer difficulty of access. Paradoxically, it is this very strangeness, rather than beauty or sublimity, that can draw us towards, then more deeply into, such creative works. Because the complexities and, indeed, problematized simplicities of (Post)modern expression so often prompt or invite exegetical responses that are so obliged by its subtleties that further complication rather than clarification too often results, I have made an effort, in the initial stages of discussion, to set out the notion of the aesthetic of the strange in a generally accessible and straightforward manner, reserving the finer points for a later chapter. And in order to provide the empirical evidence necessary to show that it is, indeed, the aesthetic of the strange that informs the literature and art of Modernism and Postmodernism, the central chapters offer a more detailed survey of the various strategies by which writers and artists have repeatedly succeeded in ‘making strange’ – and with lasting, not ephemeral, effect. This evidence cannot be easily discounted. Nevertheless, those who are better informed about, or indeed experts in, the field of aesthetics will justifiably expect a more elaborate argument to back up any such introduction of a ‘third’ aesthetic alongside the traditional ones of the beautiful and the sublime. A theoretical disquisition will accordingly be included that focuses on the differentiation between the aesthetic of the strange, on the one hand, and the aesthetic of the beautiful and that of the sublime, on the other. Of particular interest and relevance is the interface between the aesthetic of the strange and the aesthetic of the sublime; in more recent debates, namely, it has become almost de rigueur to regard the aesthetic of Modernist and Postmodern literature and art as a variant of the aesthetic of the sublime. Since the frame of reference in such debates has not infrequently been Kant’s Critique of Judgement, it would seem appropriate to employ the same conceptual frame – the same civilized weapon, as it were – to mount a counterattack on this prevailing view. Inevitably, discussion here will have to be fairly specialized. Readers less interested in this controversy need

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Introductory Note

xiii

not immerse themselves in these intricacies; the preceding, relatively ‘un-philosophical’ material should suffice to provide rewarding access to the Modernist and Postmodern works of art themselves. The introductory chapter provides a sufficient explanation for why writers and artists have found ‘making strange’ so essential and why it pays to make a serious effort to grapple with the ensuing strangeness. The idea of claiming the existence of a ‘third’ aesthetic for the literature and art of Modernism and Postmodernism has, of course, not come exclusively from examining the empirical material presented. The major relevant studies in the field of aesthetics have also served as an important motivation, both by lending support to my own view and by provoking qualified dissent. I am fully aware of how much I owe to those who have worked in the same field before me; of these, I would single out for special mention the endlessly resourceful Immanuel Kant and, with regard to more recent discussion, Jean–François Lyotard, with whom I mostly beg to differ but who nevertheless was the prime motivator for my engagement with the problem in hand. I say this here because full documentation of the process whereby the idea of the ‘third aesthetic’ assumed its present form, not to mention due consideration of manifold influences, would have required much more ample space. As my chief aim here was to reach the general reader, I decided to omit such forays into background readings. What is offered instead of references to critical studies is enlightening comments by writers and artists on their own and similar works. As will be explained in more detail below, this has to do with the fact that most Modernist and Postmodern literature and art is in need of accompanying explanatary comment to ease access and enhance our awareness of what happens (or, at least, is meant to happen) during the encounter. Literature and art informed by the aesthetic of the strange remains a challenge, and what follows here has been written as a plea to take up that challenge rather than giving up on its complexities. H E R B E R T G R A B E S (J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 8)

1

The Aesthetic of the Strange

Not Beautiful, but Strange OR MORE THAN A CENTURY,

ever since the advent of Modernism, our lives have been shaped by a sense of alienation as a result of a growing encounter with the strange. Partly sought after by going abroad, and partly forced on us as an inevitable effect of ever faster changes in the social, cultural and technological spheres, the experience of the strange in terms of a disturbing otherness is sometimes enjoyed, often feared, or – in the long run – simply accepted. A natural and constructive way of dealing with the strange is therefore not only politically and morally desirable, but also pragmatically necessary in the face of increasing rates of change in the world around us, increased migration, and clear tendencies to globalization. Yet such an approach to the strange is apparently not easy, in particular if the strangeness is so extreme that it cannot be processed with the help of our usual modes of perception, feeling, and judgement. The insecurity which this causes may lead not only to rejection, but also express itself as aggression. That this is the case is well illustrated by the fact that even in the area of art and literature, where the viewer and reader are seldom

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confronted with life-threatening things, the encounter with the very strange can cause such reactions. One has to remember that it was the arts that first offered the possibility of particularly shocking experiences of strangeness – at the latest since the early twentieth century. In fact, it is possible to speak here of a dominion of the strange, because what has remained largely unchanged since then, despite the large variety and change to be found in art and literature, is the fact that most works not only appeared strange upon their emergence, but managed to retain their fundamental strangeness in the sense of a disturbing unconventionality. The manifestations of alienation in the encounter with the visual arts and literature of early Modernism were already clear enough. One need only mention the exhibitions of the Impressionists – and even more so those of the Expressionists, Cubists, Constructivists, Dadaists and Surrealists – the appearance of symbolist and imagist poetry, expressionist drama, and the novels of authors such as Gertrude Stein, Andrei Bely, James Joyce, or Alfred Döblin. Not only that – the artists and authors who followed also put intense effort into ensuring that the strangeness remained. And just when the strategies by which Modernism created strangeness seemed ‘exhausted’, a whole set of new ones was invented and soon held by critics to be characteristic of a new era called ‘Postmodernism’. Since then, things have changed yet again; but despite all these shifts in taste and expression, anyone who has a more than passing interest in the products of the artistic imagination must admit that contemporary literature and art continue to create a sense of alienation. If the arts may no longer fulfil the norms of the aesthetic of the beautiful it is a result of this strangeness rather than the fact that they often enough depict objects which common sense tells us should be considered ugly or repulsive. For, as Kant long ago pointed out, “Fine art shows its superiority precisely in this, that it describes things beau-

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tifully that in nature we would dislike or find ugly.”1 Modernist and Postmodern visual arts and literature are no longer beautiful because the initial alienation which they cause hinders them from – in Kant’s words – arousing “directly a feeling of life’s being furthered”2 and therefore being “presented […] as the object of a universal liking.”3 The notion of “directness” is important here – it is indisputable that Modernist and Postmodern works of art can indeed create a sense of pleasure if one is prepared to deal with them repeatedly and at greater length. It is in fact precisely this indirect pleasure which makes the aesthetic of the strange so particular. An initial sense of strangeness is created in the reader or viewer, meant to engender multiple attempts on his part to overcome this reaction, and in this way finally an expansion of one’s perceptivity and awareness. Seen from this perspective, it is no surprise that Modernism in particular should have granted such importance to the radically new, that the avantgardes sought above all to renew art – and life if possible – from the ground up. For the strangeness that is so desired is inherent in ‘the new’ – at least, so long as it still is new. As the Modernists sought strangeness above all in the form of the radically new, and novelty wears off rather soon, what we find is a rapid succession of avantgarde movements that eventually led to the coexistence of the plurality of styles we find in Postmodernism. The obvious attempt to create as large a sense of strangeness as possible through the constant presentation of ‘the new’ and the use of new modes of presentation prompted Robert Hughes to proclaim “the shock of the new” as the driving force behind twentieth-century art.4

1

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, tr. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987): § 48, 180. 2 Critique of Judgement, § 23, 98. 3 Critique of Judgement, § 6, 53. 4 Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (London: B B C , 1980).

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It is widely accepted – recent studies have confirmed this – that at the latest since the Renaissance, when the period known as the Early Modern began, works of literature are expected to deliver something new, whether new topics or themes, points of view or modes of presentation.5 Indeed, their ability to offer the reader or viewer new experiences became the central criterion by which their quality was judged. This view was further strengthened with the emergence of the cult of genius in the eighteenth century. “The new” had to be absolutely new, and the talent of the original genius was the ability to create it out of nothing: “it must be nature in the subject […] that gives the rule to art; in other words, fine art is possible only as the product of genius.”6 However, as long as literature and the arts remained true to both an aesthetic of imitation – whether of nature or of older works considered to be exemplary – and to the ideal of the unity of the beautiful and the good, even the wholly new could not really create a sense of the altogether strange. It was, therefore, less the cult of genius than a revaluation of the horrible, the frightful, in eighteenth-century art theory, a revaluation leading to the establishment of the aesthetic of the sublime,7 that opened the way for a more radical strangeness in literature and art. The aesthetic experience of the sublime could only be had by means of an encounter with a degree of strangeness extreme enough to cause a life-threatening shock, and such an effect was admittedly not easily achieved in the realm of art. What did achieve wider popularity with the advent of the Gothic novel was the presentation of the uncanny, both within the imagined world and within the depths of the 5

See the essays in Das Neue: Eine Denkfigur der Moderne, ed. Maria Moog– Grünewald (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2002). 6 Critique of Judgement, § 46, 175. 7 Cf. here Herbert Dieckmann, “Das Abscheuliche und Schreckliche in der Kunsttheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Die nicht mehr schönen Künste: Grenzphänomenen des Ästhetischen, ed. Hans Robert Jauss (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1968): 271–317.

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human soul, in order to create a mingling of fear and pleasurable excitement (in German, Angstlust) – an aesthetic of feeling which shared with the aesthetic of the sublime not only the indirect creation of pleasure but also the fact that this pleasure was closely bound up with the agitation caused by the encounter with the horrible. The strangeness of what was presented was therefore geared primarily to its potential to cause such emotional agitation – a potential which was quickly used up, thereby making it necessary constantly to create new and more extreme forms of the terrible. Horror literature and films rely to this day on this form of emotional kick, where the strangeness is indeed for the most part identical with ‘the new’, in terms of the unexpected or yet unencountered. That this does not have to be so – that the strange can remain strange even when it is no longer new – and that it is therefore more accurate to speak of an aesthetic of the strange than of ‘the new’ – only became apparent with the emergence of Modernism. It showed when Modernist literature and art, seeking autonomy, began to free itself from the principles of imitation and presented alternative worldviews as well as alternative worlds in forms that were not only unusual but that could no longer be derived directly from one’s experience of the world. Of course, it is unquestionable that when they first appeared they caused – at least in part intentionally – the “Shock of the New.” Yet we also know that many of the most characteristic works of that period still retain an astounding potential to trigger a sense of strangeness. Nowadays one need only read Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1857), Strindberg’s To Damascus (1898), T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) or James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and look at pieces of art such as Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”(1893), Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907), Duchamp’s “Cycle de bicyclette” (1913), or Malevich’s “Black Square on White” (1915) to see what I mean. Not only has a gap opened up between the more sophisticated literature and visual arts and the general public, but authors and artists have

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quite obviously created their works in a way that keeps them open to many interpretations and makes them opaque even for connoisseurs. The fact that alterity is not identical with “the new” – at least not in the sense of the absolutely new of the cult of genius – is also very apparent in the turn to the strategy of subtle variation found in Postmodernism. In literature this led, for example, to the “New Realism” and the widespread use of pastiche, and in the visual arts since the 1980s to a series of “Neo” movements (such as “New Fauves,” “Neo-Geo,” “Neo-Figurative,” and “Neo-Conceptualist”). It is not that the authors and artists have simply run out of ideas that are totally new – this is contradicted by art which works with the new media. Rather, it seems apparent that writers and artist have fully recovered, so to speak, from the “anxiety of influence”8 – the fear of being blamed for working with what is already known – which had held sway since the late eighteenth century. It became clear again that it is possible to achieve a high level of originality – particularly with connoisseurs – by giving a subtle twist to the traditional or by combining well-known topics, themes and modes of presentation that have hitherto been kept apart. Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of Modernist and Postmodern works of literature and art is their apparently endless variety. It may, therefore, appear presumptuous to maintain that this variety has its roots in one and the same aesthetic –the aesthetic of the strange. However, before explaining more precisely what is meant by the aesthetic of the strange and why it applies to such a wide range of apparently different works and movements, it seems necessary to show that another hypothesis which has been widely discussed during the last decades is at least just as presumptuous and, indeed, far less likely. I am of course referring to the revival of the sublime in the form of the claim that the literature and art of Modernism and Postmodernism are based on the aesthetic of the sublime. 8

See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

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Not Sublime, but Strange There seems to be no doubt that more recent art and literature cannot be subsumed under the aesthetic of the beautiful. On the contrary, many critics have devoted their energies to proving that Modernist and Postmodern aesthetics are based on the sublime.9 Therefore, their most important arguments and some of my counter-arguments need to be at least mentioned here, even though a detailed theoretical discussion of this hypothesis will only be undertaken in a later chapter after the reader has been acquainted with most of the evidence. What encouraged the attempt to link Modernist and Postmodern aesthetics up with the aesthetic of the sublime was the fact that, in both, pleasure is created only indirectly. With Modernist and Postmodern literature and art it is precisely its strangeness that causes an initial sense of alienation and only after this has been overcome allows for a particular kind of pleasure. Many critics have equated this with the indirect creation of pleasure in the eighteenth-century sublime which Edmund Burke calls “relative pleasure” or “delight” “to express the sensation which accompanies the removal of pain or danger.”10 According to Kant, it “is a pleasure that arises only indirectly: it is produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces fol9

There is such a large number of publications on this topic that I can list only some of the more important and influential. See, for example, Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976); Jean–François Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979); New Literary History. The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations (special issue 16.2, Winter 1985); Du Sublime, ed. Michael Deguy (Paris: Belin, 1988); Das Erhabene, ed. Christine Pries (Weinheim: VCH, 1989); Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Rob Wilson, American Sublime (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). 10 This must be differentiated from “positive pleasure,” which is a result of the encounter with the beautiful. See A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (1757; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987): Section IV, 37.

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lowed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger.”11 The equivalence of these two processes was propagated above all by the psychological reading of the “sublime moment” in Thomas Weiskel’s influential study The Romantic Sublime from 1976. Weiskel explains the experience of the sublime with recourse to the relationship between the reader and the text, going so far as to equate the insecurity that results from a confusing passage in a text and its subsequent resolution with the eighteenth-century sublime – with the shock produced by the encounter with apparently life-threatening magnitude and power which is followed by relief and a successful mastery of the event. He ignores the important fact that Modernist and Postmodern literature and art may as a rule alienate to a greater or lesser degree, but is nearly without exception incapable of causing a true “inhibition of the vital forces” or even creating a life-threatening effect. Avantgarde art, whether Dadaism or the public autopsies of today, has ‘shocked’ audiences often enough, but there is a great difference between feeling shocked – never mind simple alienation – and experiencing a life-threatening shock. This difference is far too large to equate the two processes and to speak of one and the same aesthetic. In addition, Weiskel ignores the fact that the sublime is characterized by suddenness: the “relative pleasure” follows the “inhibition of the vital forces” immediately, whereas the sense of estrangement caused by Modernist and Postmodern literature and art can as a rule only be overcome gradually: only after a more intense engagement with the artwork does a sense of pleasure result. Another apparent correspondence between Modernist and Postmodern art and literature and the aesthetic of the sublime was proposed by Jean–François Lyotard. This exists for him in the attempt to show “the existence of something unpresentable. Showing that there is

11

Critique of Judgement, § 23, 98.

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something we can conceive of which we can neither see nor show.”12 Lyotard works with that central aspect of the Kantian aesthetic of the sublime: confronted with the incredibly large or the incredibly powerful, the imagination fails, but in failing manages to activate the ability of the mind to take recourse to ideas. These ideas are then recognized and experienced as being superior to all sense perception, thereby bringing about a subjective increase in power, a sense of being uplifted.13 Lyotard singles out only that moment in which a certain type of sensory experience leads to the failure of the imagination and then to the consideration of ideas which cannot be represented in a material form. There is, however, an important fact which is ignored here. The recourse to ideas (Lyotard’s “unpresentable”) and the uplifting feeling of a subjective increase in power central to the aesthetic of the sublime which follows the failure of the imagination in the face of the incredible size and power of certain natural events can only come about if the human subject has been led by his culture to “the development of moral ideas.”14 It may indeed be true that Modernist and Postmodern literature and art attempt to show “the existence of something unpresentable” – even if simply because this art relies to a great extent on theory, a point which Lyotard does not mention. However, while Kant could presume at his time an orientation to moral ideas of a metaphysical sort, one cannot generally take the same for granted in the Modernist and Postmodern era. For this reason, when speaking of the indirect presentation of infinity to be found in more recent art, one no longer speaks of a sense of being uplifted, but of the experience of the

12

Jean–François Lyotard, “An Answer to the Question, What is the Postmodern?” in The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985, ed. Julian Pefanis & Morgan Thomas (1988; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992): 11. 13 See Critique of Judgement, §27, 114–15, and § 29, 129. 14 Critique of Judgement, § 29, 124.

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abyss. Despite this, Lyotard insists on the term sublime even though it is more a case of its inversion,15 because he – along with Barnet Newman, the American abstract expressionist painter – is convinced that the very appearance or presence of recent art is an event which repeatedly works against exactly this feeling: “Here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and that’s what is sublime.”16 The simple presence of a new piece of art still says nothing, however, about the specific aesthetic experience which this work mediates. It could be the beautiful or the sublime in the traditional sense, or – as I will show – the strange. Even if one agrees with Lyotard, this wider use of the term sublime does not get at the essence of more recent literature and art. I do not wish to contest that the conception of an alternative to the aesthetic of the beautiful in the form of the aesthetic of the sublime, due in large part to Burke and Kant, not only formed the basis for the aesthetic of feeling of Romanticism and Aestheticism, but also prepared the way for the avantgardism of Modernism and the plurality of the Postmodern.17 Since the start of Modernism, however, literature and art has developed in ways which could not have been predicted in the eighteenth century and cannot be reconciled with the basic assumptions of the aesthetic of the sublime. In addition to the already mentioned changes, there is still another which deserves mention. In the aesthetic of the sublime from the eighteenth century the feeling of powerlessness, the failure of the imagination, is a result of an encounter with the incredibly large and powerful. Modernist and Postmodern literature and art, on the other hand, elicit such a feeling by means of the experience of uncertainty, seem-

15

See Herbert Grabes, “The Inversion of the Sublime: Infinity in the Postmodern Novel,” Amerikastudien 38.4 (1993): 589–99. 16 Jean–François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989): 199. 17 Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” 206.

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ing arbitrariness, and the inescapably subjective nature of all attempts to determine meaning. This powerlessness cannot be suddenly overcome by mere recourse to the idea of eternity, but only through the use of creative problem-solving strategies which often demand considerable effort. It appears to me that one of the main reasons for the recent revival of the sublime is to be found in the revival of Kantian aesthetics. As I will point out more clearly later, for reasons contingent upon Kant’s system there could only be one alternative to the beautiful: namely, the sublime. If one holds to this dichotomy, then Modernist and Postmodern literature and art participates in the aesthetic of the sublime simply because they can no longer be subsumed under the beautiful; and because this more recent aesthetic is indeed quite different from that of the eighteenth century, the term sublime is redefined so that it fits to some extent. Such a process appears to be misleading, though, because it artificially creates a degree of continuity which does not exist. It seems more promising, instead, to attempt to describe the particular nature of the new aesthetic with new terminology.

The Aesthetic of the Strange The ‘third’ aesthetic, which applies to more recent literature and visual arts, lifts the dichotomy of previous aesthetic theory by accentuating the wide range between the beautiful and the sublime. As a rule no longer directly appealing and beautiful, but also not so terrifying that it causes “an inhibition of the vital forces” as in the sublime, Modernist and Postmodern literature and art makes use of the spectrum from almost beautiful to almost sublime to create a sense of alienation which reaches from slight irritation to the experience of the uncanny. This demands of readers and viewers that they are especially creative in their attempts to understand the works, leading in turn to a pleasurable expansion of perception, feeling, and consciousness. The cause of this initial alienation, varying in its intensity, is a just as varying extent of

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strangeness created by the artists and authors in many different ways. We are confronted with the strange in the sense of the alienating Other, whose wide range between the beautiful and the sublime can be approximated via the following diagram: THE STRANGE (AS THE DISTURBING OTHER) THE STRIKINGLY

THE OVERWHELMINGLY

BEAUTIFUL

THE UN SETTLING

SUBLIME

THE I NCO MP REHENSI BLE

THE UN CANNY

As one can see, the oft-cited (and often enough deplored) unintelligibility of recent literature and art forms the centre of the spectrum. At the same time, the possibility still exists that the strangeness may in exceptional cases become so extreme that it is sufficient to cause an experience of the sublime. Outside the aesthetic of the strange there remains only the purely beautiful, because only then is there no strangeness to be found which could cause a sense of alienation. Often, however, a small degree of strangeness is enough to destroy the overall beauty and already unsettle the reader or viewer to such an extent that the process of reception moves towards the aesthetic of the strange. The broad spectrum of strangeness of varying intensity – from slightly irritating to uncanny – would on its own almost explain the multifarious nature of Modernist and Postmodern literature and art. This becomes even clearer if one considers the endless number of ways through which strangeness might be created. It is already enough if the subject or the presentation of the subject (or both) either somehow differ from our usual and familiar experience of the world and the cultural norms which direct these experiences, or if they do not fit within the limits of the traditional areas of beautiful literature and art.

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The variety of possibilities which appeared in Modernism alone is overwhelming. And just when the characteristic strategies used to create a sense of strangeness in Modernism seemed to have exhausted their possibilities, Postmodern literature and art demonstrated that the aesthetic of the strange was nowhere near its end. That this is still the case today and will remain so for a while to come is more easily understood if one does not just consider strangeness itself, but also the specific process of aesthetic experience which it sets in motion. This process is characterized by the fact that, confronted with a sense of alienation brought about by the strangeness of recent literature and art, the reader or viewer invests even more effort into integrating these strange elements into his or her understanding of art and the world. In doing so, they can be given some meaning and be dealt with at an emotional level. If this effort is successful it leads to pleasure, which indeed is based in large part on satisfaction with one’s own ability to creatively solve problems, but is also a result of an appreciation of the literature and art which caused the process in the first place. It is, however, not self-evident that this process gets started at all and leads to the desired result. Whoever expects the immediate pleasure promised by the aesthetic of the beautiful in the case of Modernist and Postmodern literature and art, will react to the strangeness found there with displeasure, disappointment, perhaps even anger, and refuse to further deal with these works. It is widely known that this is the case for a large proportion of the general public. This means in the first place that the aesthetic of the strange relies upon a cultural preparation of the recipient, an explanation of and introduction to the ways in which the effect of literature and art has changed. In addition, in order to be successful the recipient must have sufficient resources to not only be open for this strangeness, but also to cope with it. The authors and artists themselves, as well as those who deal in their profession with literature and art, were aware that this is not necessarily the case, and so they have attempted since the early days of Modernism to make these apparently confusing works more accessible through the publica-

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tion of manifestos, commentaries, and theoretical tracts. It seems that it is necessary to provide conceptual support for the process of coming to terms with recent literature and art in order to turn the sense of alienation which results from the encounter with these works into aesthetic pleasure. In other words, it became quite clear that the understanding of Modernist and Postmodern literature and art requires the help of theory, a point which in the meantime has become commonplace in the development of aesthetic theory. What has received less attention, however, is the question of why this has to be the case. If one attempts to answer this question, it seems necessary in the first place to recall that there is no such thing as ‘pure’ perception. On the contrary, perception is always coloured by expectations, which are in part anthropologically given, in part acquired through culture, and in part conditioned by individual experience. This means that while all perception may indeed be subjective, it is at the same time generally applicable enough within the frame of a certain culture to successfully predict certain effects – for example, whether something will be perceived of as beautiful or disturbing. The sense of estrangement which the literature and art in question here sets in motion through their Otherness cannot be relativized or resolved at the level of perception itself because this is an automatic process. What is required is reflection which attempts to reveal the ways in which perception is conditioned, and such reflection can only be communicated conceptually. One such example is Russian Structuralism, which propagated for Modernist art the principle of alienation as a means to de-automatize perception. Rendering the everyday world in an unfamiliar way, however, is only one means among many to create a sense of estrangement. Even if perception continues to function automatically and that which appears strange remains strange, conceptual reflection might still enable a reaction to this strangeness which is not rejection but, rather, sees it as a chance to expand one’s consciousness and to change set emotional patterns. Even if one is sceptical enough to argue that at the conceptual level we are just as conditioned by culturally acquired

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patterns, one has to admit that recent literature and art, with their provocative strangeness, provide at least the possibility to change ingrained modes of perception or to test the limits of conceptual thought in the attempt to integrate even what appears to be very strange. No matter how hard criticism and theory try to explain retrospectively the emergence of new literature and art in terms of changes in cultural modes of perception and thought, they always inevitably lag behind art production itself. The era of Modernist and Postmodern literature and art relies upon a parallel development of criticism and theory in order for their aesthetic effect to fully unfold; but the latter always remains in this sense secondary since the authors and artists must always first produce anew this strangeness which criticism and theory then in no small way help us to understand. It is worth noting here that the attempt to cope with strangeness does not necessarily mean that everything is then clear. It is possible that the strange remains strange, but that the sense of estrangement nevertheless makes way for some understanding – for example, if one learns to see the confrontation with strangeness as a basic element of one’s experience of the world and self. This may lead one to ask why literature and art need to increase or intensify the plethora of possible grounds for estrangement which already exist in the world instead of reconciling the differences between subjective desire and existential facts through beauty. After all, this possibility does exist: “Fine art shows its superiority precisely in this, that it describes things beautifully that in nature we would dislike or find ugly.”18 If one looks for an answer to this question within the area of aesthetics itself, rather than outside of the art domain, there are two crucial innovations in the aesthetic of the strange which come to the fore: the strengthening of the creativity of the reader and viewer and the interplay of imagination and conceptual thought, without which the initial estrangement cannot turn into aesthetic pleasure. In contrast to 18


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the experience of the beautiful, where the reader and viewer are in the first place truly “recipients” of what is presented, the aesthetic of the strange demands a considerable amount of effort. At the same time, however, one element of the pleasure which does in the end result from this is an increased belief in one’s own ability to solve problems, a strengthening of one’s self-confidence. In contrast to the aesthetic of the sublime, this subjective increase in power, this increased awareness of one’s own abilities, is not achieved by means of a momentary consideration of moral ideas, of the basic superiority of humans as rational beings over everything which can be perceived by means of the senses, at least not as a rule. Since the alterity of Modernist and Postmodern literature and art causes estrangement of varying intensity, but – with perhaps a few exceptions – does not overwhelm the reader and viewer, the hope remains that the strange might be made comprehensible or at least less strange with some effort and the aid of certain resources such as the imagination and conceptual thought. Kant may have been able to define the beautiful as “what, without a concept, is liked universally”19 – but only because he could assume that the principle harmony of the free play of the imagination with the concepts of the understanding seemed guaranteed in any case by the intrinsic purposiveness found in the beautiful. In the case of the aesthetic of the strange, it is precisely this harmony which is in question: this is not a given, but it is given, so to speak, to the reader and viewer as a problem to be solved. Therefore, theory is necessary in dealing with the aesthetic of the strange and there must be an interplay between imagination and conceptual thought during this aesthetic process which Modernist and Postmodern art set in motion. The question of why literature and art should increase the wide range of possibilities to encounter alterity already found in the world rather than simply presenting beauty can, of course, also be answered 19


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with recourse to the connection between the realm of art and culture as a whole. Notwithstanding such interests as commercialism and social prestige which often play a role in the arts scene, literature and art constitute a domain in which readers and viewers can react to what is presented in a state that is relatively free of extrinsic interest – as Ezra Pound put it, “Now art never asks anybody to do anything, or to think anything, or to be anything.”20 It is for this reason that estrangement results more exclusively from the encounter with the strange itself and not from practical fears connected with it in other areas of life. By the same token, the process of dealing with strangeness can take place in a more relaxed fashion because there is no pressure for it to be successful. This process allows us to develop our creativity freely and allows us to reflect upon our own reaction to what appears strange to us, since we are neither under time pressure nor under the pressure of having to make a practical decision. A culture that produces ‘interest-free’ literature and art of the type which is not necessarily beautiful but often provocatively alienating helps to ensure, in perhaps the most effective way, its own preservation and further development. It is essential, however, that the potential of this art be seized upon by as many as possible; and the aesthetic of the strange arguably requires a firmer education in aesthetics than any before it.

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Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1960): 46.

2

The Strange Art and Literature of Modernism

Radical Strangeness in Early Modernism of the experience of art, aesthetics is closely linked with artistic production. Different types of art enable different experiences. It is therefore necessary to show that Modernist and Postmodern art imparts in the first place an experience of the strange in the sense of the alienating Other, before explaining theoretically and more precisely the particular nature of this experience as an independent aesthetic of the strange alongside of the beautiful and the sublime. Not that this is particularly difficult or even new. From the enraged reaction of the bourgeois public to avantgarde art, through the pessimistic cultural visions of conservative critics, Theodor Adorno’s negative aesthetic and the existentialist celebration of the absurd, to the apotheosis of the radically ‘Other’ in Postmodern theory – Modernist and Postmodern art is recognized as being an art of the alienating Other. Despite this, it seems necessary to recall the variety of ways in which twentieth-century art enabled the experience of strangeness and by which means this was achieved. The visual arts and literature shall serve as examples for this for reasons partly subjective, partly objecS A THEORY

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tive. As a literary scholar, I turn, of course, to the art form that I know best; and as most art movements of the twentieth century were initiated by and named after new developments in the visual arts, it would not make sense to discuss twentieth-century aesthetics without them. The Shock of the New, the title given by Robert Hughes to his overview of visual arts in the twentieth century,1 was a defining characteristic of avantgarde art and literature of early Modernism. However, it was not merely their novelty which caused this effect – not all that is new is necessarily shocking – but their extreme strangeness. Visual arts and literature of this era broke so radically with all conventions (of what is presented, how it is presented, and the implied conception of art) that it could not help but appear very strange indeed – and the artists and authors were not only aware of this, they aimed for this effect. They intended indeed to shock or at least to surprise by strangeness. From our perspective today, it is hard to believe that the works of the Impressionists, which later became extremely popular, shocked viewers when they were first exhibited in 1874. If one considers, however, the ‘wild’ use of colours by the Gauguin-inspired Fauvists and German Expressionists at the start of the twentieth century, the following geometrical stylizing of form in Cubism, the first abstract paintings, and the dissolution of the traditional boundaries of what was considered art in the ready-mades of Duchamp and Man Ray, then the shocking effect is easily understood. The avantgardist art of the Dadaists and Surrealists as well as the American Abstract Expressionist of the 1950s were also bent on creating a stir by means of varying types of strangeness – even if one had become used enough to this strategy to no longer be totally shocked. In the realm of poetry, the phantasmagoric visions of the city in Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal from 1857 were already strange enough to shock both literary critics due to the violation of the conventions of 1

(London: B B C , 1980).

