Lioudmila Voropai
Faked Fakes: Art Strategy and Art Tactic
“…She turned to me and lazily remarked, that my irony and a habit to question the rules is just a mask of inability to play any game properly. I was at a loss for what to say.”
Vasilissa Premoudrova, De Ludo Globi
Contents
Introduction 3
Part 1. Investigating the Cultural Logic Of Fake 5
1. The Secrets of Success 5
2. Notes to the Political Economy of Fake 8
Part II. Art and Delusion: Practices of Self-Mystification 9
1. Art and its Relation to Other Social Systems 9
2. Historical Genesis of the Social Functions of Art 13
3. Art as Subject of Mass Media 18
Notes 26
Introduction
The number of the cultural products defined by their producers as ‘Fake’ is seemed to have nearly reached that critical point when it starts to become slightly irritating. To declare an artwork or a film being a fake is nowadays a sure way to increase its 'added value' on “the market of symbolic goods”. An obvious socio-critical potential of fake as a self-confident cultural practice perfectly meets one of the basic intellectual needs – the need of being unsatisfied with the social reality.
It hardly makes sense, even as a pure rhetoric figure common at the beginning of any research, to suspect that the artists and filmmakers are becoming 'fakers' because of some conscious 'marketing' strategy. It would be more reasonable to suggest, that they are rather moved by flair for a certain unarticulated demand at the 'market', which is closely intertwined with some ‘Lust am Falschen’ [1] .
The broad spectrum of fakes 'under offer' - from the reports in the media about the events which have never happened and so called 'mockumentaries' on the TV, to the catalogues of the not existed exhibitions and the article of fictitious critics about fictitious art-movements - implies some preconditions (social, economical, historical, etc.), which should be analysed first in order to enable a relevant study of the diverse practices of 'Fake' themselves. The typology of phenomena always has at the background the typology of their causes, even if the last one is not often articulated as such.
Proceeding from these assumptions, the current thesis is not intended to provide an all-embracing study of 'Fake' as a social and cultural phenomenon [2] , but rather to explore the reasons of its seductive power as a particular art strategy in the present art context.
In order to avoid some terminological confusion, we will distinguish an older meaning of the term ‘fake’ in a sense of forgery, i.e. production of a counterfeit object with the purpose to deceive, from its later use as a word that designates the art strategy[3] in the context of contemporary art. The main difference between the last one and its ‘historical precursor’ consists in an intention.
Traditionally under the term ‘forgery’ is meant a simulation of some already existing phenomena, particularly in an art context - a copy of 'original' artwork or an imitation of an individual style of a certain artist. The forgery however tries to conceal its 'secondary nature' and poses as that ‘true’ object, which it imitates. In other words, a forgery is produced with the intention of being perceived as not that, what it is, but as that, what it is not. The forgeries aim to be consumed as the artefacts, sometimes even imaginary, like, for example, unknown works of the well-known masters, which they pretend to be. So, some famous forgeries like, for instance, the forgery of Johannes Vermeer "Supper at Emmaus" [4] by Han van Meegeren from 1936 or that of Matisse "Lady with Flowers and Pomegranates" [5] by Elmyr de Hory from 1955, were even bought by museums as 'true' Vermeer (Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen in Rotterdam) and 'true' Matisse (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA).
A teleology of the concept of fake in terms of the art strategy we mentioned before is quite different. Fake in this sense just pretends that it has an intention to be perceived as not that, what it purports to be. It merely seems, that fake tries to falsify 'the reality' [6] , to stage itself as a part of 'the word', even if this 'word' is included into the 'art-world' [7] . Actually it exists only in the "as if" mode: it stages itself as if it would attempt to imitate some existing phenomena. In a fact fake only feigns its own endeavour to simulate ‘reality’, i.e. it imitates its own intention to imitate. In a sense, fake is a product that pretends to be a pretension.
The casuistry of the double pretension, or even, pretension of a second degree, perfectly serves to the compatibility of the notion of fake with some conceptual trends within the contemporary art discourse with its weakness for sophisms, self-referential constructions and loops of thought.
One of the aptest recent examples of fake, which can be mentioned here to illustrate this principle, is the project of art festival of the fake-artworks. In the Internet was placed a website, which was announced as an official site of the new art festival of the ‘fake art’.
This site entirely simulated the usual structure and aesthetics of the art festivals’ websites providing a possibility to apply for the participation at this festival. After a while, when the number of applicants and submitted artworks reached a certain point, the ‘organisers’ of the ‘festival’ declared that the ‘festival’ itself was a fake – that was an art project realised by a group of the students from the Art Academy in Bremen [8] .