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realist representation and defenders of morals because of a suspension of the ethical. From there, through Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre (1871) and the poetry of the Symbolists at the end of the nineteenth century, to the Imagists, Futurists, and Surrealists, the innovations were extreme enough to repeatedly shock readers. In drama, the intense sense of estrangement extended from Strindberg’s later works to the theatre of the absurd and Beckett in particular, in the novel at least from Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913) to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). Considering the length of time during which this provocatively strange art appears, the question of when the era of Modernist art and literature generally begins and ends2 is just as controversial as the question of whether those art movements and types of literature which were at least formally less strange belong to this era or not. The latter question seems less troublesome if one remembers that the aesthetic of the strange opens a spectrum of possible effects ranging from the slightly strange and irritating to the uncanny or even sublime. Of course, it is possible to find examples of art and literature which, well before the span of time described above, must have appeared extremely strange – interestingly enough, in Mannerism at the start of the era known as Early Modern. For this reason, Gustav René Hocke was able to establish a firm and fruitful link between the periods of early Mannerism and later Modernism.3 Whether and to what extent an “aesthetic of the strange” already came into being at that time cannot be dealt with within the framework of this study, even though this question is interesting precisely when dealing with the problem of the connection between culture, art production, and aesthetics. The enigmatic and the labyrinth, the leitmotifs of Mannerism,

2

See Malcolm Bradbury & James McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” Modernism 1890–1930, ed. Bradbury & McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976): 19–55. 3 See Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957), and Manierismus in der Literatur (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959).

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may indeed create the effect of an estranging alterity; they contain at the same time, however, the possibility of solving the riddle by following the thread of Ariadne – in other words, the appropriation of what initially appeared strange. Therefore, they are at least less radical than the irrevocable dissolution of familiar modes of perception and a secure sense of meaning as found in the majority of works of the twentieth century.

1. A LTERNATIVE R EALITIES P RESENTED IN U NUSUAL W AYS It was not the encounter with unfamiliar details which turned Modernist art and literature into an experience of the aesthetic of the strange. It was, rather, the concentration of the strange, the confrontation with alternative realities and unusual forms of representation at the same time – at least in the case of more extreme works. Even when familiar elements from the world and the sphere of art were present in a certain work, they were distorted, fragmented, estranged, and the modes of representation broke with convention in such an extreme way that the usual ways of seeing and reading were no help at all in dealing with this new art. New modes of perception and reading were necessary which had yet to develop.

The Unfamiliar Metaphors of Expressionism The destruction of a familiar reality was most evident at first in the visual arts. In German Expressionism, which combined the subjective sense of colour of the Fauvists with a glaring distortion of forms, a renunciation of a realistic orientation in art is clearly seen. One is met, instead, with the creation of another reality which of necessity appears strange because it is not primarily based on the communal outside world but on expressive, individual, unconscious inner powers of creation. In the words of Emil Nolde, “I deeply wish that my art would grow out of the material at hand. – There are no set rules. The artist

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creates a work by following his nature, his instinct. He is himself surprised at his creation; so are others.”4 What resulted presented itself as an independent world, which was at most connected to the everyday world metaphorically. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner commented upon his own work as follows: It is therefore not correct to judge my pictures according to whether they are true to life. They are not representations of certain things or beings, but independent organisms made of lines, surfaces, and colours which contain the forms of nature only to the extent that they are a necessary key to understanding. My paintings are metaphors, not representations.5

The works of literary Expressionism are also metaphors rather than representations. A few of the later so-called dream plays of Strindberg should serve as the earliest examples of this: Till Damaskus (1904) and Stora landsvägen (1909). The scenery, characters, and events are structured according to dream-patterns in order to present the hidden unconscious and subconscious inner world. A reality is created which has an estranging effect because it is ruled by chance, improbabilities, and false logic. This dream-structure was also used in part by the dramatists of German Expressionism (Georg Kaiser, Von Morgens bis Mitternachts, 1917), but they also developed a different type of monodrama in which the isolated self cried out his hopes, fears, and agonies directly and ecstatically (Walter Hasenclever, Die Menschen, 1918). A further variant of Expressionist drama was developed by the American dramatist Eugene O’Neill in The Emperor Jones (1920). Haunted by fears of persecution and death, the protagonist becomes a victim of both his individual and collective unconsciousness, totally crippling 4

Emil Nolde, Briefe aus den Jahren 1894–1926, ed. M. Sauerland (Berlin, 1927): 2; quoted in Dokumente zum Verständmis der modernen Malerei, ed. Walter Hess (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1971): 45 (my tr.). 5

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Aus Schriften und Briefen,” Kunstwerk V (Baden– Baden, 1951): 2; quoted in Hess, Dokumente, 47 (my tr.).

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his previous ability to be rationally calculating. Here, the imagined roles are presented in a theatrically effective fashion and contrasted with a realistic frame story. The ecstatic hyperbole found in Expressionist drama is also characteristic of expressionist poetry.6 In this poetry demonic energies, celebrated in apocalyptic visions, press for the destruction of cities as a symbol of a detested civilization (Stefan Heym, “Die Dämonen der Städte”; Johannes R. Becher, “Berlin”). Faced, however, with the real destructive violence of the First World War, this celebration – in the name of vitalism – of destructive irrational powers quickly turned into just as expressive conjurations of pure horror (Wilhelm Klemm, “Schlacht an der Marne”; Albert Ehrenstein, “Der Kriegsgott”) and later even to ecstatic visions of peace (Alfred Wolfenstein, “Die Friedensstadt”; René Schickele, “Abschwur”). These were linguistic metaphors for desires, visions of horror, and an emotionally loaded experience of reality – they are separated from romantic portraits of the soul by an abyss. In paintings such as “Der Schützengraben” (1920–23) and his triptych “Der Krieg” (1929–32), the painter Otto Dix, who volunteered for service in the First World War, would bring these visions of horror to light. None of this, however, could surpass the shocking strangeness of the poems of Gottfried Benn (Morgue und andere Gedichte, 1912), in which sickness, death, decay, and ruin are aestheticized in such a way that even a reading public accustomed to Naturalism found them scarcely bearable.

6

This is amply demonstrated in an anthology edited by Kurt Pinthus and first published in 1920 in German by the Rowohlt publishing house in Berlin. For an English edition, see Menschheitsdämmerung: Dawn of Humanity – A Document of Expressionism, ed. Kurt Pinthus, tr. Joanna M. Ratych, Ralph Ley & Robert C. Conard (Columbia SC: Camden House, 1994).

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The Strange Objectivism of the Cubists The familiar world of appearance is rendered strange in different way in the works of the Cubists. The artists of Analytical Cubism combined concrete objects with abstract forms in such a way as to create the impression that the variety found in the physical world can be traced back to elementary geometrical structures. Since the rules of perspective are also suspended and the objects are portrayed simultaneously from multiple points of view which would not be possible in the real world, one is confronted with a reality which is not more subjective (as in the case of Expressionism) but more “objective” than the world of appearances – and therefore just as strange, albeit in another fashion. “It’s all the same to me,” stated Braque, “whether a form represents a different thing to different people or many things at the same time”7 (see fig. 2), and in a letter to Daniel–Henry Kahnweiler from 1912 Picasso wrote “Perhaps we shall be able to disgust everyone and we haven’t said everything yet.”8 The works of the later Synthetic Cubism attain to a similar effect of estrangement, but in this case geometrical forms come together to create figural shapes: in the words of Juan Gris, “I try to make concrete that which is abstract. I proceed from the general to the particular, by which I mean that I start with an abstraction in order to arrive at a true fact. Mine is an art of synthesis, of deduction […].”9 Even if this technique leads to recognizable concrete objects, these remain in constant competition with a pure architecture of colour, and through this ambivalence an artificial reality emerges which clearly puts its own independence on show. What the viewer can no longer expect is unmediated “access” to these works of art, as was characteristic of the aesthetic of the beautiful. Whoever 7

William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989): 20. 8 Rubin, Picasso and Braque, 25. 9 David–Henry Kahnweiler, Juan Gris: His Life and Work, tr. Douglas Cooper (1946; London: Lund Humphries, 1947): 138.

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wishes to appreciate Cubist art must be prepared to work for an understanding, must – as Picasso put it – first learn their “language”: The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anybody else but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?10

The Estranging Montage of the Heterogeneous in the Collage This is even truer of an artform which was developed by George Braque and Pablo Picasso between 1911 and 1913: Braque’s papier collé (literally, ‘paper glued together’) and Picasso’s collage (see fig. 3). Here, real things such as newspaper and wallpaper scraps, glass, wood, and sawdust are glued to the canvas and combined with painted lines and surfaces. Whereas Braque only used scraps of newspaper for his works and the words found on these scraps harmonized with the picture as a whole, Picasso’s collages are a provocative combination of varying realms of reality, of extremely naturalistic artlessness and demonstrative artificial autonomy, by means of which the objects introduced into the world of art retained their strangeness. As Picasso himself commented, If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too. This displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we wanted to make people think

10

“Picasso Speaks,” The Arts (May 1923): 315–26; quoted in Art in Theory 1900–2000, ed. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2003): 216.

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about because we were quite aware that our world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring.11

According to this, the early collages were meant to evoke strangeness, and apparently they managed just this. This also holds true for the literary avantgarde at this time. Not only an outsider like Gertrude Stein attempted to find a linguistic analogy to the process of composition used by the Cubist painters – with whom she was befriended – by creating collage-like lyrical ‘portraits’ from heterogeneous discursive elements which could only be synthesized in the imagination of the reader (Tender Buttons, 1914). The central principle of composition of some of the most well-known poetic creations of Modernism, such as Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), was the montage of heterogeneous materials and styles of presentation which is constituent of collage – in this case, in the form of quotations, allusions, and quite varying modes of discourse. These linguistic compositions, which attemped a more ‘objective’ representation of the world of appearances than realism, are to be found not only in poetry. Mentioned above, for example, was the Russian avantgarde writer Andrei Bely, who, as early as 1913, published his novel Petersburg – a “Cubist” novel in which realistic and metaphoric modes of presentation constantly intrude, abstract concepts are presented in the same fashion as concrete objects, and description, quotations, allusions, and philosophies are put together in such a way that a hallucinatory overall effect is created which is supposed to make St. Petersburg present. And as in the case of poetry, the prime example for the Modernist novel – Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) – is a montage of heterogeneous fragments of illusions of reality, of quotations, allusions, and wildly different types of discourse and style –

11

Quoted in Françoise Gilot & Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: Signet, 1965): 72.

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not to mention the later Finnegans Wake, where the principle of montage is also used at the level of sentence and even word.

The Wholesale Break with Tradition: Abstract Art At approximately the same time as the collage, between 1910 and 1915, abstract painting emerged, whose total renunciation of every type of concreteness signalled a break with the entire Western art tradition. In essence, however, the artists were merely carrying out in a radical way what the art theorist Conrad Fiedler had already formulated in 1876: “Art is not concerned with forms which exist previous to and independent of the artistic activity; rather the beginning and end of art lies in creating forms which only come into being at all as a result of this very activity.”12 The total break with the principles of concrete representation had differing motives and took on a variety of forms. Wassily Kandinsky, who painted his “First Abstract Watercolour” in 1910, stressed the relationship between abstract art and nature despite abandoning figural representation (see fig. 4): Abstract painting leaves behind the ‘skin’ of nature, but not its laws. Allow me that great word, the cosmic law. – The abstract artist does not receive his ‘stimulation’ from an arbitrary part of nature, but from nature as a whole, from its manifold manifestations which gather in him and lead to the work. This synthetic foundation seeks the form best suited for its expression, that is, the ‘abstract.’ Abstract painting has a wider horizon, has more freedom, and is richer in content than what we might call the ‘figural.’13

12

Conrad Fiedler, “Über die Beurteilung von Werken der bildende Kunst”; quoted in Werner Hofmann, Grundlagen der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1978): 233 (my tr.). 13 Wassily Kandinsky, Essays über Kunst und Künstler, ed. Max Bill (Stuttgart, 1955); quoted in Hess, Dokumente, 87 (my tr.).

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As Kandinsky described it in his theory of abstract art, this was to be the case only for a period of transition until this art also was able to produce an effect which would be strong enough: If we begin at once to break the bonds which bind us to nature, and devote ourselves purely to combination of pure colour and abstract form, we shall produce works which are mere decoration, which are suited to neckties or carpets. Beauty of Form and Colour is no sufficient aim by itself, despite the assertions of pure aesthetes or even of naturalists, who are obsessed with the idea of “beauty.” It is because of the elementary stage reached by our painting that we are so little able to grasp the inner harmony of true colour and form composition. The nerve vibrations are there, certainly, but they get no further than the nerves, because the corresponding vibrations of the spirit which they call forth are too weak. When we remember, however, that spiritual exercise is quickening, that positive science, the firmest basis of human thought, is tottering, that dissolution of matter is imminent, we have reason to hope that the hour of pure composition is not far away.14

And, indeed, it took only two years before Kasimir Malevich, the founder of Suprematism, dared a purely geometrical form of presentation with his famous “Black Square on White” (1913), explaining shortly thereafter: “The artist can be a creator only when the forms in his picture have nothing in common with nature.”15 For Malevich, the liberation from natural forms and colours was to be found in a reduction of form to the geometrical – to the most basic form of the square – and of colour to the ‘non-colours’ black and white. This ancestor of all later Minimalists countered sceptical objections that his paintings did not offer enough with the assertion that his 14

Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, tr. M.T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977): 47. 15 Kasimir S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915–1933, vol. 1 (Copenhagen, 1969): 23; quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 175.

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square was rich with meaning, filled with the absence of all objects.16 What the viewer saw, however, was only a black square on a white background, and that was in fact very little and rather estranging. An abundance of meaning could only develop in the creative fantasy of the viewer, and it already at that time became clear that accompanying commentary as an aid in understanding became more important the less clearly the actual work suggested a certain meaning. This is also true for the wholly abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian which appeared as of 1917/18. Mondrian arrived at purely geometrical forms because – in a radical continuation of Cubist intentions – he wished to present the “pure reality” to be found behind the variety of appearances: “Immutable pure reality lies behind changeable natural forms. Therefore, one has to trace natural forms back to a pure, immutable state.”17 He saw this pure reality as being ruled by a balance between two opposed powers – a balance which he believed could only be represented in the form of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines. This corresponded in the use of colour to the opposition between the primary colours red, yellow, and blue – as “abstractions of the natural colours” the only colours left “available” for use – and the three noncolours white, black, and grey.18 The well-balanced composition made up of horizontal and vertical lines and pure colours was conceived of as a representation of a “pure” reality hidden below the surface of the world of appearances, as the painterly equivalent of an elementary philosophy: It is a composition of rectangular colour planes that expresses the most profound reality. It achieves this by plastic expression of

16

Cf. Aaron Scharf, “Suprematism,” Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Nikos Stangos (London: Thames & Hudson, 1983): 138. 17 Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art (New York, 1947); quoted in Hess, Dokumente, 100 (my tr.). 18 Piet Mondrian, Neue Gestaltung (Bauhausbücher 5; Munich, 1925); quoted in Hess, Dokumente, 101–102 (my tr.).

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relationships and not by natural appearance. It realizes what all painting has always sought but could express only in a veiled manner.19

The only problem was that the viewer – and I will discuss this point more extensively at a later point – could not easily infer this from the paintings without a knowledge of the theosophical speculations of the artist. What he saw were strict geometrical lines and colours in a wellbalanced combination – which indeed could have been regarded as possessing a certain beauty if they had not been so unusual. Despite a number of similar tendencies, in the realm of the literary it was fundamentally not possible to achieve total abstraction. This is because even the smallest elements of a linguistic system signify and refer to a certain meaning. Nevertheless, one could attempt to imitate the elementarism of the abstract painters and prevent the more complex creation of meaning of natural language by suspending the unity of discourse, rules of grammar, and the semantic field. The extent to which this would go becomes clear in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” from 1912, in which he demands: SYNTAX MUST BE DESTROYED BY ARRANGING THE SUBSTANTIVES AT RANDOM AS THEY COME INTO BEING. THE VERB MUST BE USED IN THE INFINITIVE […]. ADJECTIVES MUST BE DONE AWAY WITH […]. ADVERBS MUST BE DONE AWAY WITH […]. EVERY SUBSTANTIVE MUST HAVE ITS DOUBLE […]. PUNCTUATION MUST ALSO BE DONE AWAY WITH […] The images must be orchestrated and distributed according to THE GREATEST POSSIBLE CONFUSION. THE “I” IN LITERATURE MUST BE DESTROYED, in other

words, psychology as a whole.20 19

Le Néo-Plasticisme: Principe général de l’équivalence plastique (1921); quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 290.

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He hoped to found by these means a method of composition of “free words” which he then demonstrated in the volume of poetry Zang Tumb Tumb from 1914. The reader is confronted with single words and mathematical symbols which are printed in many different fonts and spread out all over the pages, whereby distinct graphic patterns sometimes emerge. A further impressive example is the collection of poetry Bif§zf+18. Simultaneità. Chimismi Lirici (1915) by the Florentine Futurist Ardengo Soffici, who also wrote a Futurist Aesthetic between 1914 and 1917. Similar ideas and poetical experiments are to be found in the works of the Russian Futurists. In Vladimir Mayakovsky’s early poetry collections, the arrangement of the words on the page is not determined by syntactic rules, but by graphic design which is made up of a rich variation of font and an individual layout. Vasilij Kamenski’s poetry anticipates in a similar way effects to be found in the later Concrete Poetry, and Velimir Chlebnikov experimented with Russian morphology. Alexander Kruchenyk, in his “Declaration of the Word as Such” from 1913, propagated the freedom to express oneself not only by means of general language (concepts), but also personal language (the creator is individual), and in a language which has no solid (frozen) meaning – the Za’um.21

His poetry, then, consists of nothing but neologisms which only suggest possible affinities to actual Russian words at the level of sound (as in the case of nonsense poetry) or morphemic structure. There is no need to further explain how strange an effect this must have had, and the authors were after precisely this effect – after all, the title of the 20

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”; quoted in Manifeste und Proklamationen der europäischen Avantgarde (1909– 1938), ed. Wolfgang Asholt & Walter Fähnders (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1995): 24–26 (my tr.). 21 Quoted in Asholt & Fähnders, Manifeste und Proklamationen, 48 (my tr.).

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first manifesto of this group from 1912 was “A Slap in the Face for Public Taste.”22 Of great importance for theoretical reflection on the new aesthetic of the strange was the the concept of alienation as developed by Russian Structuralists. Viktor Shklovsky had already formulated this principle in 1917: The goal of art is to mediate a sense of the object as vision, and not as recognition; the process of art is the process of rendering things “alien” and the process of troubling form – a process which increases the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is its own justification in art and must be prolonged; art is a means to experience the making of something; what is already made, on the other hand, is unimportant in art.23

Even if alienation is only one means among many to create an estranging effect, it is astounding that at such an early time the specific aspect of the art and literature of Modernism was so clearly recognized – namely, a “process which increases the difficulty and length of perception.” It is even more astonishing that despite this, aesthetic theory continued to take recourse to the aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime, even though what is characteristic of both is the suddenness of perception.

The Provocative Expansion of the Definition of Art: Dada and Ready-Mades The extent to which recent art aimed for a provocative estrangement of the familiar is quite apparent in Dadaism. This movement understood itself as being anti-art, and from the beginning painting, sculpture,

22

Quoted in Asholt & Fähnders, Manifeste und Proklamationen, 28 (my tr.). Viktor Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priyom” (“Art as Process”), Sborniki II (Petrograd, 1917); quoted in Jurij Strieter, Russischer Formalismus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971): 15 (my tr.). 23

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poetry, and music were connected to one another in events similar to happenings. There is no uniform Dadaist style, neither in the visual arts, nor in literature. What the Dadaists had in common was the destruction, the derision of established art conventions and the bourgeois world-view: Dada was found in a lexicon, it means nothing. This is the meaningful nothing, where nothing means something. We want to change the world with nothing, we want to change poetry and painting with nothing, and we want to bring the war to a stop with nothing, declared Richard Huelsenbeck in 1916 in the Zurich “Cabaret Voltaire.”24

In particular, the attachment to convention of the familiar world of art and its elitist claims were to be unmasked by putting the extremely banal and accidental on display; the “artist, or the poet, […] is glad to be insulted”: Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist, and because at this moment I enjoy mixing this monster in oil paints: paper tubes imitating the metal that you press and automatically squeeze out hatred, cowardice and villainy. The artist, or the poet, rejoices in the venom of this mass condensed into one shopwalker of this trade, he is glad to be insulted, it proves his immutability.25

In order to reach their goal, the Dadaists made great use of recent techniques developed by the Expressionists, Cubists, Futurists, and abstract artists. The woodcuts, collages, reliefs, and sculptures of Jean Arp, one of the founders of Dada Zurich, used the potential of nonrepresentational painting (at that time still provocative) and strengthened the effect by means of intentionally simple organic forms. 24

Quoted in Asholt & Fähnders, Manifeste und Proklamationen, 117 (my tr.). Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” in Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, tr. Barbara Wright (London: John Calder, 1977): 10. 25

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Francis Picabia designed for Dada Paris his famous “ironic machines.” Max Ernst, who was with Arp the most important member of Dada Cologne at the start of the 1920s, treated the elitist pretensions of the artist to originality and technical ability with irony by creating collages from figures which he had cut out of old newspapers and books. The Dadaist Kurt Schwitters from Hanover added to this scraps of old bus tickets, labels, and the like. Schwitters, the editor of the magazine Merz, became famous above all because of his “Merzbau,” a multiplestory high column made of debris and garbage – a work which not only extended the principle of the collage to sculpture, but also made garbage fair game for art. It was, however, the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp which were to perhaps most influence the further development of art, everyday objects like the wheel of a bicycle, a bottle-dryer, a hat stand, a snow shovel – banal objects which he signed and declared to be “works of art” as a result of merely removing them from their functional context. It was a very essential opening-up of what is considered to be art – the assumption that the artist has to have created his work himself in the sense of a craftsman, which was totally indisputable up to that point, was rendered null and void. On the contrary, Duchamp established that it was enough if the artist chose the presented object, thereby endowing it with a new meaning. The idea that art can be created by means of a simple de-functionalization (or more exactly: by creating a new function) could be demonstrated most provocatively and effectively by choosing very banal everyday objects. Of legendary status is Duchamp’s submission of a urinal with the title “Fountain” to a New York exhibition in 1917 under the pseudonym “Mr. Richard Mutt.” After being rejected, Duchamp proclaimed the redefinition of art which this piece announced, which went beyond all provocation and would cause perhaps the most essential change in the visual arts up until the present:

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Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.26

However, before this new form of the creation of art propagated by Duchamp could be accepted, the institutions of art and then the viewers had to come to terms with the shock. Upon closer inspection it may indeed be reasonable that giving an everyday object a new function enables a new experience of that object; but at first it seemed too provocatively simple, too detrimental to the conception of the artist as a creative genius, to be accepted. Literary Dadaism was just as eclectic. The “phonetic poetry” of Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara, for which Huelsenbeck’s Phantastische Gebete [Fantastic Prayers] (1916) are a good example, had already been developed by the Italian and above all the Russian Futurists – as well as the distribution of the words all over the page in graphic design. One of the few original literary creations is the drama Les mamelles de Tirésias [The Breasts of Tiresias] (1917) by Guillaume Apollinaire, described already at this point in time by the author himself as “surreal.” In this play the heroine Thérèse throws her “balloon-breasts” into the audience in order to then turn her attention as Tiresias to politics while her abandoned husband then gives birth to 40,049 children in one day to compensate for a lack of children in Zanzibar, the setting of the play. There is no motivation for the events and not only the characters speak, but also the stage props. There is no doubt that what is presented is meant to appear extremely strange. Also worth mentioning are the early works in prose of Louis Aragon Anicet ou le panorama (1920) and Les aventures de Télémaque (1922), both of which were also already considered to be surreal, and

26

“The Richard Mutt Case,” The Blind Man (New York, May 1917); quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 252.

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Paul Éluard’s Les nécessités de la vie et les conséquences des rêves (1921). The Dadaists also put much energy into the publication of innumerable manifestos. Nearly all of them wrote some, above all Tristan Tzara. The titles alone were in keeping with the spirit of Dada – for example, La Deuxième aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine or Cinéma calendrier du coeur abstrait – and the contents lived off the shift back and forth between the presentation of irrational principles in comprehensible language, totally incomprehensible passages, and metafictional reflections on the writing of manifestos which totally contradicted the manifesto itself. The ideas of Dada were also presented and demonstrated in many journals. Schwitter’s Merz has already been mentioned – the journal’s title was cut out of an ad for the “Commerzund Privatbank” – and between 1919 and 1921 there appeared in Paris alone Tzara’s Dada and Le Coeur à Barbe, Francis Picabia’s 391 and Cannibale, Paul Eluard’s Proverbe, Céline Arnauld’s Projecteur, and Paul Dermée’s Z – all fine examples for a very estranging reading experience.27

The Strange World of Surrealism Surrealism, which sprang from Dadaism, was theoretically conceived above all by writers. According to André Breton, it “is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought.”28 In order for this ‘higher reality’ to manifest itself, it is necessary to banish every form of rational control from the process of artistic production: ‘It is true of Surrealist images as it is of opium 27

See Robert Short, “Dada and Surrealism,” in Bradbury & McFarlane, Modernism, 292–308. 28 André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, tr. Richard Seaver & Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969): 26.

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images that man does not evoke them; rather they “come to him spontaneously, despotically […]’.”29 What this brings to light – in many different ways and in varying forms – is the “marvellous” which is considered at the same time to be the only form of beauty.30 The essential point for my argument here is that the marvellous is certainly always something strange. Whether it is also perceived of as beautiful is another thing. This becomes clear upon considering the works of Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró and Picabia, painters who turned to Surrealism in the 1920s. Ernst’s collages made of leftover scraps of material which he had created during his Dada period had already been described by André Breton as surreal. However, it was his rubbings – drawings of irregular and uneven surfaces such as scratched wooden floors which were produced by placing paper on the surface and then rubbing it with pencil, and which came to him in “hypnagogic visions” (i.e. visions while half asleep) – which fully met the desire for unconscious production: On the tenth of August, 1925, […] I was struck by the obsession that showed to my excited gaze the floor-boards upon which a thousand scrubbings had deepened the grooves. […] [In] order to aid my meditative and hallucinatory faculties, I made from the boards a series of drawings by placing on them, at random, sheets of paper which I undertook to rub with black lead. In gazing attentively at the drawings thus produced […] I was surprised by the sudden intensification of my visionary capacities and by the hallucinatory succession of contradictory images superimposed, one upon the other […]. I insist on the fact that the drawings thus obtained lost more and more, through a series of suggestions and transmutations that offered themselves spontaneously – in the manner of that which passes for hypnagogic visions – the character of the material interrogated (the wood, for example) […].31

29

Breton, “Manifesto,” 36. Breton, “Manifesto,” 14. 31 Max Ernst, Beyond Painting (New York: Wittenborn, Schulz, 1948): 7–8. 30

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The longing for production which is unconscious was also met by André Masson, who produced drawings by means of “automatic writing,” creations which were as ambiguous as the rubbings but finer and interspersed with more suggestions of figural representation. Miró, in turn, produced pictures at this time composed of patches of paint “randomly” spread on the canvas which were meant to present the wondrous – and do in this case thanks to his artistic competence. Francis Picabia, on the other hand, tested the limits of tolerance of viewers when he signed a single spot of paint and declared it to be a Surrealist work of art. At the same time, Surrealism did not reject artistic skill and compositional creativity on principle as long as the result was a presentation of the marvellous. At least, this is the only way to explain the fact that the founders celebrated in 1924 a painter such as Giorgio de Chirico as their master, who had already between 1911 and 1915 produced magical spaces by means of a very conscious constellation of fantastic architecture and heterogeneous objects. In the end, Salvador Dalí’s psychoanalytical dream worlds were realized by means of a very exact academic painting of illusions (see fig. 6) and are, therefore, in terms of the process of production the exact opposite of Max Ernst’s rubbings or André Masson’s “automatic writing.” In this respect, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, and (between 1926 and 1935) Picasso occupy a type of middle ground. The concentration on the inner world was crucial, as demanded by Breton: The plastic work of art, in order to respond to the undisputed necessity of thoroughly revising all real values, will either refer to a purely interior model or cease to exist.32

Their experiments with “automatic” writing, the results of which were published in 1920 under the title Champs Magnétiques, gradually led 32

André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (Paris, 1928); quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 460.

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Breton and Philippe Soupault to the belief that this spontaneously resulting metaphoric language had the ability to open a path to the inner truth of human beings. This new trust in the cognitive value of uncontrolled language brought about a turning away from the mainly destructive anarchy of the Dadaists and to the more hopeful Surrealist Manifesto of 1924. The belief that humans could better deal with the contradictions of the material world by means of a revival of their associative abilities even included the utopian idea that the Surrealist reworking of language could also cause changes in social reality. For this reason, Surrealist journals had titles such as La Révolution surréaliste (1924–29) and Le surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–33), while the theoretical writings of the poets had a decidedly revolutionary character.33 The literary works of the Surrealists may not have all been equally revolutionary, but they were at least fascinating in regard to the novelty and strangeness which was part and parcel of a presentation of the marvellous. A good example is the huge success of Breton’s story Nadja (1928), in which the author presents the repeated accidental encounters with a young woman in minute detail, complementing the unlikely events with analogous dream experiences and free association. His later novel L’amour fou (1937) also focusses on the accidental events which occur while meeting and spending time with a young woman – coincidences which are then taken as signs for a deeper reality. In this case, the book also includes three prefatory theoretical essays which provide the reader with an introduction to the Surrealist aesthetic as preparation for what is to follow – a fact which is clearly indicative of the necessity of theory for a understanding of this literature. A further work typical of literary Surrealism, Louis Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris (1926), also includes a theoretical introduction. The 33

Cf. Breton’s “Confession dédaigneuse” (1923), Aragon’s Traité du style (1928), Éluard’s “Critique de la poésie” (1931), René Crevel’s Les pieds dans le plat (1933), and Benjamin Peret’s Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là (1936).