The exploiting of the fake-methods to the tradition of ‘fake-artworks’ itself imparts this in a sense manneristic project with the charm of self-referentiality. What is especially important for this work as well as for any fake in general is the act of the ‘self-demystification’. To achieve the highest degree of its efficiency as an artwork in the art context, to realize itself in its adequacy to the own concept, fake should in some way declare its ‘fakeness’. This gesture of manifestation is one of the most significant aspects of the 'logic' of fake: "Im Gegensatz zur traditionellen Kunstfälschung handelt es sich bei der Konzeption von Fake … um eine künstlerische Strategie, die sich von vornherein selbst als Fälschung bezeichnet." [9]
In which form fake-work demonstrates its ‘fakeness’ does not play a big role. The work can use some internal or external hints and indications for that; it is not a strategic matter, but rather the question of its relevance for any concrete work.
What is really important here is, that these acts of self-manifestation suggest at least an understanding of the very idea of the used practice. Precisely this circumstance endows fake with that valuable quality of self-reflectivity, which in many respects enables the successful carrier of fake within the discourse of contemporary art.
Part 1. Investigating the Cultural Logic Of Fake.
1. The Secrets of Success
“Any worthful discourse starts with the Platonism; or ends up with the Platonism; or both.”
Vasilisa Premudrova, Ancillae Philosophiae
Dropping a curtsey sideward tradition of thesis writing, we should do some remarks concerning our purposes. This thesis is not aimed to submit an overview of the fake-artworks of the last years or to offer a detailed analysis of some concrete examples of fake. What in this chapter will be dealt with is rather the discourse of fake in a broader context of the art discourse in general. But at the same moment the current paper is not going to become a kind of discursive analysis in a usual understanding of this term, for this concern restricts itself to the few particular questions. Namely, how and why the discourse of fake as a self-conscious art-practice was established within the discourse of contemporary art.
As any other discourse, the art discourse contains some conceptual topoi, which function as ‘check points’ of a discursive validity of certain phenomena. Different art practices have different degrees of compatibility with the interpretations provided by these topoi. As we will see, fake, because of its high degree of compatibility, has managed to pass these ‘check points’ successfully.
“Ich arbeite nicht mit Originalen bzw. nur mit Originalen. Doch meine Verachtung des Originals geht so weit, dass ich mir nicht einmal Kopien von den originalen mache. Kopien bzw. Abschriften macht man, um das Original zu sichern, für den Fall, dass es verloren geht. Ich achte das Original so gering, dass ich es durch keine Kopie vor seinem Verschwinden retten möchte. Ich arbeite also nicht mit Kopien“. [10]
The dichotomy of the concept of the original and the concept of the copy has a long history. Since Plato’s ‘first edition’, the interpretation of this opposition has undergone some radical changes. In Platonism, at least in that lapidary version of it, which allows us to operate with this term without getting stuck with its endless possible interpretations in the terrain of the history of philosophy, the ontological status of original and that of copy had an inverted polarity. An eidos or idea is the original that exists in the intelligible word, which is the ‘true’, ‘real’ world, the ‘world of ideas’. The material objects in the perceptible world are just the copies of eidoi or ideas from the ‘true’ intelligible world.
During the long process of the history of metaphysics this platonic hierarchy of the initial ‘true’ intelligible world of ideas and secondary ‘untrue’ perceptible world of their copies – material objects – from the ontological perspective was turned to be its exact opposite. The status of the ‘really existing’, ‘true’ and ‘real’ was appropriated from intelligible eidoi and granted to perceptible physical objects . As a result of this ‘October revolution’ the category of original became applicable to the material objects [11] ; the category of copy kept its predicates of ‘unreal’ and ‘untrue’, but got the predicate of the ‘really existing’ in the ‘real’ world. In a sense this process can be considered as an act of the ontological equalization, because both, original and copy, now belong to the same material perceptible world. This aspect is hardly mentioned in any discussion about Platonism in context of the analysis of the discourse of fake.
Some general remarks regarding the role of the Platonism in the contemporary art discourse should be done here. In this respect the discourse of contemporary art obediently follows that general interpretative tendencies concerning Platonism, which became common in all postmodern, poststructuralist, deconstruction etc. discursive practises since the sixties.
Platonism in its simplified version is treated as a convenient platform for the revelation of its own positions, which becomes possible only in form of criticism and differentiation of the concerned subject. In this context Platonism is interpreted as an origin or/and embodiment of the metaphysical principle of settling the oppositions. Moreover, sometimes the very concept of metaphysics is deduced to this principle of the oppositions: truth and untruth, being und nonbeing, true and untrue, good and evil etc. Therefore, Platonism that ‘stands for’ metaphysics is accused of being logocentric and having totalitarian intentions. In order to depict own its standpoints the postmodern thought should have offered some alternative concepts, which avoid the trap of binary oppositions, at least the old ones.