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first part consists of a series of very precise observations of reality in the Passage de L’Opéra in Paris, whereby magical backgrounds open up in the midst of the realistic presentation. In the second part, a nighttime walk through Paris parks is the starting point for free associations, expressed in the form of fragments of reality – for example, scraps of newspapers and billboards – which are inserted in a collagelike fashion. With regard to form, however, such a mixing of modes of discourse appears tame when compared to the magical language games found in the poetry cycle Corps et biens (1930) by Robert Desnos. Particularly in the parts “Rrose Sélavy,” “L’aumonyme,” and “Langage cuit” the reader encounters a variety of phonetic and morphological language games which are reminiscent of the experiments of the Russian Futurists. At the same time, in those parts of the work which are less hermetic in terms of form, there is one recurring theme which becomes apparent: love as the emotional state which became the Surrealists’ favourite subject because of its paradoxical nature. Nearly all the poems, for example, of the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard are dedicated to love, one huge homage to love which turns humans and the world into something marvellous. But while the poetic sequences of images in the poems from L’amour la poesie (1929), La Rose Publique (1934), and Le livre ouvert (1941) – for the most part rhythmically ordered and in constant change – may indeed create by means of association very clear emotional effects, they can only be tentatively synthesized at the level of meaning. Surrealist drama, on the other hand, was much more directed towards social criticism. Grotesque distortions and dream sequences serve in Yvan Goll’s Methusalem oder Der ewige Bürger [The Eternal Citizen] (1924) to expose bourgeois society; in Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Kurka wodna [The Tap] (1922) to demonstrate that awareness of crisis which had already been formulated in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of The West; and in Roger Vitrac’s Victor ou Les enfants au pouvoir (1928) once again to satirize the decaying higher strata of the bourgeoisie. What was presented on stage in these works was so

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strange in terms of scenery, conception of character, plot, and use of language that these plays are also viewed as grotesque early forms of the Theatre of the Absurd.

Stream of Consciousness I would like to at least mention one of the most important literary achievements of Modernism, for which there are only symbolic equivalents to be found in the visual arts due to limitations of the medium: the presentation of the stream of consciousness as a complex mesh of past and present. When reading the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, above all, however, Marcel Proust’s monumental A la recherche du temps perdu, the reader is given the chance to imagine strange inner worlds with unprecedented precision and subtlety because the processual nature of these worlds is quite effectively suggested. He must be open for unusual modes of presentation and sees himself confronted with all the contradictions of a many-sided other self which – strange though it might appear – may not be all that different from one’s own self. Taken as a whole, all this experimentation led in an extremely short space of time to an astounding creation of new artistic realities and forms of presentation, which were almost always so radically different from what had been common until then that they could not help but appear disquietingly strange. In the meantime, what was once regarded as transgressing the boundaries of art has long since been greeted as a welcome expansion of these boundaries, because it brought with it an expansion of our possibilities and abilities to experience the world and art. This means that a shift within the wide spectrum of alterity from unsettlingly strange to (nearly) beautiful has taken place. But for the general public, the alternative realities and modes of presentation to be found in the visual arts and literature still appear to be mostly strange.

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2 T HE W IDENING OF E XPERIENCE With the exception of a certain number of Dadaists, the break with realist representation and its conventions on the part of Modernist artists was more of an inevitable consequence of their intentions than their direct goal. What drove them was a desire to expand perception and aesthetic experience by pushing the limits of their own medium, both in terms of what is presented and in terms of the techniques and means of presentation. Thus, the constant experimentation, the frequent changes of style – sometimes within the work of one and the same artist. A versatile genius like Picasso shifted, for example, from Naturalism to Primitivism, Cubism, Classisism, to Romanticism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and to mythological painting, discovering in every case something new for himself and for art.

Experiments with Form and New Modes of Perception The Expressionists explored the possibility of giving metaphoric expression to the subjective experience of reality by means of an unrealistic use of colours and exaggeration of forms. The Cubists brought realistic and geometric forms together, experimented with abandoning the rules of perspective in favor of a more ‘objective’ two-dimensional representation of the three-dimensional world of objects, brought the painting of illusions and scraps of reality together in the collage, and discovered in this way the principle of montage. Kandinsky and Malevich dispensed entirely with concrete representation, the first by means of formlessness, the second by means of an absolute rigidity of form. The Dadaists expanded the definition of art through their “anti-art” in the form of two- and three-dimensional collages made of garbage, intentionally banal ready-mades, and a total abandonment of the lasting ‘work’ in their happenings. The Surrealists added “automatic writing,” rubbings, the unconsciously motivated spreading of patches of paint on a canvas, as well as the combination of heterogeneous objects in magical dreamworlds.

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Confronted with all these radically expanded possibilities, the viewer could in a similar way have totally new experiences. Expressionist painting clearly and demonstratively suspended the criteria of the “correctness” of colours and forms that are true to nature – a criterion which had held sway for a long time, even in Impressionism. The intense, “incorrect” colours and obviously distorted forms demanded to an unprecedented extent the recognition of a subjective principle of creation and a far more autonomous artistic reality. The same holds true for the works of the Cubists, in which abstract geometrical forms were combined with figural objects. Above all, the simultaneous presentation of various views of an object – impossible according to the laws of perspective – asked the viewer to suspend natural habits of perception, and the intrusion of fragments of reality in the collage destabilized the axiomatic definition of the artist as a master in a technical sense. The development from Expressionism and Cubism to abstract painting may from the artists’ point of view have only been logical; for the viewer, however, the total renunciation of concreteness meant a radical questioning of the understanding of visual art which had been valid until that point – a stylized representation of an already familiar reality. And whoever was busy coming to terms with the creation of fully autonomous artistic realities must have been quite affronted by the nearly simultaneous expansion of the limits of art in the opposite direction: the presentation of banal real objects without any change to their form as ready-mades which the artist no longer produced, but rather merely chose. For the ready-made, originally conceived of as “anti-art” (or at least appearing to be so), was soon taken seriously as just another new type of art, and the viewer was confronted with “works” whose strangeness consisted of the fact that they were all too well-known from the everyday world. And when subsequently concrete objects were represented in an illusionary manner in the dream paintings of some Surrealists, their combination was so contrary to any

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worldly logic that it was necessary to read Freud or Jung in order to regain once again at least some sense of understanding.

The Need for Explanatory Theory We have come to a familiar problem – Modernist art requires the help of theory in order to be understood. This was clear enough to the artists themselves; they resorted to justifying their art in commentaries and manifestoes. The shock of the radically new in every case could only be overcome with the help of an accompanying theory, because new modes of perception and new attitudes towards art had first to be developed for this wholesale change in the production of art to be appreciated. In this way, the shift from the aesthetic of the beautiful or the sublime to a new aesthetic, the strange, had clearly taken place. This held true to the same extent for the encounter with the avantgardist literature of Modernism. Even those who were familiar with the previous transformation of drama effected by Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov did not possess adequate means of dealing with the radically irrational presentation of the subconscious in expressionist plays such as Till Damaskus or Stora Landsvägen. The dream-structure signified a total renunciation of both the linear temporal structure – which had been constituent for drama – and the logical connection of presented events which makes the imagining of ‘real’ people or a consistent series of actions possible. Readers attuned to customary modes of reading were no less perplexed when confronted with the montage of words, images, and discourses found in avantgardist poetry – whether that of the Futurists, Gertrude Stein, Pound, or Eliot, to name a few examples. Here, too, the writers attempted to reduce the shock effect and enable suitable modes of reception by means of manifestoes, commentaries, and footnotes – but this theoretical support was insufficient to foster a new sensibility. Time and intense effort were necessary, regardless of whether it was poetry, the avantgardist novel in the manner of Joyce’s Ulysses,

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Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, Aragon’s Les aventures de Télémaque, or Breton’s Nadja, or plays such as Apollinaire’s Les mamelles de Tirésias, Witkiewicz’s Kurka wodna, or Vitrac’s Victor ou Les enfants au pouvoir. It is no exaggeration to say that due to the artistic delight in experimentation unleashed during the first three decades of the twentieth century more possibilities for an expansion of experience in dealing with art were on offer than ever before. This also demanded, however, an unprecedented degree of willingness and ability to reorient one’s senses and mind in the face of the encounter with varying forms of extreme strangeness. The experience of each new artform was thus decisively characterized by a primary sense of estrangement, which – whether it had to be overcome or accepted – became the basis for a new aesthetic: the aesthetic of the strange.

3 T HE U TOPIA OF R ENEWAL This untrammelled pleasure in experimentation on the part of Modernist artists came from the hope that art could undergo radical renewal: a renewal of its themes and means of representation, but above all its intentions, its understanding of itself, and its function. On one point in particular there was a consensus: art should – indeed, had to – undergo a radical change in order to rediscover or even finally uncover its inherent possibilities, its real meaning. This prospect of renewal was the result in turn of an extensive and deep consciousness of crisis – above all the awareness of a crisis of realism in the sense of a representation of the external world of appearances, soon followed by a general crisis of representation, and accompanied by the questioning of a rational world-view.

The Renewal of Art Van Gogh, celebrated by the Expressionists as their forerunner, already formulated very clearly the new turn against realism: “Tell Ser-

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ret that in my eyes the true painters are the ones who do not paint things as they are, dryly and analytically, but as they feel.”34 Matisse went a step further: The painter no longer has to be concerned with paltry details – this is captured more effectively and quickly by photography. It is no longer the task of painting to represent historical events – this is found in books. We have a higher view of painting. It serves to express the inner vision of the artist.35

This turn to the interior, as subjective as it may appear, was motivated by the hope of being able to represent in this way the true nature of things instead of their simple appearance: The longing for essential, indivisible being, for freedom from the deception of the senses of our ephemeral life, is the basic disposition of all art […] To show an unearthly state of being that underlies all else, to break the mirror of life so that we can look into being.36

Even in the paintings of Mondrian, which appear to be so extremely abstract, an understanding of art as representation is still to be found, except it is no longer a representation of the world of appearances, but rather of a “pure reality”: I felt that it [pure reality] can only be achieved by means of pure form, and this must not be fundamentally conditioned by subjective feeling and imagining. […] What lies behind the changeable

34

Vincent van Gogh, Briefe an seinen Bruder (Berlin, 1914): 406; quoted in Hess, Dokumente, 24 (my tr.). 35 Henri Matisse, Künstlerbekenntnisse, ed. Paul Westheim (Berlin, 1924); quoted in Hess, Dokumente, 37 (my tr.). 36 Franz Marc, Briefe, Aufzeichnungen und Aphorismen (Berlin, 1920); quoted in Hess, Dokumente, 79 (my tr.).

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natural forms is immutable pure reality. Therefore, one has to reduce the natural forms to pure and unchanging relations.37

The turn away from a representation of mere appearances became a wholesale renunciation of re-presentation, became a self-confident dedication to presentation, the creation of totally new artistic realities. Apollinaire already claims this of Cubism: “Cubism differs from the old schools of painting in that it aims, not at an art of imitation, but at an art of conception, which tends to rise to the height of creation.”38 Robert Delaunay actually describes for himself this path to radically new creation very precisely: I arrived at an abstract Cubism, where colours are in play with one another through the development of their contrasts while figural signs and references are still allowed – my paintings “Fenêtres Simultanées” [Simultaneous Windows, 1912]. – It was the creation of something new in the truest sense, without any analogy in the past and present. In these paintings it was a question of colour for colour’s sake [couleur pour la couleur]. – It was no longer a representation of nature and also not supernaturalism, but rather – if you will – the first abstract painting based on colour.39

And Kandinsky, who held to a hidden connection of all areas of life as a result of his theosophic world-view, nonetheless decisively claimed total autonomy for art: only through great pains, efforts, and experiments did I succeed in overthrowing this “wall around art.” So it was that I finally entered into the realm of art, which, like nature, like science, like

37

Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art (New York, 1947); quoted in Hess, Dokumente, 100 (my tr.). 38 Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters. Aesthetic Meditations, tr. Lionel Abel (1913; New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1949): 17. 39 Robert Delaunay, unpublished notes and letters; quoted in Hess, Dokumente, 55 (my tr.).

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political institutions, is a realm in itself, regulated by its own laws peculiar to itself and which, together with all other realms, will ultimately constitute that mighty kingdom that we can now only dimly conceive.40

He sought to bring the autonomy of art to bear by means of a “cancellation of the real,” a total abandonment of concreteness, but also realized that this goal can be achieved in exactly the opposite way, through recourse to the “great realism”: That “artistic”element which has here been reduced to a minimum must be recognized as the most powerfully affective abstract element. Each arbitrary object (even a cigar butt) has an inner resonance which is independent of its external function. This resonance gains in strength when the function of the object in everyday practical life – which suppresses this resonance – is removed.41

Precisely this second path was then taken with Duchamp’s presentation of banal utility articles as ready-mades. In them the artistic was indeed “reduced to a minimum,” and while Kandinsky was still interested in ‘ a simple (“inartistic”) rendering of the mere, palpable object,’42 here the objects themselves were presented detached from their “function […] in everyday practical life” – realism could not be greater. The renewal of the visual arts had thus been pushed to the extreme limits: to the creation of autonomous objects in abstract painting and to the creation of an autonomous way of viewing real objects which had been ‘abstracted’ from their practical use in the world. Both lead to an 40

Wassily Kandinsky, “Reminiscences,” in Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1: (1901–1921), ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay & Peter Virgo (London: Faber & Faber, 1982): 376. 41 Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” The Blue Rider (Munich, 1912); quoted in Hess, Dokumente, 88 (my tr.). 42 Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form”; quoted in Hess, Dokumente, 87–88 (my tr.).

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extreme strangeness of the presented and to a new aesthetic perception as outlined by the concept of the aesthetic of the strange.

The Renewal of Literature The literary avantgarde was also driven by a hope of renewal that bordered on the utopian. This achieves full clarity of expression above all in the manifestoes and critical commentaries of the time. In his first Futurist manifesto (20 February 1909), Marinetti wrote: We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.43

The Expressionist poet Kurt Heynicke proclaimed confidently in 1917: The new art has awakened. It is the first step towards a new humanity. A new humanity […] will learn to feel with the soul. […] The artist used to depend on objects – now he rejects objects, he scorns them. He forms himself – himself, part of the world – and his form is at the center of the artwork. The new art leads us back to ourselves. It is the path to the soul.44

In his manifesto for the first Dada evening in Zurich a year earlier, however, Hugo Ball had declared Expressionism a failure and announced the outbreak of a new movement in art: Has Expressionism satisfied our desire for art which is a ballotage of our most vital concerns? NO! NO! NO! Have the Expressionists satisfied our desire for art which burns the essence of life 43

F.T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973): 21–22. 44 Kurt Heynicke, “Seele zur Kunst,” Das Kunstblatt 1 (1917): 348; quoted in Theorie des Expressionismus, ed. Otto F. Best (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982): 104– 105. (my tr.).

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into our skin? NO! NO! NO! […] Expressionism, discovered abroad and become in Germany as is the custom an excessive decadent idyll and the expectation of a good pension, has nothing more to do with the aspirations of active humans. The signatories of this manifesto have gathered under the war-cry DADA!!!! to propagate art which will translate new ideals into reality. What is DADAISM then? The word Dada symbolizes the most primitive relationship to the reality surrounding us, with Dadaism a new reality claims its rights.45

And the Surrealists, whose journals La Révolution surréaliste (1924– 29) and Le surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–33) already proclaimed in their titles the demand for total renewal, were not more modest: Surrealism […] tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.46

The new form of epic theatre developed by Bertolt Brecht, whose principles he outlined in 1931 in the Anmerkungen zur Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (“Notes to the Opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”),47 was also connected to more general utopian hopes. By means of the “alienation effect,” which resulted from the destruction of the illusion propagated in traditional theatre conventions, a reflective instead of emotional stance should be created in the audience. This had a sociopolitical intent and was based on Marxist ideology. What was misunderstood, however, was that while the attempt to expose the parable-like character of the scenic presentation and the mere role-playing of the actors – by means of prologues, narrative and explanatory commentaries, or songs – did indeed found a new theatre aesthetic which also enabled an expansion of experience, 45

Quoted in Theorie des Expressionismus, ed. Best, 237–38 (my tr.). Breton, “Manifesto,” 26. 47 In Stücke für das Theater am Schiffbauerdamm (Berlin, 1955): 259–76. 46

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it in no way necessarily achieved the intended sociopolitical effect, as the history of its reception has shown. This brief reminder of the intense efforts to renew art should above all make clear why in the first three decades of this century there is such a variety of radical innovations which were quite estranging in their effect. The radical nature of the experiments is simply an expression of the utopian hope of finally being able to give (or give back) to art its true purpose. And since – as is to be expected of utopias – none of the new possibilities was fully able to fulfil this hope (at least not for everybody), the result was a quick succession of avantgardist movements which all claimed more or less directly to be absolute. For viewers and readers there was soon the inevitable sense of a reign of the new in each case. With each newly emerging avantgarde the previous one appeared ‘out-of-date’; the strangeness of the last movement appeared tame in comparison to the even greater – or at least still unfamiliar – strangeness of a new one. This was even strengthened by the accompanying theoretical commentaries and manifestos where the idea of progress was still uninterrupted – even in the destructive stance of the Dadaists that the whole idea of ‘art’ was outmoded. However, it also soon became apparent that the development of art towards the strange – brought about by abandoning the representation of the world of appearances – was at the same time a central element of its power to affect the viewer or reader. This means that even a partial acclimatization to the strangely new led to a reduction of at least the provocative part of the effect. But since this element – that is, the initial sense of strangeness – had become an important part of the new aesthetic experience, only the constant production of differing types of strangeness could guarantee this experience. The acceptance of the strangeness of these works based on the radical attempt to renew art became with time a constant striving after strangeness in the service of this type of aesthetic experience. “The Shock of the New” changed from an attendant circumstance into a goal aspired to by the artists as well as a sign of avantgarde art expected by the viewers.

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Nevertheless, this was inevitably subject to the law of diminishing returns, a weakening through repetition: the more often the viewers had already been shocked, the more difficult it was to shock them. In particular, the potential of radically estranging modes of representation was slowly exhausting itself. This resulted after the Second World War in art movements which could indeed still cause surprise, but no longer shock. At first, however, the radical experiments of avantgardist art and literature led to such an extreme sense of strangeness that this could only be mastered with intense effort. Such an effort was, of course, to be found above all among the artists themselves, whereas the general public for the most part were not willing or able to get past the initial experience of estrangement to that particular type of pleasure which the aesthetic of the strange may impart. The American art-critic Clement Greenberg stated quite rightly in 1939: The avant-garde’s specialization of itself, the fact that its best artists are artist’s artists, its best poets, poet’s poets, has estranged a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets.48

This proves once again just how much the aesthetic of the strange depends on cultural preparation; and if this apparently had not yet been undertaken at that time, one has to say that, while this may have improved, there is still much work to be done. It is no secret that art studies only plays a marginal, at best decorative role within the framework of the present-day educational system. Above all, a readiness to be open to those things which appear strange has to be encouraged, as William Wright observed with reference to abstract art in an interview with Jackson Pollock:

48

“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 7.5 (Fall 1939): 34–49; quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 542.

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A person isn’t born to like good music, they have to listen to it and gradually develop an understanding of it or liking for it. If modern painting works the same way – a person would have to subject himself to it over a period of time in order to be able to appreciate it.49

Varieties of Strangeness in the Later Phase of Modernism The artists of the later phase of Modernism – from the late 1930s until the early 1960s – were confronted with the problem that the utopian demand for the absolutely new still persisted (i.e. the radical Other was expected of art) while, at the same time, the wild experimentation of the previous decades had already explored to a great extent the region of possible conceptions and forms of expression. Therefore, it seemed only possible to create something new either by means of an intensification of already familiar avantgardist conceptions and forms or a combination of the previously disparate concepts and means of representation of differing movements. The art that resulted was strange in a great variety of ways, at times just as strange as the art of the preceding avantgarde. Nevertheless, it was only occasionally able to shock and normally only caused surprise. This was partly due to the fact that – after decades of encounters with constantly changing forms of extreme strangeness – at least those viewers and readers who strove to gain an understanding of Modernist art and literature were no longer easily rattled. Avantgardist art was in the meantime allowed the privilege to be quite strange, and in the face of these expectations it was no longer easy to shock the viewers and readers. If art managed at least to surprise, then it was because a number of the new movements, partly 49

William Wright, interview with Jackson Pollock, in F.V. O’Connor, Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967): 79–81; quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 584.

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against the background of the experience of the Second World War, were characterized by an unprecedented seriousness. In painting this seriousness is found most clearly in the attempt to revive pathos (erroneously described as ‘sublime’), in literature it takes the form of a pessimistic Existentialism.

1 T HE I NTENSIFICATION OF E ARLY M ODERNIST T ENDENCIES IN A RT The intensification of early Modernist tendencies is clearly apparent in American art of the late 1940s and 1950s, the centre of artistic production no longer being Paris but New York since 1940. Designations such as “Abstract Expressionism” and “Minimalism” indicate the continuation of concepts from the first decades of the twentieth century, and the intensification which can be observed makes this art appear to be the final stage in the Modernist conception of art. The more abstract paintings of Willem De Kooning, for instance, clearly appear to be variations on Cubist painting, and his more figurative “Women” painted between 1950 and 1953 as a continuation not only of Kirchner’s Expressionist style, but particularly of the Ceret paintings of Chaim Soutine from the early 1920s.

Abstract Expressionism In Jackson Pollock’s huge Action Paintings from 1947 to 1950 – in which paint is applied to a canvas lying on the ground by means of rhythmic bodily movements combined with a “drip and spatter” technique – both the automatism of the small paintings of a Surrealist like Masson is intensified by making the paintings over-dimensional, while the connection to the informal abstract painting of Kandinsky is felt; nevertheless, a new effect most definitely results. Not only the size (his “Autumn Rhythm, Number 30” from 1950 measures 105x207 ins), but above all the fact that these pictures sprang their

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own frames created a new sense of a space without borders, and this must have seemed strange in the face of the conventional expectation that paintings are limited by a “frame.” This sense of a lack of borders was pursued in particular by Barnett Newman, who hoped in this way to revive the aesthetic of the sublime. His paintings are coloured backgrounds broken by only a few straight vertical lines, and while they may have structural affinities with geometrical Purism of Modernism, the extreme size of the paintings – his “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” from 1951 is 95½ ins high and 213¼ ins wide – are meant to exclude the perception of the limits of the painting for the viewer and thereby create a sense of infinity. And indeed this effect can be felt if one follows Newman’s instructions and stands close enough to the painting. What Newman wished to achieve was a ‘sublime’ effect in a generally understood sense – that is, in the sense that one might call a cathedral ‘sublime’ – and he believed that in American one could create “cathedrals” of feeling without recourse to history which would be able to directly satisfy for every person the need for a sense of the sublime, for “absolute feelings”: We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions. We do not need the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend. We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.50

50

“The Sublime is Now,” Tiger’s Eye 1.6 (December 1948): 51–53; quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 581–82.

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And it seems paradoxical, to put it mildly, that in his attempt to establish the traditional aesthetic of the sublime as the basis for Modernist and Postmodern art, Jean–François Lyotard turns to Newman51 who wants nothing to do with this tradition and whose own work has nothing to do with it. Namely, a central element of the aesthetic of the sublime developed in the eighteenth century is that the sublime feeling grows out of the mastering of an initially overwhelming terror, and Newman’s large expanses of paint do not appear terrifying at all – they are actually even beautiful after one has accustomed oneself to their unusual dimensions. The borders disappear in a similar way in Mark Rothko’s vibrant paintings consisting of expanses of colour with squares blurred at the edges from the years 1949–70 (see fig. 7) in which an astounding sense of depth is apparent. The intensification of Purist tendencies becomes even more evident in the monumental, nearly monochome canvases in black, purplish-red, and purple which he painted for a chapel at Rice University shortly before his death. The reduction of the variety to be found in the world of appearances as aspired to by Purism is here pushed to the point that an impression of total vacuity results which can generate both a mystical or concentrated effect, as well as an uncanny one. In this way, Rothko seems to have come closest to creating the “cathedral” of absolute feelings wished for by Newman. A similar principle of composition underlies Robert Rauschenberg’s white canvases from 1952, Ad Reinhard’s black-in-black paintings from the mid-1950s, and Frank Stella’s “black paintings” from the late 1950s in which a matte black surface is crossed only by thin glossy black lines arranged geometrically. The Purist stance, the at-

51

Cf. Lyotard’s essays “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989): 196–219; and “Newman: The Instant,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, tr. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity, 1991): 78–88.

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tempt to get by with minimal differentiations within large homogeneous surfaces, can be felt everywhere, and even this is abandoned in Ives Klein’s monochrome blue paintings from 1961. The Minimalists of the 1960s – Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, as well as Stella – preferred, however, three-dimensional shapes as a variation and continuation of the Purist geometric conception, which in the end has its origin in Malevich’s “Black Square on White” from 1913. Once again the size is increased, for instance in Judd’s 10-foothigh columns made of rectangular forms of the same size, or in Andre’s “Lever,” a 30-foot-long row of bricks (1966). By choosing to use materials which had been industrially produced – or at least seemed so – the reduction of the artist’s task to mere arranging already undertaken by Duchamp was quite clearly demonstrated. And the at times not very friendly reaction of criticism was an indication of just how estranging this art was at first even for those viewers who were no strangers to the art scene.

The Elite Artistic Status of the Trivial All too familiar objects are the subject of one of the artists who as of the mid-1950s began to be competition for Abstract Expressionism. Jasper Johns used quite conventional oil paint and wax crayons for his targets (e.g., “Target with Plaster Casts,” 1955) and the American flag (e.g., “White Flag,” 1955), but managed to give them such an abstract, emblematic quality that the transformation of even everyday objects into quasi-abstract works of art became astonishingly clear. That this was above all due to a reduction to the purely factual was stressed by Johns himself: I’m interested in things which suggests things which are, rather than in judgements. The most conventional thing, the most ordinary thing – it seems to me that those things can be dealt with

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without having to judge them; they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy.52

If trivial or at least all too familiar objects gain in this way the elite status of art, this is just as true for the assemblages or ‘combines’ of Robert Rauschenberg, which this New York artist put together from material found on the street or in second-hand shops. In so doing, he took recourse to a method with which Kurt Schwitters had already attracted attention in the 1920s, but which now was in clear contrast to the more ‘distinguished’ works of the Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists. Nevertheless, what is new is his play with multiple associations as can be seen in his “Odalisk” (1955–58) where a box whose sides are covered with pin-up girls and classical nudes and which is topped with a stuffed rooster stands on a pillar which in its turn rests on a pillow. In this way – at least if one takes the title into account – the allusion to the harem women painted by Ingres and Matisse becomes just as apparent as the ironization of the illusory connection between lust and luxury. In retrospect it seems important to mention that these “combines” (for example, the now famous stuffed goat surrounded by a car tire with the title “Monogram” from 1959) already prefigure the more widespread return of assemblage in the decades to follow.

Kinetic Art and Op Art In terms of their principles of composition, many of Joseph Beuys’s arrangements can be seen as an intensification of both Duchamp’s ready-mades and the assemblage of the refuse of society found in Schwitter’s Merzbau. The fact that their effect is totally different is due to the thematically motivated nature of the choice and composition

52

Interview with David Sylvester, B B C , 10 October 1965, in the catalogue Jasper Johns: Drawings (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974); quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 738.

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of the elements. The playfully derisive expansion of what counts as art seen in Duchamp and the Dadaists becomes anthropological and tragic in the work of Beuys. In his montages, the used-up remnants of society appear to be a trace, a secular relic of human history tragically interpreted. The anonymity of the banal objects is dissolved by means of a mythically elevated affiliation with a very personal experience and replaced by an impression of authenticity. His preference for “unsightly” materials such as felt and grease is, according to Beuys himself, connected to the fact that the Tartars who found him half-dead after a plane crash in 1943 wrapped his body in grease and felt and kept him alive in that way. If one is unaware of this autobiographical anecdote, one will not readily pick up on the life-saving connotation of an ugly stinky “Fettecke” and, therefore, will most likely experience a high degree of estrangement. Even more astounding is the fact that Beuys’ creations leave a very strong impression as a result of their intentional creation of the illusion of an archaic anthropological “trace.” Nevertheless, the necessity of commentaries and theory in dealing with an extreme art movement in which the boundary between art and non-art is intentionally put in question becomes eminently apparent precisely in Beuys’ creations. This is another element of the strangeness of this art: it needs to be accompanied by an explanation, all the more so the less immediately obvious its status as art is. Another artform which was widespread in the 1950s and 1960s, kinetic art, may also be seen as an intensification of a conception developed in early Modernism. Already Duchamp had engaged in “rotoreliefs,” and Naum Gabo created in 1920 his first “Kinetic Construction,” accompanied by a theoretical explanation of his dynamic view of art in The Realistic Manifesto, published with his brother, Antoine Pevsner, in the same year. According to this manifesto, We renounce the thousand-year-old delusion in art that held the static rhythms as the only elements of the plastic and pictorial arts.

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We affirm in these arts a new element the kinetic rhythms as the basic forms of our perception of real time.53

Also Vladimir Tatlin’s works composed of moving lights and László Moholy–Nagy’s “Lichtmaschine” (1930) belong to the early history of kinetic art, which only achieved wider recognition in the 1950s with Alexander Calder’s mobiles. In addition to Calder, other artists used the movement of air as energy – Kenneth Martin with his rotating and George Rickey with his swaying thin strips of metal. Both in this case and in the electrically driven “Machines” of Nicolas Schöffer, Harry Kramer, and Jean Tinguely, kinetic art lives from the apparently accidental nature of the successively formed constellations. This is also true of works of art made of light by Schöffer, Gerhard von Graevenitz and Otto Piene, or those of François Morellet, Horacio García Rossi, Julio Le Parc, and Don Mason, which took advantage of the possibilities of varying light intensity which the neon light offered. More predictable are the alternative views which result from a slightly moving perspective on those works which are themselves static, merely creating the illusion of movement. They achieved recognition in the 1960s under the new name Op Art, which referred above all to the works of Josef Albers, Victor Vasarely, Jésus Rafael Soto, and Bridget Riley. Albers had already experimented with optical effects during his Bauhaus phase, and Vasarely had also already begun to create ambiguous geometrical patterns in 1935. It is therefore possible to also speak here of an intensification of earlier avantgardist tendencies. Op Art is, however, typical of the later phase of Modernism in another way. The rather playful presentation of new possibilities for art found in these works did surprise viewers, but no longer caused that extent of estrangement which was symptomatic of the encounter with many works of the Modernist avantgarde. With their compara-

53

Naum Gabo & Anton Pevsner, The Realistic Manifesto (Moscow, 1920).

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tively limited strangeness they almost came across as beautiful, at least in the Kantian sense of a direct creation of pleasure.

2 T HE C ONTINUATION AND I NTENSIFICATION OF L ITERARY C ONCEPTS The continuation of aesthetic and ideological concepts of Modernism in the form of an intensification is also the dominant trend in literature from the 1940s until the late 1960s. The radicalization of the awareness of the subjectivity of our experience of the world manifested itself in the first place most clearly in the literature of French Existentialism, above all in Jean–Paul Sartre’s Les mouches (1943), Huis clos (1944), Les mains sales (1948), and Les chemins de la liberté (1945–47), Simone de Beauvoir’s L’invitée (1943), Le sang des autres (1945), and Tout les hommes sont mortels (1946), and Albert Camus’ L’homme révolté (1951) and La chute (1956). Confronted with a world without meaning which essentially remains alien as they try to make sense of it, humans only have recourse to their own actions in order to create something meaningful. A similarly pessimistic Humanism is found in American novels which appeared at the same time by Saul Bellow (Dangling Man, 1944) and Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948), as well as the later plays of Eugene O’Neill (The Iceman Cometh, 1946; Long Day’s Journey into Night, 1956). If in these works at least the self remains intact, it too was soon caught in the general dissolution of all reliable coherences: under the pressure of a world which is constantly experienced as strange, the experiencing subject is then alienated from himself, for instance in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964). And, as George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) demonstrated in downright threatening fashion, this pessimism also held true for the social world.

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The Theatre of the Absurd and the ‘nouveau roman’ All these radicalizations held, nonetheless, for the most part to realistic conventions of presentation and were therefore less shocking aesthetically than ideologically. This changed in the 1950s with the emergence of the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau roman. The absurd situation of human beings demanding meaning in an meaningless universe already presented in Existentialism became so strikingly obvious in the Theatre of the Absurd in the form of demonstratively nonsensical actions and words that it must have seemed extremely strange when set against existing theatre conventions. This is the case, for instance, in Eugène Ionesco’s satirical parody of the conventions of the bourgeois family in La cantatrice chauve (1950), of the fruitless attempt to pass on the hard-won experience gained over the course of a long life in Les chaises (1952), and of the macabre infection of the masses by a wave of public opinion in Les rhinocéros (1959). The same can be said of Arthur Adamov’s representation of the futile search for meaning in the papers left behind by an author in L’invasion (1950) and the impossibility of definitely judging a person’s character in Le professeur Taranne (1953), as well as Jean Genet’s merciless laying bare of the moral nature of human beings in Les bonnes (1948), Les nègres (1958), Le balcon (1956), and Les paravents (1961). In the plays of these authors, both dreamlike illogical sequences of action which appear to be rituals of meaninglessness, as well as the futility, even impossibility, of communication despite manifold and abundant uses of speech serve to confront the audience with a devastatingly disillusioning interpretation of the human condition as an absurd spectacle which was most certainly still able to shock viewers. This is of course particularly true of Samuel Beckett’s plays Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), and Krapp’s Last Tape (1959). Particularly Waiting for Godot had a world-wide effect as an exemplary representation of a humanity governed by a hope which never truly materializes. Wouldn’t humans have felt terribly alienated from themselves if

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all action appeared meaningless and all speech was merely a means to pass the time spent waiting for the bestowal of meaning from without? As Martin Esslin has shown,54 the tradition of this theatre aesthetic – in which gestures and objects are of at least equal rank with a now powerless language – goes back as far as the mimus of antiquity. The immediate roots, however, are to be found in the avantgardist theatre of early Modernism – from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (1896) through Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les mamelles de Tirésias (1917) and Bertolt Brecht’s Im Dickicht der Städte (1923) to Roger Vitrac’s Les mystères de l’amour (1924) – and for this reason one can indeed speak of an intensification of already familiar conceptions in the Theatre of the Absurd. This is without doubt only true though for those familiar with this tradition. For the general theatre-going public, the works of the Theatre of the Absurd were undoubtedly estrangingly new. This also pertains in analogous fashion to the nouveau roman, the “new novel” developed in France by Nathalie Sarraute with Portrait d’un inconnu (1948) and Les fruits d’or (1963), by Alain Robbe– Grillet with Le voyeur (1955), La jalousie (1957), and Dans le labyrinthe (1959), and by Michel Butor with La modification (1957) and Degrés (1960). While the subjective view of the world had found in Joyce and Proust its representation in the ‘unfiltered’ stream of consciousness, the attempt was now made to even get behind this linguistic synthesis and to convey perspective by means of the specific constellation of objects in space. The accompanying abandonment of the illusion of a continuous plot and the thwarting of the use of psychological categories had not only an estranging effect similar to the dream-like sequences found in the Theatre of the Absurd, but was also a powerful intensification of Modernist formal strategies to create the strangeness that constituted the basis of the new aesthetic.

54

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City NY: Doubleday,

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German Followers of Brecht, Concrete Poetry, American Anti-Formalism of the Beat Generation Drama in Germany after the Second World War until the 1960s can largely be seen as a continuation of the Epic Theatre developed by Brecht at the end of the 1920s, in both a formal and thematic sense. While, however, Brecht himself at least in his later work affords a glimpse of utopia – in The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Engl. 1948, German 1954), for instance – Max Frisch (Die chinesische Mauer, 1946; Andorra, 1961) and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Der Besuch der alten Dame, 1956; Die Physiker, 1962) leave the audience with a radical unveiling of the disastrous state of the world and a demonstration of human weakness and immorality which borders on the cynical. This is also true of the documentary theatre of Peter Weiss (Die Ermittlung, 1964) and Rolf Hochhuth (Der Stellvertreter, 1963), even though here the brutal revelation of the calamitous past is indeed seen as the precondition for the chance of a better future. At the very least for those viewers who held on to a humanistic view of mankind, these plays tended to have a shocking effect, and this extreme estrangement was certainly also an integral part of the aesthetic, even if there was nothing particularly innovative about them in a formal sense. The 1950s in the U S A bore the imprint of the poetry and prose of the Beat Generation, an explicit anti-formalism and ideological anarchism with mystic and romantic undertones. The poems of Charles Olson (X & X, 1950; In Cold Hell in Thicket, 1953), Robert Creeley (The Immoral Proposition, 1953; If You, 1956), and Allen Ginsberg (Howl and Other Poems, 1956) drew their shock potential on the one hand from the representation of experiences with drugs, alcohol, jazz, and sex (which were supposed to lead to visions), and on the other hand from the breaking of previously accepted taboos with regard to language. The influence of the French Symbolists is as unmistakable as that of Walt Whitman, and the engaged desire to shock bourgeois society and culture goes back to the Dadaists and early Surrealists. Both Ginsberg’s Howl and Jack Kerouac’s picaresque novel On the

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Road (1957) – in which the journey without a goal and the unrestrained enjoyment of momentary desires became a metaphor for an alternative attitude and way of life that avoided hard and fast conventions and positions – became icons of this movement. A continuation and intensification of early Modernist aesthetic conceptions was also found in “Concrete Poetry,” which began in the 1950s and reached its first summit around 1960. For not only the linguistic reduction to single words, letters, and sounds, but also the mixture of media (language/graphics in the case of visual poems, language/music for the acoustic poems) can already be found in the Italian Futurists (Marinetti) and the Dadaists (Ball, Schwitters, and Aragon). In particular in those countries where German is spoken, a constructivist linguistic miminalism gained great importance through poets such as Eugen Gomringer, Ernst Jandl, Franz Mon, Helmut Heissenbüttel, and Claus Bremer – despite the fact that it would alienate most readers and drive many critics to nothing short of outrage. In a sense reminiscent of Minimalism in painting, this was one of the last attempts to create an estranging type of art which might even shock by picking up on and intensifying the extreme experiments of early Modernism. In the end, regardless of whether shock or just surprise was the result: the impression of a more or less pronounced strangeness remained as a rule an essential element of the experience of art in the later phase of Modernism. Here, too, one can therefore clearly speak of an aesthetic of the strange.

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The Strange Art and Literature of Postmodernism

New Radicalness in the Early Phase of Postmodernism a clear distance from the guiding principles of late Modernism and the start of a new phase known as “Postmodern” was established in American literary criticism of the 1960s,1 a debate developed about whether this new era should be seen as something totally different or merely as a second phase of Modernism. The debate continues to rage, and seen in retrospect the reason is clear: with the exception of the use of the new media, all recent art production and literature take up conceptions and modes of representation which had already been discovered and developed during Modernism. However, they differed for the most part clearly enough from the art (and literature) of Modernism’s later phase in terms of their claim to validity, the concrete form they took, and their effect that one could quite correctly speak of a new period of literature VER SINCE

1

The first such attempt was Leslie Fiedler’s programmatic essay “Cross the Border – Close the Gap,” Playboy (December 1969): 151, 230, 252–54, and 256– 58.

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and art. The way in which one assesses this major change therefore depends on whether one assumes an evolutionary development or a break with the past. With regard to the aesthetic of the strange, what is apparent in particular in the literature and art of early Postmodernism – i.e. from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, is a gradual shift towards a stronger effect of estrangement. Taking recourse to examples from the avantgardist literature and art of early Modernism, artists and writers tried to create even more radically estranging effects to the point of shocking viewers and readers. That they only partly succeeded was due firstly to the fact that the inclusion of genres and images taken from popular culture gave the general public something familiar to work with; and secondly that those who were familiar with the experimental literature and art of Modernism were in the meantime so used to provocation that they were prepared to accept even something very unusual as a welcome surprise. Lyotard’s interpretation of the aesthetic of Postmodern art as a version of the aesthetic of the sublime is therefore doomed to fail alone on the fact that even those very strange new things were too quickly and easily integrated into a meanwhile very extensive understanding of what qualified as art and were thus unable to cause that shock indispensible to an experience of the sublime. It is true that new possibilities for the presentation of the very strange were sought and indeed found, but they met with a horizon of expectations which reacted much too positively to new stimuli to allow for a real shock effect.2 Such an attitude on the part of viewers and readers is to be understood to a large extent as a reaction to an extremely heterogeneous art production in which a large variety of conceptions and styles were on

2

“Contemporary art has in fact become an integral part of today’s middle-class society. Even works of art which are fresh from the studio are met with enthusiasm”; Klaus Honnef, Contemporary Art, tr. Hugh Beyer (Cologne: Taschen, 1988): 11.

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offer simultaneously. An attempt at orientation within this variety seems then necessary in order to see how and to what extent the experience of alterity was made possible.

1 T HE R ELATIVIZATION OF THE F AMILIAR By the 1960s at the latest it seemed not only that the whole realm of possible thematic conceptions and media-specific forms of expression had – as a result of the extensive experimentation of the early Modernists – been explored, but also the intensive development of these possibilities in the later phase of Modernism made a further continuation of the same seem not very fruitful. One chance to nevertheless create something new was evidently seen in the relativization of what had already been taken to the extreme. This relativization took many forms, from the ironic, parodic, or travestying ‘repetition’ of the already known, through the combination of conventions previously kept separate or even viewed as contradictory, to the dissolution of the borders of the realm of art itself. This relativizing stance – which also ironically includes the particular technique used in each case to achieve this – became one of the defining characteristics of early Postmodernism in particular. What was estranging here was the total lack of respect for all valued conventions, whether in the area of art or the world at large – even if the self-ironic presentation came across as a demonstration of modesty and therefore kept the extent of the provocation within limits. The dimension of the experience of strangeness depended of course greatly on the emotional connection to the relativized or even parodied Modernist conventions. This literature and art of relativization was able to surprise in any case, and it is worth reconsidering the ways in which this was achieved.

Irony, Parody, Travesty The relativization of the familiar by means of irony, parody, or travesty is a particular characteristic of many Postmodern works of litera-

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ture. But also in painting, above all in the Italian transavangardia of the 1980s, the ironic note in their recourse to motifs and styles of European art history is unmistakable. It is not as easy for the painter to communicate an ironic stance – a stance which consists of saying the opposite of what is meant while making exactly this process apparent. In addition, he must above all turn to the provocative elevation of the banal or use travesty to render the dignified banal. Both of these processes are clearly perceptible in the paintings of Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, and Francesco Clemente. The familiar is relativized by citing it in an alienated fashion, so here, too, estrangement is an essential part of the aesthetic effect. A very biting irony is unmistakable in the paintings in which Anselm Kiefer, for instance, turns his attention to the German past. The works based on the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest are a good example: combinations of painting, woodcuts, and collage in which portraits of “great Germans” are pejoratively included in the myth of Germanic superiority. This is also found in his painting “Unternehmen Seelöwe” [Operation Sea Lion], a travesty of the eponymous German plan to conquer England during the Second World War in which Kiefer has the German marines go for a swim in a bathtub. A similarly biting irony is also found in some works of the preceding Pop Art movement, for example in Richard Hamilton’s famous picture “Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing” (1956; see fig. 8). The works of the American Pop artists contain more of a self-ironic stance, connected with a questioning of the traditional definition of art and leading to a sense of estrangement mainly through an elevation of the banal. This is an effect which will be discussed in more detail later. Irony, parody, and travesty are so common in early Postmodern literature that they could almost count as a characteristic of this phase of literary production. The ironic stance is taken up not only with regard to traditional themes and modes of representation, but also in the form of ironic self-reflection on one’s own work. Due to the pre-

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valence of this phenomenon, I will only be able to refer to a small selection of works in which the meaning of the ironic refraction for the overall aesthetic effect is particularly apparent. In Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), for instance, the increase in the amount of ‘objective’ indicators of an all-embracing conspiracy is accompanied by an ever stronger suspicion that it could possibly all just be a paraniod delusion on the part of the heroin Oedipa Maas because the state of the world and subjective experience of the world can no longer be told apart. In Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1968), the fairytale world has been ironically converted into a 1960s hippie commune, including the decay of traditional values and conventions to an ever-increasing pile of cultural junk and garbage. In Sam Shepard’s play The Tooth of Crime (1972), on the other hand, the imitation of a popular singing style ironically appears to be more powerful than the authentic rendering of the same precisely because it has nothing to do with artistic conviction. And regardless of whether the ironic questioning tended to be epistemological (as with Pynchon), critical of culture (as in Barthelme’s case), or took aim at the traditions of art (as seen in Shepard) – it always caused such a radical relativization of the familiar that it led, at least at first, to a very clear sense of estrangement. The self-ironic stance in Postmodern literature is closely tied to that sort of autoreflexive commentary which led to the designation ‘metafiction’ for the majority of their works. Even if the primary goal of the insertion of reflections about the act of writing or the creation of the literary illusion was to point out the processual character of artistic production and the constructed nature of the result of this process: the object of the commentary, the ‘actual’ story, is self-ironically relativized to something largely arbitrary. An absolutely typical example for this is John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), but also stories such as Donald Barthelme’s “Sentence,” Gilbert Sorrentino’s “The Moon in its Flight,” or Robert Coover’s “The Magic Poker” make clear how the self-referentiality of the narrative constantly reduces the narrated to the status of one among many possibilities, thereby self-

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ironically relativizing it. Such an interruption of the creation of illusion by commenting on or revealing the linguistic conditions of its production (at a meta-level of the narration, therefore ‘metafiction’) was interesting and surprising, but also very estranging when set against the usual expectations of readers – so estranging, in fact, that while this literature was discussed at length by literary critics, it was not successful with the general public. A large part of its particular aesthetic effect was, however, precisely this estranging break with the traditional narrative conventions. It comes as no surprise that parody or travesty played a special role within the tendency to relativize the familiar in Postmodern literature, for in this way the limitedness or clichés of traditional genres, works, styles, themes, or subject matter can be clearly revealed. In the later phase of Modernism, a turn to parody on the part of some authors is already evident (Jorge Luis Borges, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan [The Garden of Forking Paths], 1941; Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 1941; Thomas Mann, Der Erwählte [The Elect], 1951), but it was not until the 1960s that it became the dominant technique of Postmodern literature. John Barth’s parody of Ebenezer Cooke’s verse satire The Sot-Weed Factor (1708) in a novel of the same name from 1960, Nabokov’s parody of a critical edition of a poem in Pale Fire (1962), Thomas Berger’s western parody Little Big Man (1964), Barth’s parody of the artist’s (auto-) biography in Lost in the Funhouse (1968), and Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974) should be mentioned as particularly impressive examples of genre parody. Parodies of style, which work with the cliché nature of certain parts of society or the whole ‘American Way of Life,’ are to be found in plenty in Jerzy Kosinsky’s novel Being There (1970) with its cliches taken from TV culture, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977) with its stereotypes of mass media and particularly the jargon of politics, as well as in James Purdy’s Cabot Wright Begins (1964) in its clichés taken from every area of life. At times, the irreverent dealing with the familiar called

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upon the opposite technique of travesty – as in Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (both 1967) – and at times the mutual relativization of historical value systems resorted to pastiche as the most fitting form (as in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman from 1969). The particular appeal of these works lay not least in the surprising transformation of the familiar which at the same time irreverently demonstrated the historical limitedness and fundamental arbitrariness of cultural and – in particular – aesthetic conventions. In a series of new plays from the 1960s we find this technique intensified into open satire. Prime examples of this are Arthur Kopit’s parody of absurd and psychoanalytic drama in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (1959), Edward Albee’s radical destruction of the myth of the American family in The American Dream (1961), Jean–Claude van Itallie’s ironic disclosure of the generally cliché nature of language and behaviour in America Hurrah (1966), Lanford Wilson’s unmasking of the myth of the ‘perfect’ American small town in his travesty of Wilder’s Our Town entitled The Rimers of Eldritch (1966), Barbara Garson’s political attack on Lyndon B. Johnson in MacBird! (1966) in the form of a travesty of Macbeth, and Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders (1968) as a bitter satire on the moral and social changes which had taken place in the 1960s. Compared to the novels, the plays dealt as a rule with more contemporary issues, while the approach was more direct and aggressive. And in terms of the extent of estrangement to be found, one soon spoke of the “Uncomfortable Theatre.” It is indeed anything but comfortable to see well-loved social myths revealed as illusions or to have the cliché nature of current habits of speech and behaviour demonstrated. If this is too foregrounded, however, the danger exists that possible aesthetic access to the work may be barred and that as such works become less current they may lose greatly in interest.

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The Mixture of Styles and Genres A further characteristic of many Postmodern works is the mixing or combination of quite differing styles and genres often traditionally considered as irreconcilable. This is a clear contrast to the works of Modernism’s later phase in which the possibilities of one single style and genre were pushed, so to speak, in a purist manner to its furthest limits. While the early Modernists had already created in the principle of the collage and montage the precondition for a combination of heterogeneous elements, they did so with intentions which no longer had the same validity for Postmodernism. In the Cubist collage, the mediation between the most extreme realism and the desire for abstract form was in the foreground; for the Dadaists the deliberate creation of anti-art; and for the Surrealists the most accurate expression of an unconscious felt to be chaotic. In literature the montage of differing conventions of style and genre served as an expression of a fragmented perception of the world (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land; Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz; John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer) or created a sense of multi-perspectivity in order to demonstrate the subjectivity of all experience and description of the world (James Joyce, Ulysses; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury). In Postmodernism, on the other hand, the creation of hybrid styles and genres dispenses with such aims: often enough it no longer wishes to be a demonstration of anti-art or to claim to reproduce the unconscious, neither does it desire to mimetically represent a fragmented reality nor point out the subjectiveness of perspective. While this does not mean that it cannot also be read and interpreted in terms of such Modernist expectations, this would seem to reduce its very ambivalent and playful effect. If one abandons attempts to arrive at such unequivocal meanings, one begins to see that this mixture of styles and genres – undertaken with a great measure of matter-of-factness and irreverence regarding traditional expectations – serves in the first place

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to create surprising new aesthetic effects from both the variety of possible combinations as well as the tensions and breaks. In the 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg used the collage to paradigmatically represent the heterogeneous flood of television images. In “Retroactive I” (1964; see fig. 10), for example, pictures of President Kennedy and an astronaut, of oranges, dancers, and workers in extremely different styles are united, whereby the image of the dancers turns out to be a silkscreen enlargement of a photograph printed in Life magazine which in its turn was a parody by Gjon Mili of Duchamp’s famous painting “Nude Descending a Staircase” (1912) created by means of stroboscopic flashes. The art historian Robert Hughes has pointed out that the figures in Rauschenberg’s cut-out of this photograph look, in addition, like those in Masacchio’s Florentine fresco of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from paradise.3 The principle of hybridization, of mixing styles and genres, became the preferred technique in American literature in the 1960s. Vladimir Nabokov had with Lolita (1955) already completed a feat of daring in the combination of autobiography, legal plea, love story, crime story, detective novel, and psychological case history, which in terms of the heterogeneity of its discourse would still be exceeded by Pale Fire (1962). Kurt Vonnegut combined the historical novel with science fiction in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood, 1966) and Norman Mailer (The Armies of the Night, 1968) presented a mixture of reportage and fiction in the ‘non-fiction novel’, Ishmael Reed brought Black poetry and the Surrealist novel together in The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), and those authors already mentioned under the aspect of relativization through irony Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America, 1967), Donald Barthelme (Snow White, 1967), and John Barth (Lost in the Funhouse, 1968) achieved their parody for the most part by mixing styles and genres. The result was surprising and aesthetically fascinating, but challenged the reader with 3

See Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, 346.

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regard to both familiarity with literary and cultural conventions as well as the ability to creatively synthesize. There is no question that the irreverent combination of what had traditionally been kept separate caused a due amount of estrangement. In the realm of theatre the mixture of genres went beyond the traditional drama forms in that formalized dance-like movements as well as music took on increased importance. In the first part of Jean–Claude van Itallie’s America Hurrah (1966) – which bears the subtitle “A Fugue for Eight Actors” – the repetitive nature of cliché habits of speech and behaviour is expressed, for example, by means of dancelike movements based on a fugue-like musical pattern; and in Megan Terry’s anti-war play Viet Rock (1966) ‘realistic’ scenes are interspersed with dance elements and songs as in a musical. The rock musical Hair by Ragni, Rado, and MacDermot – which enjoyed worldwide success – was an attempt at ‘total theatre,’ a new type of total work of art which united almost all the styles and forms of expression familiar at that time: scenic presentation and ‘realistic’ dialogue, the changing of roles within loosely connected scenes, dance, pantomime, singing, accompanying music and inserted songs, mimetic use of costumes, and ideologically motivated nudity. However, the estranging effect cannot have been too great despite breaking common conventions, including those of the most obvious influence, the hybrid musical genre. Otherwise it is not possible to explain its quick success with the general public.

The Expansion of the Realm of Art and Literature The most obvious means by which familiar conceptions of art and literature were relativized was in the expansion of the realm of art and literature: everyday objects – the banal elements of mass culture – were turned into art in the movement known as Pop Art and were

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integrated into the literature of early Postmodernism.4 In Pop Art – the name of which is analogous to Pop Music, thereby indicating its orientation toward popular culture – this expansion took place both in the choice of subject as well as the form of presentation. The inclusion of banal everyday objects in the realm of what is worthy of being presented in art had its forerunners – beginning with the collages of the Cubists, through Duchamp’s ready-mades and Surrealist painting, to the assemblages of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. What is particular to Pop Art in both Britain and America is a preference for kitsch as well as those images spread by advertising and the entertainment industry which make popular culture a particular sign system. The above-mentioned collage from 1956 by Richard Hamilton “Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing” (see fig. 8) combines ‘modern’ consumer goods and their trademarks with an image of mankind represented by means of a bodybuilder and a pin-up girl, and he explains this technique in the following way: “If the artist is not to lose much of his ancient purpose he may have to plunder the popular arts to recover the imagery which is his rightful inheritance.”5 As a consequence, Jasper Johns’ “Two Beer Cans” from 1960 or Andy Warhol’s “Brillo Box” from 1964 take mass-produced consumer goods as their exclusive subjects. In the case of Tom Wesselmann it is, for example, an isolated mouth with a cigarette drawn in the style of an advertisement (“Mouth No. 12,” 1967); with James Rosenquist a collage of isolated body parts and objects done by means of illusionary painting (“Push Button,” 1961); Roy Lichtenstein imitates the style of comic-books in combining cut-outs of figures and objects with speech bubbles; and with Claes Oldenburg we have over4

The fact that Andy Warhol’s “Brillo Box,” in terms of its appearance, could no longer be distinguished from the real thing was, for Arthur C. Danto, the beginning of “the end of art” and its transformation into philosophy, because it was now only interpretation which could distinguish between the two. 5 “For the Finest Art, Try Pop,” Gazette 1 (1961); quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 743.

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dimensional plastic re-presentations of everyday objects which connote numerous images (“Two Cheeseburgers with Everything,” 1962; see fig. 9). Andy Warhol additionally thematized the fact that the images presented were mass-produced by repeating the same image within one and the same composition (e.g., “200 Campbell Soup Cans,” 1962; “Marilyn Monroe,” 1967). The expansion of the realm of art in terms of the mode of representation was achieved above all by using and imitating mechanical techniques of reproduction. A popular medium was the silk-screen print, and Warhol, for instance, painted with acrylic and oil so that they at least looked like silk-screens, thereby taking on the appearance of mass products (e.g., “Marilyn Monroe Diptych,” 1962; “Self Portrait,” 1966): “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.”6 This is also true of the attempt to create in a painting the illusion of photographic reproduction as seen in the press (e.g., in Warhol’s “Suicide,” 1963; “Green Car Crash,” 1963), of television images (Rauschenberg, “Retroactive I,” 1964 (see fig. 10); Joe Filson, “Look,” 1963), of comics printed such that the pattern of dots is clearly visible (Roy Lichtenstein, “Holly Solomon,” 1966), or of billboards (e.g., Tom Wesselmann, “Mouth No. 12,” 1967; Robert Indiana, “Louisiana,” 1965). As a rule, the imposing size of the paintings and the attendant enlargement of what is presented already causes a sense of estrangement (Warhol’s “Green Car Crash” is, for instance, 90 ½ x 81 ins, Wesselmann’s “Mouth No. 12” 109 x 83 ins, and Claes Oldenburg’s “Shoestring Potatoes” is 108 ins high). The surprising element of Pop Art was the demonstration of just how suited for art the quotidian images of mass culture were. Although it was unusual as the subject of art, the banal did not seem shocking because it was presented as a rule as “beautiful” in the sense 6

“What is Pop Art? Interview with Eight Painters (Part 1),” Art News (November 1963); quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 748.

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of an aesthetic of the beautiful. In this, Pop Art discovered the aesthetic attraction of images taken from the everyday, consumer, and media worlds: Pop may be seen as a product of two twentieth-century tendencies: one from the outside – the subject matter; and the other from within – an esthetic sensibility. […] Since works of art cannot really be the product of blunted sensibilities, what seems at first to be brash and barbarous turns in time to daring and strength, and the concealed subtleties soon become apparent.7

This possibility is not as extensively used in Postmodern literature as Leslie Fiedler optimistically predicted in his oft-cited article “Cross the Border – Close the Gap.”8 It is is true that the patterns of popular genre literature were increasingly used in the U S A for more ambitious literary intentions. This is the case with the western and the horror story (Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster, 1974), the detective novel (Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1966), the crime story (Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, 1966), fantasy (Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar, 1968), the journalistic report (Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1972), and science fiction (Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan, 1959; Cat’s Cradle, 1963; Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969). But a popular effect as seen in the many poster reproductions of works of Pop Art was achieved only seldom (above all by Vonnegut). More exact analogies for the aestheticizing of images taken from mass culture and media are found in the affirmative play with linguistic and behavioural clichés in the work, for instance, of Stanley Elkins (The Dick Gibson Show, 1971; The Franchiser, 1976), Donald Barthelme (Snow White, 1967), Richard Brautigan 7

Roy Lichtenstein, lecture to the College Art Association (Philadelphia, January 1964); quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 750–51. 8 Playboy (December 1969): 151, 230, 252–54, and 256–58; reprinted in American Literature Since 1900, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1975): 344–66.

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(Trout Fishing in America, 1967), and Robert Coover (Pricksongs and Descants, 1969). Barthelme even reflected theoretically upon this process of working creatively with ‘garbage’ or ‘cultural debris’ in Snow White, and saw it as the only remaining possibility in a cultural situation where everything is already used up anyway: “the question turns from a question of disposing of this ‘trash’ to a question of appreciating its qualities, because, after all, it’s 100 percent, right?”9 When speaking of the literary version of Pop Art, mention must be made of Pop Poetry as created in the 1960s in England by the Liverpool poets.10 This poetry, whose main representatives are Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten,11 is influenced by American Beat Poetry, above all Allen Ginsberg’s, and by Pop Music to which it owes its use of concrete images. This English Pop Poetry shares with Ginsberg’s poetry a socially critical bent, which as a rule, however, is only expressed in a restrained manner. Most of the poems are love poems in which private emotional states are called up by means of a mixture of banal images taken from life in a big city and poetic clichés. Clear reference is made only occasionally to images of a consumer society and cultural clichés (as, for example, in Adrian Henri’s “Love Poem”12); one encounters much more often, however, a tone of self-pity because one has to live all alone in such an unfriendly world. This may be though the precise reason for the widespread popularity of this poetry with the public, a popularity seen in the fact that all these poets (in addition to those already mentioned, Adrian Mitchell, Christopher Logue, Tom Pickard, and Larry MacSweeney) wrote poetry to be recited and reached a large audience through their

9

Snow White (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965): 97. See the anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain, ed. Michael Horovitz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). 11 See Penguin Modern Poets 10: The Mersey Sound – Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). 12 Penguin Modern Poets 10, 38–41. 10

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readings in many English cities (one mass event in June 1965 in the Royal Albert Hall in London attracted no fewer than 7,000 listeners). This makes it clear that – as was the case with many works of Pop Art – the extent of strangeness which defines avantgardist Modernist art had been reduced far enough that it could suit the taste of the masses, but at the same time was sufficient enough to create an impression of being subversive and interesting.

2 T HE C ELEBRATION OF T RANSIENCE AND THE A RBITRARY Two important cultural preconditions of Modernism were an epistemological doubt as a result of a more subjective view of the world, and a crisis of values which had already been proclaimed by Nietzsche but only really began to be felt with the advent of the First World War. The awareness that all experience of reality is perspectival and subjective did not, however, lead to doubts about the objective existence of an outer or inner reality itself, and the artists were motivated by the hope of being able to at least approximately represent this generally valid ‘truth’ behind the world of appearances by means of adequate modes of representation. This is true of both the visual and literary forms of Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism, Purism and De Stilj, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s, and for all the perspectivist portrayal of consciousness found in Modernist literature. And if the crisis of values also shook the belief in a sense of meaning in the world, the hope in a bestowal of meaning through art remained even more virulent since there was thought to be a radical contrast between the natural world and art. In the second half of the twentieth century, in the 1960s and the 1970s, the crisis came to a head once again due to the fact that Structuralism became dynamic. The insight into the way meaning is always arbitrary and dependent on the system which it is produced by, as well as the historical change of these systems, laid bare the constructedness

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of all assumptions about reality and meanings. This scepticism was no longer – at least as far as the social world was concerned – epistemological (i.e. restricted to perception), but became ontological, including the being of the self and the world. This applied to art as well, whose manifestations could no longer be dedicated to the portrayal of an objective ‘truth’, but appeared to be the result of a historically variable process of conscious or unconscious exclusion or inclusion. This was the cultural background for the emergence of Postmodern art, which therefore made no epistemological or ontological claims, and restrained from any claims to the bestowing of meaning. Following the Nietzschean concept of “a joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation”13 – which had been revived by Derrida for the humanities – this art made a virtue of necessity by thematizing constant change and arbitrariness both in terms of content and forms of representation.

The Shift From the Work to Process In terms of aesthetics, the turn to the processual was in no sense new. Already in Romanticism the preferred object of aesthetics was no longer the work itself, but the creative process by which it came into being, the activity of the artistic imagination. This had also already affected the form of the works as well: in order to demonstrate the essentially open-ended nature of creative processes, the authors opted chiefly for the fragment. And when this concentration on the activity of the creative imagination came to a head thereafter in Aestheticism, the objective work became totally superfluous: it was replaced by a way of life which was defined by aesthetic experience, the aesthetic existence. One no longer needed to produce works of art, it was far more necessary to attempt to make oneself into a work of art in the 13

Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey & Eugenio Donato (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972): 264.

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sense of an ongoing imaginative process: “to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”14 As a reaction against this position, Modernism strove for an objectivization of subjective experience in the work of art, sought an “objective correlative”15 for even the most fleeting sensations. In the visual arts this began with Impressionism and Expressionism, and went through Surrealism to Action Painting; and in the realm of literature it stretched from the early Modernist stream-of-consciousness technique to the nouveau roman. It was precisely the more extreme forms of objectivization – from Suprematism in early Modernism to Minimalism of the later phase in the 1950s and 1960s – which spawned, however, a renewed interest in creative processes, in this case not of the artist, but of the viewer or reader. The artist’s task, then, was to merely stimulate such processes by means of minimalist works, thereby motivating the ‘recipient’ to become a co-creator. The creation of minimalistic works is only one way, however, to fulfill this task. Another is to no longer create any lasting works, but only to enable aesthetic experience for a limited time by means of fitting arrangements. This was the path taken by John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg with their multi-media events in the late 1940s and 1950s, and since Allan Kaprow’s “18 Happenings in 6 Parts” (1959 in the Reuben Gallery in New York) the audience became – to a limited extent – a participant in the artistic event. As is the case with most of these artforms, there were models for this to be found in Modernism in the actions of the Dadaists and the Surrealist demonstrations. The climax of this was the International Exhibition of Surrealism in 1938 in Paris where the visitors were led into something like a salon deep down in a simulated coal-mine (with 1,200 bags of 14

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1910): 236. 15 T.S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920; London: Methuen, 1969): 100.

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coal above their heads, withered leaves and grass at their feet), past Dali’s “Rainy Taxi” (covered in ivy and full of live snails which crawled over a water-soaked, life-size puppet placed in the passenger seat), in order to then reach the main hall full of similarly surprising exhibitions by means of a “Surrealist street.”16 To be more precise though, this was a form situated between the static work and processual art, the so-called Environment, which was installed for the length of an exhibition in one or more rooms where the viewer could move around and have aesthetic experiences. The true happening was even more ephemeral: similar to a theatrical performance, it took place at a set time and lasted as a ‘live performance’ for only a short time, only to be unrepeatably finished – unrepeatable already in the fact that the participants were allowed to influence the structure of what took place, at least to a certain extent. The happenings of Kaprow are particularly good examples for this because, although there were a few audience members at the first one, Kaprow unequivocally demanded that happenings should only be performed once and all viewers be shut out.17 Just as fleeting were the ‘events’ or ‘actions’, during which the recipients remained in the role of the viewer. Impressive examples for this were created at the start of the 1960s by the Neo-Dadaist Fluxus movement, whose most famous members were Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, and Wolf Vostell. Beuys in particular knew how to provoke an audience, for example at the “Fluxusconcert” on February 2 and 3, 1963, where he removed the heart from a dead rabbit in the course of his action, or at the “Festival der neuen Kunst” on July 20, 1964, in Aachen, where he caused a scandal by filling a piano with washing powder and rubbish which he then bored into with a drill. Two of his ‘actions’ which became especially famous are “Wie man dem toten 16

See Stangos, Concepts of Modern Art, 134–35. In Assemblages, Environments and Happenings 1959–65 (New York, 1965); quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 721ff. 17

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Hasen die Bilder erklärt” [How the pictures were explained to the dead rabbit] (1965 in the Schmela Gallery, Düsseldorf) where Beuys covered his head in honey and golden leaves, attached an iron plate to his right foot, and carried a dead rabbit in his arms which he held close to the various pictures in the gallery while apparently talking quietly to it for three hours; and “I like America and America likes Me” (May 21–25, 1974, in the René Block Gallery, New York) where the artist spent three days and nights in a barred-in room with a few strips of felt, some bundles of the Wall Street Journal, and a live coyote. Some of the actions of the “Conceptualists” Chris Burden and Vito Acconci were also particularly provocative. Burden became famous as the result of a performance in 1971 in Los Angeles when he shot himself in the arm, and in other ‘actions’ designed to shock he had himself crucified on the roof of a Volkswagen or he crawled halfnaked over bits of broken glass. The most notorious ‘action’ on the part of Acconci was “Seedbed” (1972) where he masturbated under a ramp and let visitors who were walking over the ramp know his most private fantasies over a loudspeaker. In terms of shock potential, however, the Vienna action-artists Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Hermann Nitsch, and Arnulf Rainer could by all means compete with their American contemporaries. Schwarzkogler went much further than Burden: in 1972 he amputated his penis piece for piece before the eyes of a photographer, and the documentation of this ‘work of art’ was exhibited at the Documenta 5 in Kassel after further self-mutilations on the part of the artist had in the meantime led to his death. Nitsch was satisfied, on the other hand, to work with the blood of animals, which he, for example, sprayed in great amounts all over himself, the room, and anyone standing near him at his “Orgies-Mysteries Theatre” (1972, New York); and Rainer used black paint to smear photographs taken of his body tied up in ropes and leather straps. Compared with this, the mannequin-like posing of the pair of artists Gilbert and George, which was supposed to create “Living Sculptures,” was downright civilized: dressed intentionally in an old-fashioned manner,

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they presented as the “Singing Sculpture” (1971; see fig. 11), “Relaxing Sculpture,” or “Drinking Sculpture” just as antiquated narrative recitations and had the performances documented in the form of a collage-like series of photographs.18 At the same time, these examples make it apparent that the objects and processes which made up the happenings and actions must have appeared to be extremely arbitrary. It is true that there was always some inventive critic who after the fact and at times with the help of artists’ commentaries attempted to give a certain meaning to both the individual parts as well as the whole event, but the impression of arbitrariness could not be completely banished – it was simply too evident and appeared too intentional. If this is apparent in those spectacular actions or events staged by the individual artists, it is almost more so in a number of minimally structured happenings where the difference from the everyday world was intentionally kept to a minimum.19 One of Kaprow’s scenarios was laconically described as follows: “Watch Cars Pass: People stand on bridges, on street corners, watch cars pass. After two hundred red ones, they leave.”20 There is no longer any audience at such a ‘happening’, just an arbitrary number of participants, and once the instructions have been given, the artist also becomes unnecessary. There is no need to further explain that such more or less structured processes, in which the finite process is everything and the production of a ‘work’ in the traditional sense is dispensed with, meant an extreme and most definitely surprising expansion of the realm of art. 18

See Stangos, Concepts of Modern Art, fig. 119. “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps as indistinct, as possible,” demanded Allan Kaprow in Assemblages, Environments and Happenings 1959–65 (New York, 1965); quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 720. 20 Allan Kaprow, “Self-Service – a happening,” TDR – The Drama Review 12.3 (1968): 160ff.; quoted in Torsten Scheer, Postmoderne als kritisches Konzept (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992): 46. 19

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Their fleeting nature reduced, of course, the possible effect to only those present, although it is not pure chance that this art form became popular at precisely the same time that the reproduction of such processes became relatively simple due to the development of video recordings. In any case, in the historical and critical discourse which followed such documentations played a similar role as previously the ‘work’, which can be kept, exhibited, and viewed repeatedly. So the stance of being unique and unrepeatable particular to processual art is made relative: the long-term form of the artistic event is the documentation in a secondary medium, the video recording. A conspicuous demonstration of this could be found in early 1995 in the Deichtorhallen exhibition “Temporary Translations” in Hamburg, where Fareed Armaly placed a television screen showing video documentations on the front surface of a huge movable wall upon which there were traces of chalk graffiti that had been erased. This is exactly the situation we are confronted with in literature, because the book as a medium where written language is stored can be nothing other than the enabling of directed processes of creation of meaning which take place in the reader. Analogous to the increased attention in theory to the processual nature of language – from the phenomenologically oriented reception theory, through the theory of actions, to Deconstruction with its stress on the principally open-ended character of the process of writing (“Reading is writing…”) – in Postmodern literature the processual nature of the literary ‘work’ was highlighted by means of various strategies. One of these strategies was to dissolve the traditionally determined sequence of the narrative by offering the reader a number of sequences at the same time. Good examples for this are Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), a novel in which the open relationship between a poem and the comments about it enables three different reading sequences (it was described as a “do-ityourself detective story” in the blurb of the English edition); Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963; Engl. Hopscotch, 1966), which begins with a “Table of Instructions” for various possible reading sequences and

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which is styled as a book containing many books;21 or Michael Butor’s Boomerang (1978), in which the sequential text passages are printed in different colours, thereby encouraging numerous sequences of reception. Another possible strategy is to leave the constitution of the reading sequence to a great extent up to the reader. Examples of this are B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), a book consisting of 27 unbound chapters in a box with only the first and last chapters marked as such, and Mark Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962) where the reader was confronted with a box containing nothing other than unnumbered pages which could be arranged as one liked. What becomes clear is that the freeing up of the sequence of the reading process is at the same time a demonstration of the contingency and arbitrariness of the whole thing. This has been pushed to extremes in the computer age with the appearance of “Hypertext” on the market in the 1980s: software containing a mere repertoire of small textual components (“lexias”) which can be combined in nearly infinite ways to form stories by means of sequences of successive choices. As in Michael Joyce’s Afternoon (1987), here the beginning is marked as such, but not the end: the process of creating the work ends when the reader as co-author ceases choosing further combinations, and the result of this whole process vanishes without a trace if it is not printed out or saved. There were , however, also less spectacular methods which drew attention to the process of reading and therefore to the processual nature of the attempt to constitute meaning. The loosening of intratextual connections in favour of an impression of ‘hard breaks’ or fragments – thereby breaking the illusion of formal closure – or the insertion of metafictional comments are examples of such techniques. Works such as Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967) or John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968) demonstrate this in all ways imaginable. The transfer of authorial power to the ‘reader’ found 21

“In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all.” Hopscotch (New York: Pantheon, 1987), “Table of Instructions.”

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in all these strategies meant an expansion of the concept of literature which was able to open up new possibilities that were not only surprising, but also extremely alienating. The emergence of what is known as performance theatre is evidence that the turn to process in the 1960s was not only motivated at the level of reception, but also at the level of production. For American theatre companies such as the Living Theatre or the Open Theatre, the process of collectively working out a presentable version of a play was just as important, if not more important, than the actual performance of this final version which still allowed room for improvisation. This was felt to be an escape from the convention of theatre in the Western world according to which the playwright has control over what the director and actors then only “stage.” In this vein, the Living Theatre presented Mysteries and Smaller Pieces in Paris in 1964, a sequence of in part rehearsed, in part improvised scenes for which there was no text. (Only five years later did the directors Judith Malina and Julian Beck publish a text documenting the performance.) Also Frankenstein (1965), the next production of the Living Theatre, was collectively created and remained open for improvisation, whereby Mary Shelley’s novel of the same name served not only as a source of ideas, but was also quoted at length. The Open Theatre also attached great importance to the collective development of its productions and also did without a predetermined text, but the director Joseph Chaikin did consider it necessary to work together with playwrights when synthesizing scenes created by improvisation to a performable final version. In this way, Viet Rock (1966) was created together with Megan Terry, The Serpent (1968) together with Jean–Claude van Itallie, and Terminal (1969) together with Susan Yankowitz. This cooperation, however, was always rather problematic, and therefore for The Mutation Show (1971) and Nightwalk (1973) this was dispensed with. The director now had final say over the whole performance: a theatre of the author gave way to a director’s theatre.

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This is true to an even greater extent for the performance theatre of Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson, whose productions are individually determined to the last detail by these artists who take on the role of authors and directors. The processual nature of what is presented is a result in the first place of the collage-like sequence of scenes and fragments of scenes, whereby Foreman was more interested in a representation of how the conscious develops out of the individual preconscious while Wilson wished to communicate archetypal experiences. Set against the background of conventional expectations the results were extremely strange, even if Wilson’s productions in particular did captivate audiences with the beauty of their imaginative imagery.

The Construction of the Contingent and Arbitrary From early Expressionism at the start of the twentieth century to the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s and 1960s, there is the unmistakable attempt to get past the apparently contingent nature of the world of appearances, to reveal the basic structures of the external and internal world – and where this is not possible, to offer the order of art as an alternative to what appears as a lack of meaning and structure. This is particularly apparent in Modernism wherever the opposite intention was expressed: even Dadaism, which demonstratively sought the accidental and arbitrary, led in the end to Surrealism where the contingent was seen as an expression of the unconscious, thereby eliminating arbitrariness from the realm where it seemed most present. Precisely this no longer holds true for Postmodern art and literature. Regardless of whether their manifestations reveal a greater or lesser distance to structures of the external or internal world: they either leave the question of contingency or hidden meaning open, or they demonstrate the unavoidable contingency, the principal arbitrariness of whatever appears to have meaning or a plan.

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A good example of the oscillation between the arbitrary and meaning transmitted by means of allusion is to be found already in the combines of Robert Rauschenberg from the late 1950s. The references to a traditional subject of art history to be found in the apparently accidental configuration of objects with the name “Odalisk,” for example, have already been mentioned. His work “Monogram” from 1959 is even more balanced between contingency and allusions to meaning – it consists of a stuffed Angora goat with a painted head and a car tire around its stomach standing on a board painted in a variety of colours. One only need compare the interpretations of “Monogram” which appeared in art journals and books in the ten years after its first exhibition to realize how arbitrary the bestowal of meaning is, and John Cage is quite correct in saying that Rauschenberg’s combines no longer have a unified theme.22 On the other hand, the transformation of the commonplace into art was clearly apparent in the assemblages and “environments” of the Pop artists in the 1960s. This is true in particular of Claes Oldenburg, whether his “Piece of Cake” made of an impressively large canvas filled with Java cotton (48 x 48 x 72 ins) or his “Bedroom Ensemble” from “Four Environments” (1963) which with the exception of some distortions of perspective appears quite real. One could also mention, however, James Rosenquist’s assemblage “Mixed Media” from 1963 or Jim Dine’s “Lawnmower” (1962), a combination of an abstract oil painting and a real hand mower. The impression of arbitrariness was extreme to the point of provocation also in a series of works of Concept Art. For example, a series of photos with accompanying texts by Vito Acconci in which is documented how the artist stepped up onto a chair and back down for

22

“There is no more subject in a combine than there is in a page from a newspaper. […] It is a situation involving multiplicity”; “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and his Work” (1961); quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900– 2000, 735.

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as long as possible every day for months on end; Douglas Huebler’s series of twelve landscape photographs taken every two minutes from a driving car, the creation of the piece explained again in an accompanying text; or Jan Dibbet’s series of photos “Daylight/Flashlight – Outside Light/Inside Light” (1971) which consists of twelve pictures of a window taken under differering light conditions from morning to evening.23 The construction of contingency was also an essential aspect of Earthworks and Land Art, which worked in open landscapes (far away from museums) with the changing weather and light patterns and natural erosion. What this means, though, is that a work such as Robert Smithson’s famous “Spiral Jetty,” a spiral built in 1970 of stone which stretched four-hundred meters from the shore into the Great Salt Lake of Utah, has in the meantime disappeared under the rising surface of the water, and that Walter de Maria’s “Lightning Field” (four hundred pointed steel rods of equal length set at equal distances from one another on a 1 mile x 1 kilometre surface in a remote desert 125 miles southwest of Albquerque in order to attract lightning) depended upon the thunderstorms which came up occasionally and worked with the accidental play of light which thereby resulted. Some of the early works of the packaging artist Christo created at least the impression of arbitrariness, for instance the journal Der Spiegel wrapped in clear plastic wrap (“Der Spiegel Magazine Empaqueté”) from 1963. His later works, however, aimed at something like a ‘sublime’ effect, beginning with “Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, Australia” (1969), one and a half miles of rocky coast wrapped in clear plastic wrap; the 1250- to 1368-foot-wide and 182-foot-high “Valley Curtain” in Colourado from 1972; the 18-foot-high and 24½-mileslong “Running Fence” in California from 1977; the eleven “Sur23

See Roberta Smith, “Conceptual Art,” in Stangos, Concepts of Modern Art,

262/67.

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rounded Islands” – islands encircled by pink plastic wrap – off the coast of Florida from 1983; and last but not least the wrapping of the Pont-Neuf in Paris (1985), the Reichstag in Berlin (1995), and the Gates in New York’s Central Park (2005). In literature the inability to differentiate between chance and design was one of the central themes of early Postmodernism. In Joseph Heller’s anti-war novel Catch 22 (1961), a mixture of grotesque and satire, horror and comedy, the irrational structure of the world is revealed – a world determined by absurd designs and coincidence which turns the survival of humans into a pure game of chance. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) the question of whether life is determined by chance or a secret plan is not only the main theme of the autobiographical poem and the accompanying fictive commentary, but also becomes the main question for the reader, who follows the labyrinthine connections between the narrated life-stories in order to determine the pattern according to which the author planned the many “coincidences.” But the conflict between design and chance becomes the central problem in understanding the world in the novels of Thomas Pynchon in particular. The question of whether all events are planned or the result of chance is dealt with within the comparatively narrow framework of a single life in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), however, has a much wider scope, using numerous interconnected narrative threads and conspiracies to turn the fight for the ultimate rocket in the Second World War into a paradigm for the conflict between a mathematically determined world-picture à la Newton and a perspective which enables freedom and spontaneity. Considering the inextinguishable need for a sense of meaning in the world, the discomforting strangeness of an imagined world in which design and chance can no longer be told apart was all too evident. In other early Postmodern works, in particular those in which the play with language and self-reflexive references to the act of narration are foregrounded, the dominant impression is that of arbitrariness. In Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967), the title’s refer-

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ent is constantly shifting, referring in turn to a hotel, a place, a person, the author, the narrator, nature, a book, and a sport. The title becomes whatever the author wishes it to be at a certain point: a consistent connection between signifier and signified no longer exists. In the stories from John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968) or Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants (1970), the metafictional insertions stress repeatedly that what is presented is only one of many possibilities, thereby demonstrating its fundamental arbitrariness. This contingency also becomes quite apparent whenever the author leaves some creative room to the reader. A number of examples have already been mentioned while speaking of processual art: B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) where the reader could arrange the loose chapters with the exception of the first and last at his own discretion, Mark Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962) where the reader could – or had to – even arrange unnumbered pages himself to form a continuous text, and Michael Joyce’s Hypertext Afternoon (1987), which consists of 538 “lexias” whose combination is left to the will of the reader cum composer.24 It was indeed quite surprising that the artists and authors distanced themselves to such an extent from the traditional claim to the necessity of significance in their creations (in the sense of an inner purposefulness) and so clearly foregrounded the arbitrariness of their activity and its product. Of course, this can in turn be functionalized and interpreted as the mimesis of a world ruled by chance, but one can hardly doubt that this constructed and demonstrated contingency must have seemed quite estranging set against the background of both traditional and utopian expectations of art. Since everyone can produce some-

24

See George P. Landow, Hypertext (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992): 113.

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thing arbitrary, what made art special was only that it thematized arbitrariness as just that.25

The Reduction to Pure Possibility Advance information about the concept of art and about an artist’s concepts is necessary to the appreciation and understanding of contemporary art. Any and all of the physical attributes (qualities) of contemporary works, if considered separately and/or specifically, are irrelevant to the art concept.26 […] objects are conceptually irrelevant to the condition of art.27 […] the work of art need not even be made; the creative act can consist of a proposal for a work.28

These are a few of the basic tenets of Concept Art or Idea Art, which was practised between 1966 and 1976 mainly in the U S A , but which also had a clear influence in Europe. The concentration on the ideas of the artists was accompanied by a dematerialization of art, manifested most evidently in a turn to language: in the words of Lawrence Weiner, one of the most famous concept artists, “Without language there is no art.”29 And, indeed, Weiner presented, for instance, the formulation “TO SEE AND B E S E E N / S E H E N U N D G E S E H E N 25

In Niklas Luhmann’s words, “The function of art seems in the end to lie in the production of worldly contingency itself” (my tr.). See Luhmann, “Das Kunstwerk und die Selbstreproduktion der Kunst,” in Stil: Geschichten und Funktionen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurselements, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht & K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986): 625. 26 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy, I and II,” Studio International (October–November 1969); quoted in Idea Art, ed. Gregory Battock (New York: Dutton, 1973): 89. 27 Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy, I and II,” 94. 28 Harold Rosenberg, “Art and Words,” The New Yorker (29 March 1969); quoted in Battock, Idea Art, 157. 29 Lawrence Weiner, Interview, Avalanche (Spring 1972): 72.

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W E R D E N ” (fig. 12) in 1972 as a piece of art, just as On Kawara

presented the date of production of a ‘painting’ (e.g., “OCT . 21, 1981”) in acrylic paint on a canvas. In addition to such works where linguistic signs were the exclusive medium, photographs, plans, maps, film strips, and videos played an important role in presenting a particular concept, the idea for a piece of art. Douglas Huebler’s “New York – Boston Shape Exchange” – his idea to plot in each city an identical cube with sides 3,000 feet long by means of white marking posts – was presented with the help of nothing other than city maps and written instructions, and Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs” (1965) consisted of a real folding chair, a photo of the same, and a board upon which was written the dictionary definition of “chair.” The ‘dematerialization’ of the work of art went in extreme cases so far that only the pure thought remained. The only thing known about Robert Barry’s “Telepathic Piece” from 1969 is that the artist promised “during the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image,”30 whereas with Walter de Maria’s “Vertical Earth Kilometer” in Kassel (1977) at least a few centimeters at the top of the one kilometre long bronze pole which he stuck in the earth are visible. It should be immediately clear that this new extension of the conception of art as a continuation of Duchamp’s ideas must have seemed quite strange since it broke with the axiom that works of visual art had to transmit their intended message – whatever it might be – visually, that is, by means of sense perception. As the concept artist Sol LeWitt put it, “Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.”31 Precisely the new experience of strangeness which was made possible by this recourse to terminology, to pure ideas (without 30

Smith, “Conceptual Art,” 264. “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” Art-Language 1.1 (May 1969); quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 850. 31

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Hegel’s “sensory appearance”), was an essential element for the effect of this art. Indeed, Arthur C. Danto felt that with this the phase of the phenomenon of the Hegelian world spirit had been reached in which art becomes philosophy and, therefore, comes to its end: the objects approach zero as their theory approaches infinity, so that virtually all there is at the end is theory, art having finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself, and remaining, as it were, solely as the object of its own theoretical consciousness.32

In literature there are hardly any true equivalents for Concept Art. If painters and sculptors turned to language in order to transmit their ideas without the ‘detour’ of a ‘work of art,’ those artists whose medium was already language had no reason to leave it. One can see an analogy in the restriction to the merely possible as seen in the already mentioned experiments of B.S. Johnson and Mark Saporta where the composition of the text still has to be undertaken in large part by the ‘reader.’ However, this is seen above all in a tendency which came about at the same time as Concept Art – the tendency to give texts which had been previously considered secondary and theoretical the status of primary texts, whereby they themselves in turn became the object of critical studies. In ‘more progressive’ English departments in America at that time, the works of authors such as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man were analysed at least as exactly and perhaps more frequently than those of Shakespeare, Milton, or Wordsworth. It is here that we find the clearest common interest between literature and other art forms regarding the turn to ideas, together with the further mutual element of a sweeping effacement of the sensory component – that is, the aesthetic in the sense of aisthesis.

32

Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986): 111

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3 T HE H ORROR G AME The boom in the horror genre that began in the early 1970s and continues today is not to be overlooked: there are too many pocket books in special sections in bookstores and horror videos in video shops, too many horror films in cinemas and series on television. This is true for the USA above all, where the genre created a stir in 1968 with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and in 1971 with the bestsellers The Other by Thomas Tryon and The Exorcist by Peter Blatty, caused a scandal with Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and established a solid position in the market for popular literature in the years that followed with works such as Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1973), Stephen King’s Carrie (1973) and Salem’s Lot (1975), Robert Mascaro’s Burnt Offerings (1973), and Jeffrey Konvitz’s The Sentinel (1974).33 As of the late 1970s, a whole legion of authors specialized in horror literature, with Stephen King as the uncrowned king: according to statistics, every fourth book printing in the USA in 1987 came from his pen.34 The success of these books has without doubt much to do with the popularity lent to the horror genre by film since the worldwide success of The Exorcist (1973). One need only mention titles such as Jaws, Alien, The Shining, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Evil Dead, or directors such as Steven Spielberg, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, or Wes Craven with his Freddy Krueger series to support this. In 1987, the same year as the production record for Stephen King’s novels, no fewer than 105 horror films were produced worldwide.35 If one includes the horror series on television (such as Freddy’s Nightmares) 33

See Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or the Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990): 2. 34 Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, 207. 35 See Hans–Ulrich Mohr, “Gothic: Der Gotizismus in der anglo-amerikanischen Erzählliteratur der Postmoderne,” Forschung an der Universität Bielefeld 9 (1994): 10.

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and the rock videos which work with horror (e.g., Michael Jackson’s Thriller), then the full extent of the market that appeals to our desire to be scared becomes clear. This is the background against which one should view the fairly widespread aesthetic play with horror in more sophisticated literature in recent decades. One may also see here a continuation of the tradition of the shocker which goes back to the eighteenth century, but the scene of the underground dungeon has long since made way for the intrusion of the horrible into the everyday world. In more recent works, the distance of the narrator to the narrated is essential for the moment of strangeness within the total aesthetic effect: shocking events and moral depravity are presented with at least the appearance of total indifference (for example, in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Brodie from 1961 and The Driver’s Seat from 1970), are put on a par with everyday routine actions and registered just as ‘coolly’ (as in Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden from 1978 and The Comfort of Strangers from 1981), or they are treated with black humour (for example, in Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing from 1974 and William Trevor’s The Children of Dynmouth from 1976). Quite often, elements of horror are combined with other genre conventions and themes which result in a relativization of the horror effect. In order to understand what is meant, novels such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster (1978), or William Gaddis’ Carpenter’s Gothic (1985) serve as good examples, as well as Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985), and Nigel William’s Witchcraft (1987). It is also striking that a number of female authors have attempted to make use of the horror genre for feminist intentions, as seen in novels such as Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976), Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1977), Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), Rachel Ingall’s Mrs. Caliban (1981), and Joyce Carol Oates’ A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982). This is just as true of a certain mixture of horror and science fiction, for instance Ursula Le Guin’s

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The Left Hand of Darkness (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1980), or Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003). While film is the driving medium of the Postmodern wave of horror, it is worth noting that in the theatre the representation of senseless violence became the impetus behind a number of more recent plays. What was alarming about this was that the portrayed aggression and the raw violence were so embedded in the realistic mimesis of a milieu study that the terrifying reign of violence in the real world outside the theatre was always evoked. A good example is LeRoi Jones’s The Toilet (1961) where there is a short final scene, however, in which at least a trace of human pity is in evidence, whereas in Leonard Melfi’s The Shirt (1967) we are left with the unmotivated representation of a murder and rape. And if Kenneth Brown had already presented the nightmare of a dominion of brutality in the form of a military prison in The Brig (1963), it was above all the plays of David Rabe based on the experience of the Vietnam War in which violence dominated. In Sticks and Bones (1971), for example, the loving American middle-class family watches while their blinded son who has returned from Vietnam cuts his wrists with a razor given to him by his brother, and Streamers (1975) consists almost entirely of a demonstration of the aggression and violence within a group of soldiers without any evidence of even the smallest hint at a moral judgement. And a play such as Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind (1985) demonstrates quite clearly that even the ample presence of psychological motivation in no way assuages the horror of physical and psychic brutality. This aesthetic play with the attraction of fear or dread – which is definitive for the effect these works have on a reader despite all the other intentions clearly in evidence – cannot, however, be simply regarded as a late variation on the aesthetic of the sublime as propounded by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful from 1757 and as it

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applies to older conjurings of the horrible. In the first place, both the distancing which results from the combination of different genres as well as the familiarity of those readers who are well-versed in horror literature with its standard effects do not allow that intensity of feeling which was so important for Burke to come about very often. But even if the dread is not powerful enough to bring about that existential fear necessary for the experience of the sublime, the kick is apparently strong enough to attract a large audience and create a welcome emotional component in more complex literary works. The fear is mostly a result of the fact that the strangeness which causes the fear is not as different from ourselves – or at least human nature – as we would perhaps wish; and the attraction results – as Burke had already noted – from the fact that our existence is not directly threatened while viewing or reading and that we can even feel morally satisfied if we sympathize with the victims. Elements of horror are also often to be found in paintings from the last few decades, even if not as intense as in the work of Francis Bacon (e.g., “Painting,” 1946) who is quite untypical for the later phase of Modernism. Beginning with the images of Anselm Kiefer such as “Malerei der verbranten Erde” (1974) or “Bilderstreit” (1977), these elements are found above all in German painting of the 1980s – for example, Walter Dahn’s “Asthma I” (1982; see fig. 13), Peter Bömmel’s “Sprung aus der Geschichte” (1982), Sigmar Polke’s “Lager” (1982), Jörg Immendahl’s “Topf” (1985), or Hermann Nitsch’s “Schüttbild mit Malhemd der 19. Malaktion” (1986). However, the pictures and reliefs of the American Robert Longo (e.g., “Now Everybody” from 1982–83 and “Corporate Wars: Wall of Influence” from 1982), the English John Walker (“Oceanea X,” 1982), as well as the Italians Enzo Cucchi (“Paesaggio Barbaro,” 1982, and “Mysterious Breath,” 1983) and Alberto Abate (“The Generation of Pasiphäe,” 1984) most definitely include the attraction of fear in their effect.

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Much more drastic were the horrific effects with which a number of artists already mentioned in connection with processual art worked. While Hermann Nitsch was content to use ‘only’ the blood of animals which amply flowed and sprayed during his ritually stylized slaughteractions (e.g., his “Orgies-Mysteries Theatre” in 1972 in New York), Rudolf Schwarzkogler turned to real human blood in his ritual selfmutilations, a fact which eventually led to his death. The American Chris Burden taught his audience the meaning of horror when he, for instance, shot himself in the arm before their very eyes in 1971 in Los Angeles or had himself tied up as a human package and then laid down on a busy street in order to leave his survival to the workings of chance. Such extreme actions, however, also make clear that the intended true-to-lifeness of these horror-generating events – the total dissolution of the border between art and life – stood to a massive extent in the way of an aesthetic effect, at least as long as one assumes that the viewer did not have the temperament of Nero. Even the photographs and videos of such events and actions only allow for a minimum of that distance which is so essential for a primarily aesthetic effect. The occlusion of the ethical aspect, difficult enough in the realm of the fictional at times, can (and should not) take place here – and what makes this type of art so alienating is that it nevertheless demands the ethically impossible.

The Strange as Subtle Difference in the Later Phase of Postmodernism It was already clear in the 1980s that the inclusion of genres and images taken from popular culture and the dominance of theory in Concept Art which lent the literature and art of early Postmodernism a certain novelty was in the meantime no longer new, and the critics had even already begun to speak of the end of Postmodernism. What fol-

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lowed was in no way a renunciation of this extremely expanded understanding of what constitutes art, but a continuation which almost inevitably had to appear less spectacular, at the same time making room though for more subtle effects. Aside from the new possibilities offered by the new media, it was nearly impossible after a century of constant experimentation to produce something new in the sense of the radically different. This insight led artists and authors to turn their back on what is known as “the anxiety of influence”36 – the fear that the influence of already existing art or literature is apparent in one’s own work – which had governed the Western production of art and literature since the cult of genius of the eighteenth century. More recently, art has been produced from art and literature from literature quite openly, whether in the form of pastiche or the revival of earlier art movements signalled through the use of the prefix “Neo.” What resulted was a literature and art of variation in which otherness consists of a change in what is already familiar and, therefore, takes on a more subtle character. In order for this milder type of strangeness – which on the gradual scale of intensity is to be found close to the beautiful and could be described as “the interesting” – to achieve its full effect, however, an audience or recipient is required who is already familiar with what is being changed or varied. In this sense, more recent art and literature is even more dependent on cultural preparation than Modernist and early Postmodern art already was. Of course, everything is new and therefore still very strange for those who are not familiar with the world of art; but in order to have the specific experience of that type of strangeness which consists of subtle difference in the variation of what is already familiar, exactly this familiarity is necessary – not only with the literature and art of Modernism, but also with that of earlier periods. Since in principle the whole spectrum of art and literature 36

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

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ever produced offers itself as the basis for new variations, we are faced in the meantime with the simultaneous existence of very heterogeneous art movements, from Neo-Abstraction and Neo-Dada to the return of figural painting, and literary movements, ranging from recent experiments with form to the return of realism.What presents itself in literature as a new awareness of the “intertextuality” of everything ever written, is described for painting by the American artist Sherrie Levine as follows: The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. Similar to those eternal copyists Bouvard and Pécuchet, we indicate the profound ridiculousness that is precisely the truth of painting. We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. Succeeding the painter, the plagiarist no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense encyclopedia from which he draws. The viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost.37

The nearly smothering plethora of already existing art and literature which led to a recourse to variation could not, however, suppress the attempt to nevertheless present something new. In particular the new media and the increased attention to cultural difference brought about not least by migratory movement were promising. Both video and computer art as well as the inclusion of strategies of representation and the world-views of non-Western cultures offered possibilities for innovation which were and still are explored at great length. Due to the general dissemination of the new media and the ever-increasing

37

“Statement,” Style (March 1982): 48; quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 1039.

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real-life encounter with foreign cultures, however, the extent of alienation which was achieved was also in this case less spectacular and more along the lines of ‘interestingly novel’, even if the intended effect was more extreme.

1 V ARIATION AND I NTERTEXTUALITY “Neo” Art and the Post-Avantgarde What immediately strikes us when looking at the various artistic movements of the eighties is that the adjective new is used rather liberally. People speak of the Neue Wilde [New Fauves , Neo-Expressionists], neo-figurative art, of new German and new Austrian art. […] The Neue Wilde were soon succeeded by an artistic trend with a neo-geometric programme, called Neo-Geo. And that was not the end of it. No sooner had neo-figurative artists and NeoGeometricians vacated their trend-setting galleries in New York, Cologne, Paris, Vienna, London and Milan to embark on lengthy exhibition tours through international museums, but people’s attention was claimed by the Neo-Conceptualists. […] Indeed, the inflationary use of the word new in connection with artistic trends does not correspond at all to current terminology. It never actually appears on its own but only ever as a prefix (Neo-) or as an adjective qualifying a trend which already exists. New tendencies are not really all that new, nor are they meant to be.38

This is how Klaus Honnef characterized “contemporary art” in 1992. When the new is – at least for specialists – no longer new and is so clearly not meant to be so, we are no longer dealing with radical strangeness, but with a more subtle form of strangeness, with variations. The attempts of the Modernist avantgarde and early Postmodern artists and authors to always create something new had explored to a large extent the wide spectrum of what is possible; all that remained at the end of the twentieth century was the recourse to 38

Honnef, Contemporary Art, tr. Hugh Beyer (Cologne: Taschen, 1988): 13–14.

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variations on what was already known. Such an art of variation, dominant in the realm of art until the cult of genius in the eighteenth century, picks up on what has come before, and its attractive novelty is found in a relatively small material, stylistic, or thematic difference which nevertheless enables a very new effect. This is clearly in evidence in German painting of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which takes recourse to early Modernism in its use of colours, technique, and orgiastic physicality and bestowed its creators with the name “Neue Wilde.” As the works of Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Walter Dahn, and others from this period show, the difference lay in the exaggeration of what was already familiar – including the overdimensional size of the works – so that the impression of a parody of primitivity was easily created. The new art of variation also included a return of realism, of course here too with a difference which took on various forms. In Michael von Ofen’s representation of a royal stag in nineteenth-century style (“Ohne Titel,” 1985), for instance, this difference is to be found in the ironic effect of an intended element of kitsch, in Thomas Huber’s “Kalenderlandschaft Nr. 2” (1987) a modern mailbox disturbs the image of a wild stream pieced together out of nature photos which have been pasted together, and in the images of the American Eric Fischl a strange light makes the sexual motifs appear to be dreams which are at the same time desired and feared. The object artists of the 1980s exhibited banal everyday objects, on the other hand, to ironize the marketing pathos of the consumer world. Haim Steinbach, for example, presented bottles and souvenirs on artistically designed shelves, and Jeff Koons cast objects such as a vacuum cleaner in bronze. As Koons described it, working with familiar objects taken from the everyday world was supposed to help bridge the gap between the world of art and the general public: To me, the issue of being able to capture a general audience and also have the art stay on the highest orders is of great interest. I

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think anyone can come to my work from the general culture: I don’t set up any kind of requirement. Almost like television. […] The objects and the other images that are interconnected to the body of work have other contexts and, depending on how much the viewer wants to enter it, they can try to get more out of it and start dealing in art vocabulary instead of just sensational or personal vocabulary, and start to deal with abstractions of ideas and of context.39

The particular in the realm of photography – which regained importance in the 1970s for the first time since the 1920s – was that the represented reality appeared to be staged or constructed. Good examples are the architecture photographs of Günter Förg (“Lingotte III,” 1989) or Jürgen Klauke’s “Schattenbilder” (1984), but above all Cindy Sherman’s role pictures where she works with the rhetoric of film in order to demonstrate the clichés of femininity – whether shaped by desire or by fear – which dominate the media world in particular. And ever since advertising has taken over the production of ‘beautiful images,’ it is not surprising that artistic photography has reacted to this with parody – whether it is the perfectly copied Chanel advertisement by the American William Wegmann in which the nose of the beautiful model is slightly bleeding (“Snap and Chanel,” 1982) or Katharina Sieverding’s presentation of deadly weapons instead of perfume and fashion in high-gloss photography. Neo-Abstract art also lives from the variation of what is familiar, sometimes with a very minimal distance. In Reinhard Mucha’s “Eller Bahnhof” (1983), for instance, this difference is to be found in the fact that an apparently totally anonymous grey-green canvas has a specific realistic title. Joseph Beuys’ minimalistic black spot on a white surface (“Das schwarze Loch”) from 1981 could have been created by Malevich between 1910 and 1920, Roni Horn’s two parts of a cut square

39

“From Criticism to Complicity,” Flash Art 129 (Summer 1986): 46–49; quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 1053.

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timber (“Parted Mass,” 1985) also twenty years earlier by Carl Andre, and Nat Vital’s long iron rod with a cloud-like plate attached at the top (“Echo of Time,” 1987) by Jannis Konnellis in the late 1960s. While it may be hard to determine in these cases whether it is primarily a question of continuation or citation, the use of citation in the abstract paintings of Gerhard Richter is clear – e.g., “Strich (auf Blau)” from 1979 and “Strich (auf Rot)” from 1980 – insofar as we are dealing with an illusionist imitation of the brush-mark and expression of informal painting. The variation here lies in the deconstructive effect of the clear reference of one set of artistic signs to already existing signs.40 The citing of traditional motifs and modes of representation became the creative principle behind Italian painting of the 1980s which was programmatically termed “Transavangardia” by the critic A. Bonita Oliva. Sandro Chia combined styles of painting in one picture which were just as contradictory as those used by the clearly eclectic Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi called up past mythical worlds by using the appropriate motifs, and Mimmo Paladino worked with prehistoric cave paintings. There is always a perceptible ironic distance in these works which became a defining characteristic of the post-avantgarde (see fig. 14).

Realist Narrative Made Strange In the literature of the last two decades, the ‘new’ as a variation of what is already familiar is encountered above all in the return of realism. While realist conventions had always remained an option during the first phase of Postmodernism – one need only mention, for instance, John Updike’s series of Rabbit novels which began in 1960 – they seemed relatively dull when compared to the experimental work of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was only with the renaissance of the American short story in the course of the 1970s that a ‘minimalist’ 40

See Scheer, Postmoderne als kritisches Konzept, 156–58.

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version of realism became stylish through the work of authors such as Raymond Carver (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, 1981), Gorden Lish (What I Know So Far, 1984), and Frederick Barthelme (Moon Deluxe, 1983); and in the 1980s even an author like John Barth returned to a ‘realist’ narrative mode with Sabbatical: A Romance (1982). The ‘new’ realism, known in some circles as ‘experimental realism’, is also to be seen as an art of variation: the conventions of realist narrative are for the most part retained, but at the same time the claim to an adequate representation of reality is questioned from within in varying ways. In Walter Abish’s How German Is It (1981), for instance, the repeated use of obvious clichés and filmic techniques of representation undermines the reliability of what is presented, and in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) this is achieved through recourse to variations on the illusion of reality in television. In the historiographic novels of Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy, 1985–86), E.L. Doctorow (World’s Fair, 1986), and Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot, 1984) it is the stress laid upon the incompleteness of attempts to grasp what has happened which gives the narrative of past events an extremely uncertain status. There was another strategy of variation which found even greater use than the just mentioned forms when it came to subverting the claim to validity of realist narrative: the integration, imaginative expansion, and ironic reversal of the conventions of popular literature. This has already been discussed at length with reference to horror literature. It is also true to a similar extent for the influence of science fiction. On the one hand, those authors already specialized in this genre such as Samuel Delany (Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, 1984) or William Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984) gave their works new complexity and quality by making use of Postmodern experimental narrative forms; on the other hand, authors like Don DeLillo (White Noise, 1984), Christine Brooke–Rose (Xorandor, 1986), and Russell Hoban (The Medusa Frequency, 1987) used a mix of

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realism and science fiction to create ‘interface fiction’ where there is an uncanny sense that the alternative worlds are all too similar to ours. In addition, female authors with feminist intentions used the narrative conventions of science fiction in order to portray contemporary topics, in particular the meaning of gender roles (e.g., Joanna Russ in The Female Man, 1975; Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale, 1986; Kathy Acker in The Empire of the Senseless, 1988). Such a creation of pastiche with a lighter or heavier touch of irony fed into a number of other forms of genre literature. Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) and Robert Coover’s Gerald’s Party (1986) are examples of an imaginative subversion of the conventions of the detective novel. The same can be said for the tradition of the romance in John Barth’s Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) and A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), the fantastic novel in Paul Auster’s Moon Palace (1989), and ‘punk fiction’ in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1981) and Great Expectations (1983). What proved to be particularly effective were those variations on historical narration that went under the heading of “metahistorical” because of their simultaneous problematizing of the depiction of history. Very impressive examples are works such as Star Turn (1985) or Witchcraft (1987) by Nigel Williams, Moon Tiger (1987) by Penelope Lively, Stone Virgin (1985) or Sacred Hunger (1992) by Barry Unsworth, and above all Waterland (1983) by Graham Swift. The hybrid mixture of fiction and the portrayal of history is also quite apparent in the many recent fictional biographies such as Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), John Arden’s Books of Bale: A Fiction of History (1988), Robert Nye’s The Memoirs of Lord Byron: A Novel (1989), Eva Figes’ The Tree of Knowledge (1990), or Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991) and The Eye in the Door (1993). The very basic problems connected with the representation of the past became so important as a structuring principle in works such as Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) or Peter Ack-

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royd’s Chatterton (1987) that one can speak, in analogy to metafiction, of ‘metabiographies’. Such myriad variations on a realist mode of writing, whether by making use of the already existing conventions of genre literature and other mass media such as film and television or by integrating different conceptions of reality from other cultures, opened up a realm of possible combinations which seemed nearly endless. What appears at first glance to be strange is the mutual relativizing of conventions of representation and conceptions of reality which used to be relatively solid. The method which dominated in the “metafiction” of the first phase of Postmodernism – the contradiction of unwarranted claims to representational validity with self-reflexive interventions and the ensuing destruction of illusions of the real in order to make what is presented as ‘real’ appear as only one of many possibilities – seems at times rather crude in comparison to the new strategies of relativization. However, this new procedure depends upon a familiarity with the various genre conventions in order for the reader to be able to recognize at all the significant use of and departure from such conventions, as well as their combination. This is above all the case when it is a question of variations on a particular literary work, as is well demonstrated in novels such as Robert Nye’s Falstaff (1976), Merlin (1978), and Faust (1980), Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (1989) and Tess (1993), or Marina Warner’s Indigo, or Mapping the Waters (1992). Nye expresses the principle of the art of variation in his novel Faust as follows: There’s always another version […] after you’ve told everything you think you know in as many different ways as you can, there will always be something that you’ve not told, and another way of telling it […].41

41

Robert Nye, Faust (London: Hamilton, 1980): 166.

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The Return to Earlier Dramatic Genre Conventions An analogous development towards variation can also be seen in the realm of drama. It is telling that a recent study of English drama has the name Rekonventionalisierung im englischen Drama 1980–1990,42 indicating a return to such varying genre conventions as the medieval passion play (e.g., in Howard Barker’s A Passion in Six Days, 1985, and The Last Supper, 1988; Tony Harrison’s The Passion, 1985, and Howard Brenton’s Greenland, 1988), the Elizabethan tragedy (Howard Barker’s Seven Lears, 1990), the Jacobean revenge tragedy (Peter Flannery’s Singer, 1989), the Restoration comedy (Edward Bond’s Restoration, 1988), old gangster films (David Hare’s Knuckle, 1974, and Kenneth Branagh’s Public Enemy, 1988), and the boulevard comedy (Peter Schaffer’s Lettice and Lovage, 1989). This is, on the one hand, to be seen as a turning away from the preceding phase of English theatre which had been influenced to a great extent by Brecht and Artaud, on the other hand also as a break with the Modernist understanding of innovation. The conscious return to the familiar – at times revealing itself as unsuited for current themes but at times also surprisingly contemporary – makes full use of the attraction of minimal differences which is a typical characteristic of the art of variation. American drama, lacking a long history of theatre to which it can return, has been dominated since the 1970s by “New Realism,” the recourse with variation to the conventions of stage realism which had been dominant until the end of the 1950s. The outstanding figure here is David Mamet who demonstrated with such successes as American Buffalo (1975) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) how a reduction to mainly stereotypical and primitive dialogues which often degenerate into cross-talk can create a previously unequalled ‘realistic’ effect. But also authors such as David Rabe (Streamers, 1976; Hurlyburly, 1984) and Lanford Wilson who in his Talley Trilogy created variations on 42

Peter Paul Schnierer, Rekonventionalisierung im englischen Drama 1980–

1990 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994).

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the traditional family drama (The Fifth of July, 1978; Talley’s Folly, 1979; Talley & Son, 1985) were able to make realistic conventions attractive once again. In addition, not only the more successful young female playwrights such as Wendy Wasserstein (Uncommon Women and Others, 1977; The Heidi Chronicles, 1988), Marsha Norman (’Night, Mother, 1982), and Tina Howe (Painting Churches, 1983; Coastal Disturbances, 1986) believed in the possibilities for variation on realism, but also the younger African-American dramatists (August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, 1986, and The Piano Lesson, 1988; Charles Fuller, A Soldier’s Play, 1981, and Sally and Prince, both 1988) as well as Chinese-American playwrights (Frank Chin, The Year of the Dragon, 1974; David Henry Hwang, FOB, 1979, Family Devotions, 1981, and The House of Sleeping Beauties, 1987). Even in the plays where the conventions of realism were more strongly deconstructed – for instance, in the work of Emily Mann (Still Life, 1980; Execution of Justice, 1984) and Richard Nelson (The Vienna Notes, 1978; The Return of Pinocchio, 1982) – they are clearly used as a foil for variation. Finally, Sam Shepard, a dramatist who made great use of the metaphoric power of images and at first thwarted mainstream realism, also returned increasingly in his later works to realistic conventions (e.g., in The Curse of the Starving Class, 1976; True West, 1980; Fool for Love, 1983; Simpatico, 1991).

The Aesthetic of Subtle Difference While the phenomenon of intertextuality was present in the art and literature of Modernism, whether in the form of (mostly ironic) allusions, quotations, parody, or montage, it was always employed to make the difference between the old and the new appear as large and obvious as possible. The artists and authors of the last two decades, on the other hand, have begun to create slight variations on what is familiar – apparently without fear of being labelled an epigone or being accused of plagiarism. From a historical perspective, this shift to art and

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literature based on subtle difference means a revival of the aesthetic known as mimesis which dominated from the Renaissance of the twelfth century until the advent of the cult of genius with its concept of the original genius in the eighteenth century. It is quite interesting that one finds today those strategies of innovation that were developed back then: the variation of a single, familiar genre, theme, or motif, or the combination of previously separate forms and themes. An important difference, however, is that current-day artists and authors can take recourse to a much larger archive as they follow upon two hundred years of constant attempts to radically expand the possibilities of artistic expression. This turn to an aesthetic of milder alterity, of a more subtle difference, means at the same time the opening up of a nearly unlimited realm of new possibilities for artistic creativity. The awareness of the inevitability of intertextuality created by poststructural theory seems in this way to have turned into productive artistic creativity. It is important to point out that this in no way limits the critical potential of art and literature. The fact, for example, that an apparently reliable form of representation such as realism can be varied in seemingly endless ways, and the experience that relatively set generic structures and styles lose greatly in reliability when they appear in hybrid combinations, both tend to undermine any unfounded ontological claims made by forms of representation. This is in fact so effective that the obvious self-reflexiveness of metafiction seems quite crude in hindsight. As far as the recipient is concerned, this new aesthetic of subtle difference undoubtedly demands a change in our aesthetic sensibility. What seems strange now is the impression that apparently nothing new is being presented. Instead of the attempt to slowly come to terms with the radical strangeness of avantgardist art and literature by means of a corresponding great intellectual effort and emotional acclimatization, the task now is to discover the subtle difference in something which seems familiar or quite similar to something already existing. This is in no way easier, for the viewer and reader must be familiar

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enough with the already existing forms and themes to notice the subtle differences in the newly created variations or to recognize the conventional elements that are combined with one another to result in a correspondence or an interesting contrast. They must above all develop a keen sense for that specific aesthetic pleasure which can result from the discovery of such fine differences from the already familiar. Intellectually, the reorientation corresponds to the new theoretical focus on difference and thus seems not too difficult. As the aesthetic experience, however, is also determined by taste, and our taste has developed over a long period of time on the basis of avantgardist art and literature which aimed at radical alterity and viewed simple variation as inferior, it will take some time before viewers and readers – including critics – have caught up with the artists and authors. In the meantime, we will have to live with statements of sad regret about the waning of true creativity or the absence of ingenious new creations, even though the aesthetic experiences enabled by the new subtle art of variation, albeit different, are just as effective.

2 R ECOURSE TO THE N EW M EDIA AND F OREIGN C ULTURES New Media and Foreign Cultures in Art Despite the predominance of already existing art and literature available for variation, the attempt to create something new in the sense of the alienating other goes on. The new media offered special possibilities here as the advent of video art and computer art would demonstrate. The spread of television since the 1950s motivated at first an artistic form of media criticism as seen in the early work, for example, of the Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell (in “TV-Collage Nr. 1” from 1958 or in “TV-Begräbnis” from 1963). But the positive possibilities of the new medium for artistic creativity were soon recognized, in particular by Nam June Paik as his video installations from the 1960s (e.g., “TVCross,” 1966) and his especially impressive abstract “Electronic Opera

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No. 1” from 1969 show. In the 1970s Paik turned to so-called “ClosedCircuit” video installations (e.g., “TV-Buddha,” 1974), used also by Peter Weibel for his experiments with perception (“Beobachtungen der Beobachtung,” 1973). In the 1980s Paik created multi-television installations (e.g., “Beuys-Voice” at the documenta 8 in 1987) in which the arrangement of the screens was used as a creative element. The combination of video art with sound experiments was also notable in the work, for example, of the American Bill Viola (e.g., “The Theatre of Memory,” 1986) and Bruce Naumann (e.g., “Rat Maze with Rock & Roll Drummer,” 1988). Like Weibel, Naumann was interested in an examination of structures of perception, and works such as “Clown Torture” (1987) or “Anthro / Sicio” (1991; see fig. 15) can by all means be seen as experiments with what the viewer and listener can bear. As the “Ars Electronica” exhibitions in Linz from 1984 to 1989, for example, demonstrated, computers were already being used to create art. Wholly new and strange images were created from a repertoire of relatively simple forms which also included interactive possibilities. Since then, “Net-Art” has arisen, in which computers communicating via the internet are used to question the materiality of art through the alternative production of ephemeral simulations. This is also true of video where the image is only present as long as it is turned on and it can be copied without losing in originality. Its character as a work then changes: while it may be saved in material form and can be reproduced by technical means, it is an essentially immaterial construct of signs, much in the same way as a literary work. Media images only regain their uniqueness when they become interactive, that is, when they open the possibility of co-creation to the ‘viewer’ and the boundary between the fully-formed image to be merely perceived and interaction or play is transcended. It should be clear that in making use of all its possibilities media art constitutes a separate genre which enables new aesthetic experiences. Nevertheless, we still find here the principles of the aesthetic of the

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strange: it is again a question of dealing with something which appears at first to be more or less strange in order to reach the type of ‘pleasure’ that results from an expanded perception and understanding. At the end of the twentieth century, it became ever clearer that the Western art world had found yet another way to create new effects of strangeness by including the repertoires of foreign cultures. This was based on a different premise than the turn to exotic art of ‘primitives’ already to be found in early Modernism. In particular those artists working in Western metropolises such as the Iranian Shirin Neshat (see fig. 16) or the African Zarina Bhimji brought about new impulses. The importance which this movement has gained in the meantime was clearly demonstrated at documenta 11 in 2002. Critics may have repeatedly complained that it was more a question of a ‘politically correct’ positioning of art from a postcolonial perspective. However, there is little doubt that the extensive presentation of art based on cultures whose world-view is foreign for us and the ethnological view which this enabled on Western art was also based on the following hope: that the encounter with the strange and the presentation of an external perspective would allow for an experience of types of strangeness which were different than those offered by the widespread variation of Modernist and Postmodern art movements as found in recent European and American art. As Peter Wollen put it, But we are entitled to hope that in the visual arts, as elsewhere, we are entering an epoch in which invention and regeneration will come from the periphery, free from the self-obsession of the increasingly provincial culture of the metropolis.43

Even if this hope was hardly fulfilled at documenta 11 in terms of new possibilities for expression, the presence of another world-view as the

43

Peter Wollen, “Into the Future: Tourism, Language and Art,” in Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth Century Culture (London: Verso, 1993): 190–212; quoted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 1108.

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driving force behind the works presented was evident enough that they appeared strange in the context of our familiar museum culture.

New Literary Utopias and Cultural Hybrids In the realm of literature, the influence of the new media has not led thus far to decisive changes in structures of representation. Strategies such as discontinuity, anachronism, and parallel time levels were already present in film and literature has been making use of these techniques for a longer time. And indeed, film as a medium which creates the illusion of reality was the theme of a number of notable English novels in the 1980s such as The New Confessions (1987) by William Boyd and King Ludd (1988) by Andrew Sinclair. In terms of content, the new possibilities for representation and control opened up by the new media were not suprisingly of interest above all for the science-fiction genre. The mixture of science fiction, Postmodern strategies of representation, and subversive ideas gave birth in the 1980s to a new genre with the programmatic name ‘cyberpunk’. Its most successful author was William Gibson who created a virtual space called ‘cyberspace’ in his novel Neuromancer (1984) – a space which, in his subsequent works Count Zero (1987) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1989), served as the field of action for electronically controlled beings or cyborgs (cybernetic organisms). It was a vision of the future which was at one and the same time fascinating and disquieting. While this genre had a short life-span, the idea of a world of networked computers was taken up again later and – as David Brin’s novel Earth from 1990 demonstrates – combined with contemporary problem constellations so that a type of metaphorical commentary about desirable or feared tendencies was made possible. What revealed itself as much more successful, however, was the creation of a new type of alterity by turning to and integrating the world-views and conceptions of the self of foreign cultures. This was accomplished by ‘ethnic’ authors who were familiar with the conven-

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tions of Western literature. While this phenonmenon is not totally new – in the area of English literature one need only mention the work of V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and Wole Soyinka from the 1960s – it was only in the 1980s that a large number of very successful novels ensured that this “hybrid” literary form received wider attention and recognition. In Great Britain, Salman Rushdie with Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) and Kazuo Ishiguro with A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986) attracted a particularly large amount of attention with the creation of the illusion of such ‘other’ worlds. In the U S A , the corpus of ‘hyphenated literatures’ written by ethnic minorities began to grow rapidly. In order to demonstrate just how successful these new hybrid creations were, one need only mention Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987) or Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990) in the realm of AfricanAmerican literature, Louise Erdrich’s retelling of Chippewa stories in Love Medicine (1984) and The Beet Queen (1986) as examples of ‘native American’ literature, Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory (1982) for Chicano literature, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1977) and China Men (1980) as examples of Chinese-American literature, and Toshio Mori’s The Chauvinist and Other Stories (1979) in the realm of Japanese-American literature. The extent of strangeness found in these works is large enough to create interest, while the generally conventional narrative form ensured that they remained accessible for a wider reading audience. Insofar these works also were symptomatic of a turn to a milder form of strangeness.

3 T HE C OMPETITION OF THE S IMULTANEOUS When new fashion trends, design styles, art movements, ideas, values, and lifestyles follow upon one another with increasing speed, at some point they become simultaneous. In his wide-ranging and historically

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founded analysis of Postmodernism, David Harvey sees both the most obvious characteristic and the most influential source of contemporary change in civilization in an increase in “time–space compression,” and the realm of art is not excluded from this.44 We are living in a ‘postavantgarde’ era in which the succession of avantgardist programmes and styles has been replaced by the simultaneous existence of different movements. In the words of Klaus Honnef, “the present situation is so pluralistic that it sometimes verges on randomness.”45 One chapter of Honnef’s book is entitled “The Cultural Supermarket”; the analogy is apt if one considers the huge and extremely heterogeneous offerings of new art or literature. Whoever would like to see this with his own eyes needs only, for instance, have a look at the catalogue edited by Heinrich Klotz for the opening exhibition of the Museum für Neue Kunst ZKM/ Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe in 1997.46 Of course, there have been attempts in recent decades to create and establish a new trend in the art market as effectively as possible. The fact, however, that this has become increasingly difficult is not mainly due to the already-discussed experimental drive of Modernism in which the creative possibilities for each medium were practically exhausted, thereby making anything ‘new’ not so new. The turn to an art of variation (instead of radical innovation) would still not rule out the possibility that a certain style might establish itself as dominant for a period of time. A much more important reason for the “new intricateness” – to transfer a term used by Habermas for the sociological situation to the realm of aesthetics47 – is the eminent expansion of the

44

The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989): Part III. 45 Honnef, Contemporary Art, tr. Hugh Beyer (Cologne: Taschen, 1988): 9. 46 Printed in Munich by Prestel, 1997. 47 Jürgen Habermas, Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit (Kleine politische Schriften V; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985).

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production, marketing, and reception of art in recent decades. While in the late nineteenth century in Paris – the art Mecca at that time – approximately 2,000 artists and sculptors created 200,000 works of art in one decade, a century later in New York alone there were no fewer than 150,000 professional artists striving to exhibit at least one of the fifteen million pieces of art produced per decade in one of the 680 galleries in the city.48 The production, marketing, and reception of literature has – against all predictions about the death of the book in an electronic age – also escalated in a similar way, a fact which is demonstrated yearly at the Frankfurt book fair even if ‘belles-lettres’ make up only a small portion of the offerings. Gallery owners, museum directors and art critics, proof readers in publishing houses, reviewers, and literary critics still attempt to separate the good from the bad and draw attention to the most important innovations. However, it is no longer possible to claim to have an overview of the new production of art which is exibited somewhere or printed (not to mention the mass of paintings and objects refused by galleries and the manuscripts rejected by publishers). And if one also considers that the criteria according to which this small selection of works are judged vary radically due to the simultaneity of exceedingly different conceptions of art, then it is clear that chance must play a large role if today a certain painting makes it into an exhibition of contemporary art or a certain novel is found in the display window of a bookshop. However, chance cannot explain everything: art dealers, gallery and museum directors, and publishers put just as much effort into winning the approval of the public as marketing divisions do in other branches. If one says that artists and art trends, authors and genres are above all ‘created,’ this does not necessarily mean that a lack of talent is compensated for by advertising. It is enough that something is selec48

See Brandon Taylor, Modernism, Postmodernism, Realism: A Critical Perspective for Art (Winchester: Winchester School of Art Press, 1987): 77.

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ted out of a still very large variety of promising new art and promoted and pushed ‘in the market’. In the title of his play about the radical shift in the pop-music scene, The Tooth of Crime (1972), the American playwright Sam Shepard aptly characterized the recent situation. Up until the 1960s the situation was as follows: a dominant movement slowly became too familiar, its potential for innovation eaten away with time, only to be replaced by a new movement. However, in a situation of plurality and simultaneity such as obtained after the 1960s, whether a certain style prevailed or not became for the main part a question of power: the ‘tooth of crime’ replaced the ‘tooth of time’. In the meantime, the situation has changed once again as the idea of pluralism has been accepted by the recipients or consumers. They enjoy being able to choose from a variety of offerings and are certainly no longer readily prepared to be limited by the dictates of one particular style. In the last two decades, therefore, not even the fashion industry has been able to create a dominant trend even for a short time, and it is most certainly not possible to truly speak of a dominant movement in either visual arts or literature. This situation has major consequences for the extent of the experience of strangeness which the encounter with art mediates. Once the plurality of simultaneous styles has become a matter of course, then the potential for provocation of each single movement is extremely relativized. If so much is possible, it is no longer necessary to come to terms with something which has recently attained general approval but which perhaps does not correspond at all to one’s own expectations. Given such a variety, one can indulge one’s own preferences. In addition to this, the widespread turn to an art based on variation means that the ‘totally different’ hardly appears anymore. Whoever is familiar with Modernist art or literature and with the innovations of early Postmodernism will find that the experience of the radically strange in art or literature in the last two decades has become rare. Almost everything is somewhat different, and instead of being faced

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with something shockingly different or having to overcome the uncanny, one is often given the task of finding out just what is different about the ‘new’. This new situation, however, sharpens both the sense for subtle difference and what is known as aesthetic sensibility – and is thus no cause for regret. Above all, an endless field of possible variants of subtle difference is thereby opened up, allowing us to expect that the aesthetic of the strange will be with us for a while to come.

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The Aesthetic of the Strange as the Aesthetic of Modernism and Postmodernism

H A V E T H U S F A R intentionally discussed the art and literature of Modernism and Postmodernism as if one and the same aesthetic underlies them – the aesthetic of the strange. Without doubt, this is a supposition which requires an explanation if one considers the attempts to differentiate the two periods which have taken place over the last decades. It is not enough to point to the fact that there are just as many critics who view Postmodernism as merely a radical later phase of Modernism as there are those who see it as an alternative to Modernism. The question which must be answered is whether the clearly demonstrable differences between the art and literature of the two periods have or have not led to a significant change in the aesthetic process. There is neither a need to further explain that the increased selfreflexivity, mixture of genres, and marking of contingency in Postmodern works is everything else than a return to the aesthetic of the beautiful, nor that these characteristics were quite inappropriate to produce an immediate sense of pleasure. Just the opposite: one can say that Postmodern art and literature were very strange – at least at first –

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even for those viewers and readers who had become somewhat familiar with Modernist works. What deserves more attention, however, is the question of whether Postmodern aesthetics – more than Modernist – represents a type of return to the aesthetic of the sublime, not least because this tenet has become quite influential as a result of Jean–François Lyotard’s writings. According to Lyotard, Modernist aesthetics is merely a “nostalgic version” of the aesthetic of the sublime because it compensates for the loss of meaning at the level of content (as a presentation of the unrepresentable) with a consistency of form as a consolation and source of joy. In Postmodernism, however, the unrepresentable is itself presented by a refusal of good form in representation in order that this no longer pleases but rather mediates a stronger impression of the unrepresentable.1 This argument is rather revealing, because it draws attention to a particular problem of the aesthetic of the strange. I have already pointed out that Modernist art and literature – the paintings of the Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists, and the first wholly abstract paintings, the poems of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, early Pound and Eliot, the later plays of Strindberg and the German Expressionists, novels such as Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans or James Joyce’s Ulysses – undeniably caused at first a strong sense of alienation and anything other than pleasure at their ‘good form’. It is interesting, however, that Lyotard – not to mention most experts in Modernist art and literature, who even speak in the meantime of ‘classical Modernism’ – now consider what was seen back then as deformed and formless to be ‘good form’. This shows that strangeness is not only a relative concept, but that art and literature which aims at an estranging effect becomes more ‘beautiful’ with time and loses to a certain extent its original function because it becomes more familiar and causes a change in general taste. Therefore, there was a succession of continu1

Lyotard, “An Answer to the Question, What is the Postmodern?,” 15.

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ally new avantgardes and style experiments in Modernism and in the shift to Postmodernism. Ihab Hassan was quite right in pointing out that the Postmodern break with conventions by integrating kitsch, elements and genres taken from pop culture, as well as self-reflexive metafictional discourse was presented in a more playful, ‘cooler’ way than the experiments of the early avantgardes.2 This in no way means, though, that they appeared less strange and, therefore, were less dependent on accompanying theories. Postmodern theoretical discourse, however, was determined to not just let this playfulness stand on its own. It was interpreted as a crisis of representation, a shift from the epistemological scepticism of Modernism to an ontological scepticism according to which all apparent consistency in the world was reduced to mere construction, to variants of a possible world-making without ontological foundation. For this reason, the aesthetic process has changed at most marginally in comparison to Modernism. The alterity of Postmodern art and literature also causes a sense of alienation, and if this is not to lead to a rejection of this art then an even stronger cultural preparation is necessary. Faced with the integration of provocative triviality and contingency on the one hand, the mixture of genres and the destruction of illusion by means of metafiction on the other hand, readers and viewers require mediating help in the form of accompanying criticism and theory. Without this help, it has become nearly impossible to provisionally synthesize the apparent lack of any coherence in the presentation of a plethora of heterogeneous elements or to find a path through a labyrinth of multiple connections. It is by overcoming such crises of understanding and perception that the certain type of pleasure connected with the aesthetic of the strange can result. 2

“Ideas of Cultural Change,” in Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities, ed. Ihab & Sally Hassan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983): 25.

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It is true that in the second phase of Postmodernism – that is, since the late 1970s – art and literature at least in part no longer present their strangeness in such an extreme form as in the previous two decades during which they were reminiscent of the Avantgarde of early Modernism. In painting, this was a result of a return of figural painting and variations on already familiar styles (e.g., in the work of the “Neuen Wilden,” in “Neo Geo,” “Neo-Abstract,” or “Neo-Conceptualism”), as well as the ironic combination of differing historical styles in the works of the Italian “Transavanguardia” and American painters such as Schnabel and Salle. In literature there was a clear return of realistic conventions (in American ‘dirty realism’, for example), even if the illusion of the reliability of what is presented was undermined in both recent historical novels – by relativizing and marking the way in which what counts as ‘real’ depends on how it is represented – and in the ‘ethnic novel’ through the inclusion of magical elements. This return to realistic forms of representation is – as has been noted – also apparent in the plays of the time. However, the milder alienation caused by this art of variation instead of radical difference is merely another form of the aesthetic of the strange. What now seems strange is the apparent repetition of what is already familiar, and the subtle difference which constitutes novelty in this case only becomes fully clear if one is adequately familiar with those conventions and styles which are being varied upon. It is in large part art which works with pastiche, which only became possible because the “anxiety of influence” – the fear of appearing influenced by others which according to Harold Bloom defined the previous art periods3 – no longer holds sway. The alterity of this recent art and literature only becomes truly apparent, therefore, when set against the background of the history of art and literary history, making the aesthetic process more reliant than ever on the cultural preparation of the recipient. Instead of having to overcome an initial impression of radi3

The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

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cal strangeness, it is a question of discovering the other in what is already familiar. In this way, a sensibility for differentiations is developed.4 Just as alienating, though, is the initial impression that one is faced with a mere repetition of what is already very familiar. If one takes this into account, we are a very long way from being able to speak of an aesthetic of the sublime. But even the art and literature of early Postmodernism is no longer sublime. Lyotard proposes that Postmodern aesthetics is based to a great extent on the aesthetic of the sublime because its art and literature is supposed to mediate a stronger impression of the unrepresentable. However, the very ontological supposition of an ‘unrepresentable’ forms a contrast to the ontological scepticism, the anti-foundationalism and constructivism, which is at the heart of Postmodern theory. It may be true that the sense of the bottomlessness of the process of creating meaning – the abyss which one encounters in the search for reliable meaning – mediated by Postmodern works can at the same time bring the idea of eternity in a negative sense into play. This is not a result, however, of being suddenly overwhelmed by something incredibly large and powerful as occurs in the aesthetic of the sublime; it is, rather, a question of being repeatedly reminded of the merely provisional nature of deciding between multiple possibilities to create meaning within an arbitrarily extensible process of striving towards understanding. The semantic over- or under-determination of Postmodern art and literature mediates the interminability, the near endlessness of the process of creating meaning and thereby the experience of radical estrangement. On the one hand, this art incites our imagination to repeatedly come up with new possible solutions and animates the fuzzy logic by which we solve problems to constantly judge differing levels of likelihood, thus strengthening our ability to overcome crises of meaning. But at the 4

See Herbert Grabes, “The Subtle Art of Variation: The New Aesthetic,” in Fremde Texte Verstehen: Festschrift für Lothar Bredella zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Herbert Christ & Michael K. Legutke (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1996): 182–90.

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same time, we are made aware that any possible solution or allocation of meaning is indeed merely provisional and that our coping with the strange cannot mean a total dissolution of its strangeness. The negative sense of infinity which results from the encounter with Postmodern art and literature no longer mediates, therefore, that ecstatic feeling of being uplifted, of an enormous momentary increase in power, which according to Kant is essential for the aesthetic of the sublime.5 We may indeed take pleasure in our ingeniousness in solving problems as well as in the fact that we can meet the challenge of understanding and appreciating more recent art and literature which wishes to confront us with strangeness by means of our imagination and new concepts and theories. However, on the emotional side the result remains ambivalent. The awareness of the free play of signifiers, the near interminability of the process of creating meaning, destroys at the same time any hope of certain orientation, produces a feeling of fundamental insufficiency in any attempt to overcome the difference between the self and the alienating other, between the subject and the world. The aesthetic of the strange no longer mediates that feeling of untroubled empathy which characterized the aesthetic of the beautiful. It may, however, contribute to the development of that more “vigorous” attitude which Kant sees as necessary for the experience of the sublime and which Hillis Miller in The Ethics of Reading portrays as a significant ethical reaction to the Postmodern insight into the fundamental uncertainty of all allocation of meaning and therefore of all understanding.6 The ethical is found here in refusing to give up the attempt at understanding and appreciation despite this basic awareness of the irreconcilable alterity of what is presented. In this sense, too, the

5

See Herbert Grabes, “The Inversion of the Sublime: Infinity in the Postmodern American Novel,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 38.4 (1993): 589– 99. 6 J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, & Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

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aesthetic experience enabled by both Modernist and Postmodern art and literature has an exemplary character – for the subject can apply this ability just as well to all other areas of life. The aesthetic of the strange may centre on the experience of the alienating Other, but for this very reason also on the experience of our deepest self.

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Figure 1: Strohhut (68 × 72 cm), um 1908 1 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Liegender blauer Akt mit Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Liegender blauer Akt mit Strohhut [Reclining Blue Nude with Straw Hat] (68x72 cm; oil on cardboard, 1909). Sammlung Franz Burda, Offenburg.

Figure 2:

2 Georges Braque, Geige und Palette Georges Braque, Violin1909 et (91,7 × 42,8 cm), Herbst

palette [Violin and Palette] (91.7x42.8 cm; oil on canvas, September 1909). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

3 Pablo Picasso, Glas und Suze-Flasche (65,4 × 50,2 Figure 3:cm), Ende 1912

Pablo Picasso, Verre et bouteille de Suze [Glass and Bottle of Suze] (65.4x50.2; collage: pasted paper, charcoal and goauche, November/December 1912). Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis, Missouri.

4 Wassily Kandinsky, Schwarze Linien Nr.Figure 189 (129,5 4: × 130,2 cm), 1913

Wassily Kandinsky, Schwarze Linien Nr. 189 [Black Lines No. 189] (129.5x130.2 cm; oil on canvas, December 1913). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

5Figure Marcel 5: Duchamp, Dem gebrochenen Arm voraus Marcel Duchamp, In Advance (121 × 35,5 cm), 1915/1964

of the Broken Arm (121x35.5 cm; readymade: snow shovel, wood, and galvanized iron, 1915). Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Indiana

Figure 6: 6 Salvador Dalí, Schlaf (50 × 77 cm), ca. 1937 Salvador Dalí, El sueño [Sleep] (51x77; oil on canvas, 1937). Private collection.

Figure 7 Mark Rothko, Ohne Titel (Seagram-Mural) (183 ×7:153 cm), 1959 Mark Rothko, Untitled (183x153 cm; oil on canvas, 1959). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

8: Wohnungen so anders, so reizvoll macht? 8 Richard Hamilton, Was genau ist es, was Figure die heutigen (26 × 25 cm), 1956 Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Home So Different, So Appealing? (26x25 cm; collage, 1956). Kunsthalle Museum, Tübingen, Germany.

Figure 9: × 37,5 × 21,6 cm), 1962 9 Claes Oldenburg, Zwei Cheeseburger mit allem (17,8 Claes Oldenburg, Two Cheeseburgers With Everything (17.8x21.6 cm; burlap soaked in plaster, painted with enamel, 1962). Museum of Modern Art, Philip Johnson Fund, New York.

Figure 10: 10 Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive I, 1964 Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive I (213.4x152.4 cm; oil and silkscreen ink on canvas, 1964). Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.

Figure 11: 11 Gilbert and George, Die singende Skulptur. Performance, London, 1970 Gilbert and George, The Singing Sculpture (photograph of performance, London, 1970). Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London.

Figure 12: 12 Laurence Weiner, # 278 (Größe variabel), 1972 Laurence Weiner, # 278 (variable dimensions; language sculpture/ film installation, 1972).

Figure 13: 13 Walter Dahn, Asthma I (200 × 150 cm), 1982 Walter Dahn, Asthma I (200x150 cm; emulsion paint on canvas, 1982). Private Collection.

Figure 14: 14 Mimmo Paladino, Chimäre (165 × 264 cm), 1982 Mimmo Paladino, Chimera (165x264 cm; oil on canvas, 1982). Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek.

15 Bruce Naumann, Anthro/Sicio, 1991 Figure 15:

Bruce Naumann, Anthro/Sicio (video installation, Hamburg Kunsthalle, 1991).

Figure 16: Shirin Neshat, I am its secret (from the series Women of Allah, 1993) Color photograph 18.9 x 12.6.

5

Theoretical Foundations of the Aesthetic of the Strange

to postulate a third, independent aesthetic of the strange as a complement to the aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime should be clear by now. Modernist and Postmodern literature and visual arts provide us with more than enough evidence for this. Even a cursory overview of the effects generated by these works makes evident that the aesthetic experience enabled by this literature and art can no longer be subsumed under the aesthetic of the beautiful or of the sublime. As a rule, they neither cause an immediate sense of pleasure as is the case with the beautiful, nor do they lead to that total failure of imagination that in the sublime enables a momentary recourse to the idea of infinity, which in turn then leads to the feelings of a sudden increase in power due to an awareness of the fundamental superiority of reason over the world of the senses. The alienation caused by Modernist and Postmodern literature and visual arts as a result of their strangeness may be great, but only in exceptionally rare cases is it massive enough to cause a total failure of the imagination; and the belief of recipients in the superiority of reason is no longer large enough to cause an ecstatic uplift even should such a failure indeed take place. What arises as a rule when confronted with HE NECESSITY

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this literature and art is an initial estrangement which then – if one is not scared off by the strangeness of the work – actively challenges both the imagination as well as conceptual thought in order to overcome this crisis of understanding and feeling. If this attempt leads even only to partial success then the result is a feeling of at least relative pleasure which for the most part has its roots in satisfaction at one’s own coping ability and the experience of a widening of consciousness. Modernist and Postmodern arts are not only “no longer beautiful,”1 they are also “no longer sublime”: they are arts which by means of the confrontation with the estranging Other enable the experience that it is worth attempting to understand – or at least somehow cope with – something which seems at first to be ever so strange. The reason is that this attempt can lead to a sense of an expansion of our intellectual and emotional capability, indeed even if this attempt fails and we are faced with the limits of our understanding. As I have already stressed in my opening chapter, the aesthetic of the strange which enables this specific experience is not to be simply conceived of as somewhere outside of the aesthetic of the beautiful and that of the sublime. Rather, it takes up a position between these two and makes use of the whole spectrum of possible effects for which the beautiful and the sublime form the extreme positions. The fact that the aesthetic of the strange takes up this middle ground, so to speak, should be made clear by the variety of artistic production in Modernism and Postmodernism as well as the varying extent of estrangement caused in each case. What we have here is not a homogeneous alternative position to the beautiful and the sublime, but the realization of many positions on a sliding scale which reaches from the nearly beautiful – which is, however, just a bit too disquieting to directly cause untroubled pleasure – through what appears to be incomprehensible, to the uncanny which is closest to the life-threatening found in the aes1

See Hans Robert Jauss, ed. Die nicht mehr schönen Künste (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1968) (my tr.).

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Theoretical Foundations

thetic of the sublime. Once more, represented as a diagram, it looks like this: THE STRANGE (AS THE DISTURBING OTHER) THE STRIKINGLY

THE OVERWHELMINGLY

BEAUTIFUL

THE UN SETTLING

SUBLIME

THE I NCO MP REHENSI BLE

THE UN CANNY

The beautiful opens itself up to us, so to speak, and causes an immediate sense of pleasure, and the sense of estrangement caused by what is merely a bit disquieting is relatively quickly overcome with a sense of relief. But in the case of those works that appear at first to be totally incomprehensible a fair amount of effort is necessary in order to not merely put up with them but to embrace them because they enrich us and expand our horizons. It is precisely this that has been the source of the increased importance of art criticism and theory since the emergence of Modernist art. Both criticism and theory contribute to an understanding of those works which appear at first incomprehensible, thereby making it possible to progress from an initial alienation to the satisfying feeling of having overcome a crisis of understanding. This is particularly so when what is presented is so alienating, seems so closed to any attempt at understanding, that it appears uncanny. Without the guidance of a suitable theory it is most likely quite difficult to make the shift from an initial at best ambivalent feeling that oscillates between attraction and rejection in the face of the experience of the abyss found beyond the limits of our understanding to what Kant aptly described, with reference to the experience of the sublime, as “negative desire.” For, as studies in empirical psychology have shown, our reactions are unequivocally positive only up to a limited degree of strangeness; as soon as the distance to what is familiar becomes too

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large, rejection or aggression results. In order that our estrangement in the face of the incomprehensible or even uncanny novelty of Modernist or Postmodern art not become too large – that such negative reactions do not result – there is need of the encouragement of accompanying theoretical commentary which conceptually holds out the promise of expanded understanding. Nevertheless, it is fortunately also the case that our tolerance of the strange increases to no little extent the more we are confronted with it. If we attempt to deal with quite differing and innovative art and literature, we often enough start to regard the encounter with the unfamiliar as a challenge rather than rejecting it. The aspect of whether pleasure is generated directly or indirectly is only one means of demonstrating the status of the aesthetic of the strange as an independent aesthetic situated between the beautiful and the sublime. To further explain it, a clear and unequivocal theoretical system is required which acts as a point of reference, and since the conception of the aesthetic of the beautiful and that of the sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgement has proved itself to be the most influential, it will serve as the basis for the considerations to follow. This also seems to be particularly suitable because more recent attempts to interpret Modernist and Postmodern aesthetics as versions of the sublime are based – with some reference to Burke – for the most part on Kant. What such attempts overlook, however, is the fact that Kant’s considerations on this topic are primarily concerned with the aesthetics of nature. Towards the end of the first part of the Critique of Judgement, after the analysis of the beautiful and the sublime, Kant does give some thought to the aesthetics of art which are above all influenced by the cult of genius of the eighteenth century as well as the interest at that time in a comparison of the different art forms. But these considerations are only concerned with ‘beautiful art’; the possibility of sublime art is mentioned at only one point in the whole book, and that fleetingly in a parenthesis:

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If, as is permissible, we start here by considering only the sublime in natural objects (since the sublime in art is always confined to the conditions that [art] must meet to be in harmony with nature) […].2

Since, however, this statement implies that whatever is said about the sublime in nature also applies to the sublime in art, and at the same time for Kant “art can be called fine [schön] art only if we are conscious that it is art while yet it looks to us like nature,”3 then not only the fundamental considerations in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” can be applied to art, but also those in the “Analytic of the Sublime.”

Disinterested Pleasure In order for something to qualify as beautiful, it must generate a “liking […] devoid of all interest.” What is meant here is a feeling that can only come about if we regard something in a purely contemplative manner, without any desire. Since Modernist and Postmodern literature and visual arts no longer take the representation of the beautiful as their aim, the question is whether this still might apply to the pleasure which results from overcoming the initial alienation in the encounter with this literature and art. Considering the fact that a large proportion of this art not only wishes to count and be regarded as ‘engaged’, but that criticism also points repeatedly to the functional relationship between art and culture as a whole, it is precisely this “disinterested pleasure” that is viewed as out of date and valid only for the apparently antiquated aesthetic of the beautiful. This may be countered, however, by another consideration. It seems difficult, almost impossible even, to overcome the sense of alienation encountered in literature and art as a result of the frequently provocative contingency and triviality of the presented, a disregard for

2 3

Critique of Judgement, § 23, 98. Critique of Judgement, § 45, 174.

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familiar conventions of representation, and a violation of societal and moral norms. This requires recipients who are prepared to at least temporarily suppress their expectations – suspend them, so to speak, without having to give them up – regarding the form that art and its social function should take and what societal norms and value judgements should be valid. Only then is it at all possible to perceive the certain quality of what is presented somewhat accurately, and it is therefore correct to also speak here of a particular aesthetic attitude. Only then may pleasure even result in the end, even though the object encountered would cause displeasure outside the realm of art. The attitude which enables this, while not absolutely disinterested, can be quite aptly described as free to a great extent from non-aesthetic interests. It seems telling that the repressing of interest, oriented as it is towards the familiar, is made possible only by. as it were, a passing encounter with something totally unfamiliar: the experience of the limits to understanding.

Universal Pleasure and the Free Play of the Imagination Since Kant assumes a “disinterested pleasure” in the experience of the beautiful, so that there are not, “underlying this liking, any private conditions” which might play a role, one will “talk about the beautiful as if beauty were a characteristic of the object” and therefore assume that it is “valid for everyone.”4 Kant may say that “The judgement of taste itself does not postulate everyone’s agreement [...]; it merely requires this agreement from everyone,”5 but he puts great effort into showing that such a judgement “rests on a priori bases”6 and can therefore make a claim to universal validity. Whether this “transcendental deduction” of the judgement of taste really carries weight is not

4

Critique of Judgement, § 6, 54. Critique of Judgement, § 8, 60. 6 Critique of Judgement, § 12, 67. 5

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the object of this study, but rather to show why it is no longer possible to speak of “universal pleasure” with the aesthetic of the strange. In order to do so it is necessary to take a closer look at a further important aspect of the Kantian conception of the beautiful. A very central point is the supposition that – in contrast to the “cognition” analyzed in the Critique of Pure Reason – in the case of the aesthetic “judgement of taste,” the idea mediated by sense perception is not defined by a concept and therefore the imaginative powers can play freely. But because the imagination has to create a unity out of variety according to a certain pattern when constructing certain images, it remains at the same time dependent on the synthesizing capabilities of the understanding. The specific aesthetic pleasure results from precisely this fundamental harmony of the cognitive ability as experienced in the free play of the imagination and the understanding. Kant defines this desire more closely as the “very consciousness of a merely formal purposiveness in the play of the subject’s cognitive powers, accompanying a presentation by which an object is given”7 and thus defines beauty as “an object’s form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the presentation of a purpose.”8 The importance of this “merely formal purposiveness” as a “feeling that there is unity in the exhibition”9 for Kant appears when he speaks of the “Combination of Taste with Genius in Products of Fine Art”: In order [for a work] to be beautiful, it is not strictly necessary that [it] be rich and original in ideas, but it is necessary that the imagination in its freedom be commensurate with the lawfulness of the understanding. For if the imagination is left in lawless freedom, all its riches [in ideas] produce nothing but nonsense, and it is judgement that adapts the imagination to the understanding. Taste, like the power of judgement in general, consists in disciplin-

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ing (or training) genius. It severely clips its wings, and makes it civilized, or polished; but at the same time it gives it guidance as to how far and over what it may spread while still remaining purposive. It introduces clarity and order into a wealth of thought, and hence makes the ideas durable, fit for approval that is both lasting and universal, and [hence] fit for being followed by others and fit for an ever advancing culture.10

If further evidence were necessary that the aesthetic of Modernist and Postmodern art can no longer be an aesthetic of the beautiful in the Kantian sense, then this passage would suffice. For what is striking in this art is precisely the fact that the “imagination in its freedom” is not “commensurate with the lawfulness of the understanding” – a lack which hinders the direct impression of “purposiveness,” an immediate “feeling that there is unity in the exhibition,” leading instead to an initially alienating sense of incomprehensibility. This first impression of an apparently ‘lawless’ freedom of the imagination, however, does not create “nonsense,” but is, rather, a challenge to the recipient’s ability to synthesize. In contrast to beautiful art, with Modernist and Postmodern art the harmony of the imagination and understanding is not immediately apparent or ‘given’, but is put at first in question and assigned to the recipient.11 The specific pleasure resulting from the overcoming of a crisis of understanding – both in the case of the merely irritating and the apparently incomprehensible, and in the case of the uncanny from the insight into the irrevocable contingency of what is presented – corresponds indeed to the changes in the experience of the world and the self found in Modernism and Postmodernism. This pleasure, however, is no longer universal – as with the aesthetic of the beautiful – because it requires a certain attitude of the recipient, a readiness to regard the at 10

Critique of Judgement, § 50, 188. This is meant, for example, when Roland Barthes speaks of texts which are no longer “lisible” but, rather, “scriptible”; Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), and Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973). 11

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first alienating alterity of art as a challenge to one’s own resources and to attempt to find meaning on one’s own. And, as already mentioned, the encouraging recourse to criticism and art theory is of great importance in developing this attitude. In order for a new type of pleasure to grow out of the encounter with the estranging art which Modernism and Postmodernism gave rise to, cultural preparation is necessary, and this is served by the reflections on art theory, which did not develop during this period just by chance. In this respect, the aesthetic of the strange is indeed much closer to the aesthetic of the sublime because, according to Kant, “if something arouses in us […] a feeling of the sublime, then it may indeed appear, in its form, contrapurposive for our power of judgement, incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and, as it were, doing violence to our imagination, and yet we judge it all the more sublime for that.”12 Here, too, the formal purposiveness in the presentation is not immediately apparent and the feeling which comes about here is also at first a “feeling of displeasure”: the pleasure in the sublime is “a pleasure that arises only indirectly.”13 This pleasure is once again not “universal,” because a certain precondition, cultural preparation, is necessary so that the appearance of something incredibly large and powerful is not merely terrifying, but is able to generate the idea of infinity in us. This allows the “superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensibility”14 to be experienced: In order for the mind to be attuned to the feeling of the sublime, it must be receptive to ideas. […] It is a fact that what is called sublime by us, having been prepared through culture, comes across as merely repellent to a person who is uncultured and lacking in the development of moral ideas.15

12

Critique of Judgement, § 23, 99. Critique of Judgement, § 23, 98. 14 Critique of Judgement, § 27, 114. 15 Critique of Judgement, § 29, 124. 13

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However, the “development of moral ideas” in the Kantian sense is hardly to be viewed as that which defines Modernist and Postmodern culture. The aesthetic of the strange requires, therefore, that the crises of understanding be overcome without the possible recourse to these ideas. While the supporting role of criticism and theory has been generally mentioned, a more precise explanation of just how this is possible is necessary.

Aesthetic Processes The perception of an object in nature or of fine art “devoid of all interest” generates a immediate sense of general pleasure, as long as its purposiveness of form is recognized. However, the aesthetic of the beautiful does not consist merely of a momentary experience, but also as a rule of a process: Yet it [pleasure] does have a causality in it, namely, to keep [us in] the state of [having] the presentation itself, and [to keep] the cognitive powers engaged [in their occupation] without any further aim. We linger in our contemplation of the beautiful, because this contemplation reinforces and reproduces itself. This is analogous to (though not the same as) the way in which we linger over something charming that, as we present an object, repeatedly arouses our attention, [though here] the mind is passive.16

However, because this process consists of a mere reproduction of one and the same feeling, “in an aesthetic judgement about the beautiful in nature [the mind] is in restful contemplation.”17 The presense of a process only is experienced in the aesthetic of the sublime because it is then a question of a very apparent change of feeling: The two likings are also very different in kind. For the one liking ([that for] the beautiful) carries with it directly a feeling

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of life’s being furthered […]. But the other liking (the feeling of the sublime) is a pleasure that arises only indirectly: it is produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger.18

The processual nature is also evident in the quality of the feeling itself: In presenting the sublime in nature the mind feels agitated, while in an aesthetic judgement about the beautiful in nature it is in restful contemplation. This agitation (above all at its inception) can be compared with a vibration, i.e., with a rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object.19

According to this, the experience of the sublime is a process of moving from an initial agitation in the face of a confrontation with something incredibly large or powerful to a strengthened sense of self, an increase in power brought about by contemplation of the idea of infinity and, therefore, the superiority of reason over the mere senses. In so doing, the fact that “it is a dominance [Gewalt, violence] that reason exerts over sensibility”20 has a major influence on the result: a liking for the sublime in nature is only negative (whereas a liking for the beautiful is positive): it is a feeling that the imagination by its own action is depriving itself of its freedom, in being determined purposively according to a law different from that of its empirical use. The imagination thereby acquires an expansion and a might that surpasses the one it sacrifices; but the basis of this might is concealed from it; instead the imagination feels the sacrifice or deprivation and at the same time the cause to which it is being subjugated.21

18

Critique of Judgement, § 23, 98. Critique of Judgement, § 27, 115. 20 Critique of Judgement, § 29, 124. 21 Critique of Judgement, § 29, 126. 19

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This quite precise description offers a welcome basis of comparison for a more exact definition of the aesthetic of the strange, for it too is processual in nature and consists of “a pleasure that arises only indirectly.” At the beginning of an encounter with Modernist or Postmodern works one is faced as a rule with a more of less intense sense of alienation. This is a result of their alterity; of the strangeness, contingency or triviality of what is presented; or of the disrespect for representational conventions and/or societal norms. The extent of the alienation is crucial for the next phase of the process: as already mentioned, a limited amount of strangeness is generally felt to be stimulating, whereas a larger amount leads to rejection and can even cause aggression. The mere irritation which results from an encounter with something only slightly ‘different’ is easily balanced off by the interest in the new. Pleasure soon results and the difference to the aesthetic of the beautiful tends to be minimal. However, if what is presented appears so strange, incomprehensible, or diverges to such a large extent from accepted norms that it seems provocative – as is the case with many Modernist and Postmodern artworks – then the initially intense alienation leads quickly to an often radical rejection of the work, at least for those recipients who have not been adequately prepared for such a confrontation. It is after all no secret that the clearly innovative art of the Modernist and Postmodern periods is rejected or at least avoided by no small portion of the public. In order for pleasure to result from the experience of the aesthetic of the strange, it is clearly necessary that the recipient be practised in dealing with those things which appear at first unusual, incomprehensible, or even threatening to a familiar understanding of the world and self. What is decisive is the readiness to view the encounter with what is incomprehensible or threatening as a challenge to one’s own ability to cope with crises, for only then is it possible to move on to the second phase of the experience of this aesthetic. This consists of the imagination being spurred on to play relatively freely and creatively

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find possible ways to somehow draw apparently meaningful connections between the object encountered and what is already familiar. The reason is that in the case of the alienating Other – to use Kant’s terminology – the harmony of the imagination’s cognitive power with reason is not immediately apparent or assumed; rather, it is precisely this which is put into question and assigned to the recipient. For this reason, the free play among various possibilities for understanding is not only characterized by an accompanying weighing of differing degrees of plausibility – that is, by the application of a fuzzy logic which can lead at best to founded conjectures. It also requires that the results be left open, both in the sense that every constructed meaning is only granted provisional validity, and in the sense that every attempt might reveal itself as inadequate – in other words, what appeared initially to be incomprehensible or even uncanny may indeed continue to remain so. We are not talking about a process in which there is a single correct solution to be found in the end (as, for example, with a crossword puzzle), but about an activation of all possibilities for understanding and the readiness to do so in order to overcome a crisis of understanding and feeling in the best possible way. This then leads eventually to a sense of pleasure based on satisfaction at both having met the crisis instead of rejecting whatever caused the initial alienation, as well as at one’s own coping ability and the experience of a widening of consciousness. While for Kant, however, “Every affect of the V I G O R O U S K I N D (i.e. which makes us conscious that we have forces to overcome any resistance […]) is aesthetically sublime,”22 the aesthetic process and its result in the case of the aesthetic of the strange are quite different from those of the sublime. Whereas with the latter the recourse to the rational idea of infinity turns the previous agitation into a feeling of a subjective increase of power quite suddenly (Kant speaks, therefore, of

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“an outpouring of [the vital forces] that is all the stronger”23), in the case of the former the initial alienation is only slowly dissolved, if at all, in the course of a longer effort. This becomes quite evident, for example, when reading experimental literary texts where the reader is continuously confronted with new strangeness which is a challenge to understanding. Instead of the one large agitation found in the sublime, we are faced with a series of more or less intense irritations; and instead of one large uplifting of the subject, we have a series of experiences of a possible (or impossible) mastering of a limited crisis of understanding. But also when suddenly confronted with the total strangeness of a Modernist painting or assemblage, Concept Art, or a Postmodern installation or video, it is normally necessary to regard the work for a longer time – to apply the powers of imagination and understanding more intensely – in order to slowly banish this sense of alienation and arrive at a sense of satisfaction at having achieved this. Not only the process itself but also the final result of these two aesthetic processes differ from one another. While one can speak of a feeling of a subjective increase of power in both cases, in the case of the Kantian sublime the fact that “it is a dominance [Gewalt, violence] that reason exerts over sensibility”24 means that only something like a “negative desire” can result. With the aesthetic of the strange, however, the pleasure which comes about is neither only negative, nor – as with the beautiful – only positive. While the satisfaction at having mastered the alienation or at least having held out against the strangeness tends to generate a positive feeling, the experience that understanding cannot attain to certainty but at best to probability – or has even reached its limits – ensures that the sense of a subjective increase in power remains rather modest.

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The Release of the Imagination Through Boundedness One of the first distinctions that Kant makes between the beautiful and the sublime is the following: The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in [the object’s] being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness, either [as] in the object or because the object prompts us to present it, while yet we add to this unboundedness the thought of its totality.25

He goes on to state that “natural beauty carries with it a purposiveness in its form, by which the object seems as it were predetermined for our power of judgement.”26 And if one takes into account that when dealing with “fine art” we must become conscious that it is art rather than nature, and yet the purposiveness in its form must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature,27

then there is no question that beauty in art is also a question of form and, more exactly, of its boundedness. Since, then, the alienation caused at first sight by Modernist and Postmodern literature and visual arts is for the most part a result of their form, which is, like all forms, of necessity limited, one might therefore assume a commonality between the aesthetic of the strange and that of the beautiful. This conclusion, however, would not take into account the fact that the actual limitedness of a work of art does not necessarily mean that it presents limitedness. The most fitting example for this is the fragment: as clearly limited as it is in truth, a fragment generates at the same time the sense of exceeding precisely this limitedness because it appears as

25

Critique of Judgement, § 23, 98. Critique of Judgement, § 23, 98–99. 27 Critique of Judgement, § 45, 173. 26

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a mere part of a much larger whole whose limits are uncertain. It is with good reason that since the Romantic period the fragment has played a central role in that art which is “no longer beautiful.” The fragmentary is indeed part of the aesthetic of the strange because it creates a fundamental uncertainty with regard to how it should be understood. Regarded in terms of its own limitedness, its function as a mere part of a larger whole is not appreciated; yet any attempt to define this function is not liable to fully succeed because the larger whole is not available and remains therefore uncertain. At the same time, precisely this stimulates the imagination to go beyond what is given and create various possibilities for completion which can even be judged according to the logic of probability. The same can be said of the so-called “open work,”28 a literary work that is not directly fragmentary, but where the ending leaves room for speculation and conjecture. The possibilities extend from the choice between a number of variants supplied by the narrator29 to a formal ending where many parts of the narrative remain open. And as in the case of those more fragmented works, this effect can be read as an intentional negation of the boundedness or completeness of form as it is found in “fine art.” Instead of the pleasure which results from such completion, we have a different pleasure growing out of the activation of the recipient’s own fantasy. Since the artwork, limited in reality, is formed in such a way that it generates the idea of its own incompleteness, it therefore stimulates the imagination to come up with possible ways to complete it. One might even have the impression that the imagination can never reach an end and that a limit can only be attained by means of a break. In this case, the fundamentally open end makes every limit seem like an arbitrary decision, thereby stressing the contingent nature of what is presented. The “purposiveness without the 28

See Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Opera aperta, 1962; Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 29 A good example here is The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles.

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imagining of particular purpose” – which for Kant is a question of the boundedness of the form in the case of the beautiful – results here precisely from the sense of a fundamental limitlessness of form. So, while the creation of a sense of contingency in a piece of art may then no longer be regarded as beautiful, it can certainly be considered aesthetic.

The Beautiful, The Ugly, and the Alienating Fine art shows its superiority precisely in this, that it describes things beautifully that in nature we would dislike or find ugly. The Furies, diseases, devastations of war, and so on are all harmful; and yet they can be described, or even presented in a painting, very beautifully. There is only one kind of ugliness that cannot be presented in conformity with nature without obliterating all aesthetic liking and hence artistic beauty: the ugliness which arouses disgust.30

With this explanation of his conception of “fine art,” Kant is merely drawing the consequences of a previous definition: “A natural beauty is a beautiful thing; artistic beauty is a beautiful presentation of a thing.”31 If the representation of something ugly, which can certainly cause a sense of alienation, can belong to the beautiful in art insofar as it stimulates a “beautiful presentation of a thing,” the decision about whether one might be able to subsume the aesthetic of the strange under Kant’s aesthetic of the beautiful depends upon what is understood by the term “beautiful presentation.” Kant says the following: if the object is given as product of art, and as such is to be declared beautiful, then we must first base it on a concept of what the thing is [meant] to be, since art always presupposes a purpose in the

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cause (and its causality). And since the harmony of a thing’s manifold with an intrinsic determination of the thing, i.e., with its purpose, is the thing’s perfection, it follows that when we judge artistic beauty we shall have to assess the thing’s perfection as well, whereas perfection is not at all at issue when we judge natural beauty (to be that).32

Here attention is drawn from the “beautiful presentation” to the presentation of the “thing’s perfection,” and this perfection consists in the fact that the artwork is a “purposive” representation of a conception – a conception of what “the thing is [meant] to be.” He finishes then by adding “Let this suffice for the beautiful presentation of an object, which is actually only the form of a concept’s exhibition, the form by which this concept is universally communicated.”33 At this point, it becomes quite clear that the Kantian aesthetic is fundamentally intentional and concerned above all with the conceptuality of the understanding. Fittingly, then, “genius” according to Kant consists in “the happy relation […], first, to discover ideas for a given concept, and, second, to hit upon a way of expressing these ideas that enables us to communicate to others, as accompanying a concept, the subjective frame of mind [the translation of Kant’s “subjektive Gemütsstimmung” has been changed from “mental attunement” to “subjective frame of mind”] that those ideas produce.”34 Artistic production according to this description begins with the concept, and as recipient we have to already know this concept in order to both judge the perfection (found in its sense of purpose) of its presentation as well as possibly arrive at a “beautiful presentation” of the object of art. It should now be quite evident just how far away the aesthetic of the strange is from Kant’s aesthetic of the beautiful even with regard 32

Critique of Judgement, § 48, 179. Critique of Judgement, § 48, 180. 34 Critique of Judgement, § 49, 185–86. 33

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to representations of ugliness. The initial sense of estrangement generated by this new aesthetic results from one of two things. Either there is no preceding concept to help the recipient to explain “what the thing is [meant] to be” (a concept, which could then serve as a measure for the purposiveness of the presentation); or there is a concept – whether in the form of a title or a commentary on the part of the artist – but the connection between what is presented and the concept, the extent to which it can be viewed as “purposive” or “perfect,” is not immediately apparent. Indeed, most Modernist and Postmodern artists and literary authors would deny that the process of artistic production begins with a concept for which fitting ideas and expression are sought in order to “communicate to others, as accompanying a concept, the mental attunement that those ideas produce.” In the Kantian conception of the beautiful in art, the activity of reason dominates in the end the imagination. While it is a question of communicating a “subjective frame of mind,” this only comes about “accompanying a concept,” both for the producer and recipient of art. To repeat Kant’s words, “In order [for a work] to be beautiful, it is not strictly necessary that [it] be rich and original in ideas, but it is necessary that the imagination in its freedom be commensurate with the lawfulness of the understanding.”35 The alienation experienced in the encounter with Modernist and Postmodern art, however, comes about precisely because the commensurability of the concepts generated by the imagination with the “lawfulness of the understanding” seems questionable. This is also true for the subjective presentation of something which is judged as ugly or even disgusting because it is not immediately apparent why art should add to the ample supply of ugliness that already exists in the world. In addition, Kant does not seem to realize that it is actually quite alienating when “fine art” “describes things beautifully that in nature we would dislike or find ugly,” thereby creating a “beautiful presentation” of them. 35


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Kant’s “Aesthetic Ideas” Kant’s discussion of “the Powers of the Mind Which Constitute Genius”36 is of great importance in defining the aesthetic of the strange more closely against the background of Kantian aesthetics. In this section he sees himself forced to go clearly beyond the boundaries with which he had limited the aesthetic of the beautiful in the course of the preceding “Analytic of the Beautiful.” There, it was exclusively a question of the relationship between the imagination and understanding; here, a further mental ability, the formation of ideas, is introduced in that Kant supplements rational ideas with the new concept of “aesthetic ideas.” Upon closer study of the concept, it becomes apparent that here (and not in the aesthetic of the sublime) we find the foundation for Modernist and Postmodern aesthetics pre-formulated. For if the aesthetic of the beautiful had thus far been characterized by restful contemplation, Kant now turns it into a process. Kant begins by demanding of “fine art” that it possess “spirit” which he then defines more precisely: Spirit [Geist] in an aesthetic sense is the animating principle in the mind. But what this principle uses to animate [or quicken] the soul, the material it employs for this, is what imparts to the mental powers a purposive momentum, i.e., imparts to them a play which is such that it sustains itself on its own and even strengthens the powers for such play.37

It is, then, when defining what “imparts to the mental powers a purposive momentum” that he finds himself obliged to introduce the concept of the “aesthetic idea”: Now I maintain that this principle is nothing but the ability to exhibit aesthetic ideas; and by an aesthetic idea I mean a presenta36 37

Critique of Judgement, § 49, 181. Critique of Judgement, § 49, 181–82.

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tion of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it.38

This description applies without any reservation whatsoever to the artistic production of the Modern and Postmodern periods. In fact, in what then follows the aesthetic idea appears in retrospect to even be the basis for abstract and – in a wider sense – non-mimetic art and literature: For the imagination ([in its role] as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it.39

Unfortunately, however, the conviction that both the production and reception of art begins with a concept leads Kant to give the aesthetic idea a conceptual basis. In doing so, it is reduced to a usage which can no longer be assumed for Modernist and Postmodern art (although the description of the process set in motion by the imagination seems quite fitting): Now if a concept is provided with40 a presentation of the imagination such that, even though this presentation belongs to the exhibition of the concept, yet it prompts, even by itself, so much thought as can never be comprehended within a determinate concept and thereby the presentation aesthetically expands the concept itself in an unlimited way, then the imagination is creative in [all of] this and sets the power of intellectual ideas (i.e., reason) in motion: it makes reason think more, when prompted by a [certain] presentation, than what can be apprehended and made distinct in the

38

Critique of Judgement, § 49, 182. Critique of Judgement, § 49, 182. 40 Literally: ‘is underlaid with’ (unterlegen). 39

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presentation (though the thought does pertain to the concept of the object [presented])41

What is more, in this context one has to remember once again that in Kant’s aesthetic of the beautiful, the “ability to exhibit aesthetic ideas” is much less important than whether the imagination is “commensurate with the lawfulness of the understanding.” There is little doubt, then, that Kant would have described most modern art as “nonsense”: In order [for a work] to be beautiful, it is not strictly necessary that [it] be rich and original in ideas, but it is necessary that the imagination in its freedom be commensurate with the lawfulness of the understanding. For if the imagination is left in lawless freedom, all its riches [in ideas] produce nothing but nonsense, and it is judgement that adapts the imagination to the understanding.42

Had Kant left the “ability to exhibit aesthetic ideas” more freedom, however, he would almost inevitably have arrived at the aesthetic of the strange. This is because aesthetic ideas whose suitability to the concepts of understanding is not immediately apparent prompt to a much greater degree “so much thought,” are more able to set “the power of intellectual ideas […] in motion,” than ideas whose harmony with the powers of reason is evident from the start – as in the case of the beautiful. In addition, the process by which an abundance of thoughts are stimulated develops much more strongly with pieces of art where the artist has not already brought “clarity and order” into this abundance. But Kant does not take this step. It is more important for him that “taste” as the “disciplining (or training) of genius”43 ensures that the wealth of thoughts set in motion by the work appear to be clearly ordered and therefore “makes the ideas durable, fit for approval

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that is both lasting and universal, and [hence] fit for being followed by others and fit for an ever advancing culture”: Therefore, if there is a conflict between these two properties in a product, and something has to be sacrificed, then it should rather be on the side of genius; and judgement, which in matters [Sachen] of fine art bases its pronouncements on principles of its own, will sooner permit the imagination’s freedom and wealth to be impaired than that the understanding be impaired.44

It is precisely here that a decisive difference between Kant’s aesthetic of the beautiful and Modernist and Postmodern aesthetics becomes obvious. The latter is more willing to allow “the understanding [to] be impaired” than “the imagination’s freedom and wealth,” paying the price at the same time that its works are no longer considered “beautiful” but instead cause alienation. However, this has not led to a total rejection of the claims of reason. We still have the attempt to bring “clarity and order into a wealth of thought”45 which the piece of art sets in motion. It is just that in the case of the aesthetic of the strange this has become the task of the recipient (with the guidance of critics and theorists). The two functions which Kant, for the aesthetic of the beautiful, sees as joined in the artist and “fine art” are now spread among different roles, and here it becomes clear why Modernist and Postmodern art requires accompanying criticism and theory.

Beautiful Art, Nature, and Alienating Art In [dealing with] a product of fine art we must become conscious that it is art rather than nature, and yet the purposiveness in its form must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature. […] Nature, we say, is beautiful [schön] if it also looks like art; and art can be called fine [schön]

44 45

Critique of Judgement, § 50, 188–89. Critique of Judgement, § 50, 188.

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art only if we are conscious that it is art while yet it looks to us like nature.46

In order to understand this comparison as it was meant by Kant, one has to jump forward to the second part of the Critique of Judgement, the “Critique of Teleological Judgement.” There, Kant not only discusses the term “nature” at great length, but also explains more precisely what is meant by “beautiful nature.” Of central importance for Kant’s understanding of nature is the “Principle for Judging Intrinsic Purposiveness in Organized Beings,” which goes as follows: An organized product of nature is one in which everything is a purpose and reciprocally also a means. In such a product nothing is gratuitous, purposeless, or to be attributed to a blind natural mechanism.47

Because Kant further goes on to say that this type of intrinsic purposiveness of nature “has to be extended to everything that is in this product of nature,” he then arrives at the “Principle by Which We Teleologically Judge Nature in General as a System of Purposes.”48 When Kant says that fine art “looks to us like nature,” then this means that the combination of multiple appearances in it is recognized by us as a “system of purposes” in the sense in which it serves as a principle for a teleological judgement of nature. “Beautiful nature” is also explained more closely in the context of the judgement of nature as a “system of purposes”: once nature has been judged teleologically, and the natural purposes that we find in organized beings have entitled us to the idea of a vast system of purposes of nature, then even beauty in nature, i.e., nature’s harmony with the free play of our cognitive powers as we apprehend and judge its appearance, can similarly be considered an

46

Critique of Judgement, § 45, 173–74. Critique of Judgement, § 66, 255. 48 Critique of Judgement, § 67. 47

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objective purposiveness, namely, of the whole of nature [regarded] as a system that includes man as a member.49

Here it becomes clear what Kant means when he demands of a product of fine art that “the purposiveness in its form must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature.” For if the beauty of nature can be “considered an objective purposiveness […] of the whole of nature […] as a system,” then there is as little room for any “chosen rules” as for anything that does not appear to be a part of the “system of purposes.” Insofar as the alienating art of the Modernist and Postmodern periods either puts precisely such inner purpose into question or makes it appear the result of arbitrary rules, it can no longer appear “as nature” in the Kantian sense and be considered beautiful. Indeed, in Modernist and Postmodern art there is little doubt that we “become conscious that it is art rather than nature,” for its constructedness is as a rule far too evident. Alienating art does not appear to us as nature but is artificially constructed, often even arbitrarily. Because it so openly displays its constructed nature, it also questions whether those things which appear “natural” to us – in particular, familiar modes of representation and perception, as well as established values – really are a part of nature or rather are a product of culture. Therefore, the aesthetic of the strange can be viewed as that part of culture in which the boundary between nature and culture is repeatedly put into question, thereby enabling a change in culture. If – in the words of Roland Barthes – myth turns history into nature by making us forget that history is made by humans,50 then alienating art is demythologizing because it presents alternatives to the modes of representation, concepts, patterns of thought, and hierarchy of values 49

Critique of Judgement, § 67, 260. “We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature.” See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (1957; New York: Hill & Wang, 1972): 129. 50

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which appear familiar and “natural,” revealing at the same time the fact that they are determined by culture. According to Barthes, literature has this function to the extent that it creates artificial myths because “the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth.”51 Modernist and Postmodern art does this, however, in a very particular way – by confronting us with the strange in order to shock us out of the comfort of what is familiar, what appears “natural” to us.

The Beautiful as a Symbol of the Morally Good and the Strangeness of Art as a Symbol of the Unstable Distinction Between Subject and ‘World’, Culture and ‘Nature’ Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good; and only because we refer [Rücksicht] the beautiful to the morally good […] does our liking for it include a claim to everyone else’s assent, while the mind is also conscious of being ennobled, by this [reference], above a mere receptivity for pleasure derived from sense impressions, and it assesses the value of other people too on the basis of [their having] a similar maxim in their power of judgement.52

Having demonstrated in the Critique of Pure Reason that categories of the understanding can be expressed directly by means of schemata, while with the ideas of pure reason this only works indirectly by means of analogies (that is, symbolically), Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, compares the beautiful with the morally good as defined in the Critique of Practical Reason in order to show in what way there is an analogy between the two and, therefore, that the beautiful can be understood as a symbol of the morally good. An important aspect in this is that, “In judging the beautiful, we present the freedom of the

51 52

Barthes, Mythologies, 135. Critique of Judgement, § 59, 228.

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imagination […] as harmonizing with the lawfulness of the understanding” because this forms an analogy to the fact that “In a moral judgement we think the freedom of the will as the will’s harmony with itself according to universal laws of reason.”53 Because, however, in the case of the aesthetic of the strange it is precisely the “harmony” of the free imagination with the lawfulness of the understanding that is in question, this art of estrangement can no longer be considered a symbol of the good. One could leave it at that, were it not for the fact that the connection between the aesthetic mode of perception or judgement and other modes of perception (for example, cognitive, moral, pragmatic) is left undefined. One has to see that by showing an analogy between the beautiful and the morally good, Kant manages to both grant the aesthetic of the beautiful a moral value as well as ascribe a clear anthropological function to it. It is, therefore, worth considering whether there is not an analogy between the strangeness of Modernist and Postmodern art which challenges our intellectual understanding and our emotional appreciation to the same extent, and the strangeness which we encounter in other areas of life which also challenges these two capacities. If so, then the aesthetic of the strange could also be granted a certain anthropological function. To decide this requires a consideration of the individual stages of the specific aesthetic process set in motion by Modernist and Postmodern art, in terms of both the intellectual and the emotional component: 1. Characteristic of Modernist and Postmodern art and literature is the fact that they set in motion the conception of something strange, whether merely unexpected, unfamiliar, or incomprehensible, even incapable of being understood – regardless of whether this occurs as a result of what is represented, the way it is represented, or both. They thereby intentionally create a situation which comes about in other areas of life, which indeed is sought after, often cannot at times be 53


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avoided and is sometimes feared. This is a question of the accompanying emotional reaction, which extends from a welcome surprise via a more or less intense sense of alienation to a feeling of being threatened. 2. The next phase of the process set in motion upon encountering this art depends greatly upon whether the strangeness of such an initial effect can – with help of cultural preparation in dealing with art that is “no longer beautiful” – be understood as an intentional challenge to our own ability to overcome crises of understanding and feeling. If this is the case, then a phase of reflection sets in despite the sense of emotional alienation which may tend towards a rejection of the work. This reflection consists of trying out a number of possible ways to understand the work and a simultaneous consideration of the relative effectiveness or probability of each. If, however, the immediate pleasure found in the encounter with beautiful art is expected of the encounter with Modernist and Postmodernist art, then the strangeness will likely cause disappointment, rejection and avoidance on the part of the recipient. In other situations in life, the latter reaction seems understandable because it is a question of our existence. Admittedly, there too there is a play with the attraction of fear, but only if the risks are either calculable (for example, in bungee jumping or adventure holidays) or purely fictional (as in the reception of horror literature or videos). When it gets serious, however, one only meets the challenge of what is unsettlingly or even threateningly strange – and attempts to overcome the emotional and cognitive crisis in a similar way – if it is totally impossible or ethically unacceptable to avoid doing so. Whether this is successful depends to a great extent on how much fantasy is put into the search for possible solutions, how well one can judge their possible effectiveness, and how ready one is to accept them. All these abilities can be strengthened, without the seriousness of decisions concerned with ‘real life,’in the experience of the aesthetics of the strange, parti-

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cularly so because the artists manage repeatedly to make us aware of the limitations of our familiar strategies for dealing with strangeness. 3. The result of the attempt to somehow creatively relate the strange presentations of the imagination called up by this art and literature to the “concepts of the understanding” is a pleasure at having at least achieved a provisional understanding or taken the process of understanding to its outer limits. The feeling of estrangement gives way to a feeling of pleasure which results from a strengthened awareness of one’s ability to overcome crises or the satisfaction at not having capitulated in the face of the initial estrangement. A similar feeling certainly results in other areas of life when a crisis has been overcome, but in this case it is more a sense of relief from an unavoidable burden than pleasurable satisfaction in having voluntarily met a challenge successfully.

Overall, there is an analogy between the aesthetic process set in motion by the conception of the strange caused by Modernist and Postmodern art and literature, and the processes incited by the encounter with the alienating Other in other areas of life. This analogy lends to the aesthetic of the strange not only a practical meaning in dealing with life – because it promotes the development of coping strategies to overcome crises of understanding and appreciation – but also an ethical one: it strengthens the readiness to respond to otherness not unthinkingly with avoidance, rejection, or even aggressive attempts to suppress it, but to regard strangeness as a challenge to our ability to integrate and to our readiness to tolerate what remains strange. Perhaps even more important than these two functions is the accompanying insight into the variability and, thus, relativity of our own subject position. The aesthetic of the strange allows us without any existential pressure to experience that the sense of estrangement caused by something which appears strangely other can be overcome

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or – in the extreme case – that those things that remain alienating despite all effort to comprehend them can be at least tolerated. In doing so, the subject confronted with the strange becomes conscious of her or his intellectual and emotional flexibility. The importance of this change in consciousness cannot be overestimated – it is no less than the transformation of an attitude of exclusion based on the fearful concern to maintain the status quo into a creative confrontation with the significant Other. Admittedly, one cannot assume that such a change in attitude with regard to the encounter with alienating art and literature will automatically and with the same intensity transfer over to other areas of life where it is possibly a question of life-threatening situations or at least situations where there is a great personal involvement and interest. On the other hand, there is no need to assume that somebody who has experienced often enough that feeling of satisfaction which can extend to happiness as result of mastering the initial alienation caused by Modernist and Postmodern art and literature – and who, therefore, perhaps even seeks the encounter with new forms of strangeness – will retain in all other areas of life an attitude of fearful exclusion or even hate of what is strange to an unreduced extent. Just like the aesthetic of the beautiful and the sublime, the aesthetic of the strange is nothing more than a type of model for our thought, emotion, and action in other spheres of experience – nothing more, but also nothing less. The “suspended relation to meaning and reference” which Jacques Derrida emphasized as an indispensable condition of literature54 (and which applies without doubt to other artforms) allows for a realm within culture which is tolerated, even institutionalized, where it is possible “in principle […] to say everything, to invent and even to suspect the traditional difference between nature and institution, nature and conventional law, nature and history”55 – and, if I might add, where it is possible to produce strangeness to such a great 54 55

See Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992): 48. Derrida, Acts of Literature, 37.

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degree which otherwise would be subject to massive suppression. At the same time, the fact that individual as well as societal boundaries between subject and ‘world’, I and Other, culture and nature, are not ‘natural’ but changeable and more flexible, at least to a certain extent, is brought to light. For this reason, the strangeness of Modernist and Postmodern art and literature can be seen as a symbol of the unstable distinction between subject56 and ‘world’, culture and ‘nature’.

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Given the Postmodern discussion of the disintegration of the subject, it is necessary to mention that ‘subject’ is being used in this context in the transcendental sense of the principle which synthesizes all experience –a principle without which a change in conceptions, thoughts, feelings could not be conceived of at all, because “alteration is the combination of contradictorily opposed determinations in the existence of one and the same thing.” See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. & ed. Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): B 291, 336.

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