One of the most significant among them for our concern of the discourse of fake was the concept of simulacrum. Of course, it would be more correct to speak about the concepts of simulacrum, for their understandings noticeably differ depending on the interpretators’ intentions.
For instance, according to Jean Baudrillard the simulation – the process that leads to the appearance of simulacra - is the substitution of signs of the real for the real [12] . Signs no longer represent or refer to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to other signs.
Slipping away from Baudrillard’s analytical mode at the level of the ‘political economy of sign’ and moving nearer the ‘metaphysical’ one, we will find another influential concept of simulacrum in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In his famous article "Plato and the Simulacrum" he defines the simulacrum as a copy of a copy whose relation to the model has become so attenuated that it can no longer properly be said to be a copy. It stands on its own as a copy without a model [13] . A copy, no matter how many times removed, authentic or not, is defined by the presence or absence of internal, essential relations of resemblance to a model. The simulacrum, on the other hand, bears only an external and deceptive resemblance to a putative model. The process of its production, its inner dynamism, is entirely different from that of its supposed model; its resemblance to it is merely a surface effect, an illusion.
Both the foregoing concepts of simulacrum despite their noticeable difference have one very important point in common - the simulacrum cannot be adequately discussed in terms of the dichotomy of copy and model. As ‘a copy without a model’ the simulacrum has abandoned the terrain of the necessity to have an external referent. It has the reference in itself, representing an ideal type of the self-referent structure.
The discourse of fake found its solid metaphysical background in the theory of simulacrum. From that perspective the very fake is nothing else but simulacrum. Deleuzeian description of the simulative practice can be one to one applied to describe the practice of fake: "Simulation does not replace reality . but rather it appropriates reality in the operation of despotic overcoding, it produces reality on the new full body that replaces the earth. It expresses the appropriation and production of the real by a quasi-cause. [14] "
For the discourse of contemporary art, which development was entirely determined by certain tendencies in the postmodernist and poststructuralist thought in general, the concept of original is always closely intertwined with the 'old', i.e. coming from classical aesthetics, concept of the artwork. (Of course, 'classical aesthetics', 'postmodernist and poststructuralist thought' and 'the discourse of contemporary art' in this text are the same schematised constructions as afore-mentioned 'Platonism'. But as far as the rhetoric of self-positioning is the rhetoric of exaggeration and certain irresponsibility, these terms will be used as working concepts without permanent reserve. Otherwise we would not be able to make any distinct statement, being doomed to the sad endlessness of self-deconstructing writing.)
So, in classical aesthetics, which is, certainly, deeply rooted into metaphysics of Platonism, artwork is an object with a distinct ontological status. Because of its object nature the artwork should be thought in the category of being, which within the metaphysical context correlates the category of truth. At best the relations between the artwork, being and truth were resumed by Heidegger in his “der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”: “Im Kunstwerk hat sich die Wahrheit des Seienden ins Werk gesetzt. [15] ” Therefore “das Wesen der Kunst” can be defined as “das Sich-ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit des Seienden”.
The inevitable uniqueness of the artwork results from its relation to the being accordingly to the truth. Under these presuppositions the concept of artwork correlates the concept of original just as the concept of being correlates that of truth.
As far as all these concepts within the art discourse, traditionally noticeably influenced by the Frankfurter School, imply certain political ontology, both the ‘classical’ concept of artwork and that of original are designated as “metaphysical disguises of the bourgeois notion of ownership [16] ” and the “ontology of original” is considered “as bourgeois ontology of the artwork”. Under these assumptions the artwork does not go beyond the paradigm of art as mimesis. It is just a representation of the reality, that’s why this kind of art conforms existing social order and can be even used as a means of power.
In opposite, at the level of the possible ideological implications the concept of fake can be successfully presented as a strategy that has a strong socio-critical or even revolutionary potential. It represents not the real, but imaginary alternative to the real. At the same moment, this imaginary is disguised as the real. And that what is really subversive and really efficient about fake, because being the alternative it looks very trustful and makes to believe that this alternative really exists [17] .
2. Notes to the Political Economy of Fake
Fakes are like owls in the famous sentence from “Twin Peaks”: “ The owls are not what they seem.” Moreover, fakes are like self-confident and fair owls, for by their definition and the very fact of their existence, they declare: “We are not what we seem”.
Probably exactly at this point we should start to search for a key for the understanding of the cultural logic of fake.
The fake reaches an adequacy of its perception by a recipient - a viewer of a film, a visitor of an exhibition, a reader of a text etc. – only if at a certain moment the recipient gets to know that the product s/he consumes is a fake. And namely this knowledge constitutes the ‘added value’ of fake. In this respect the whole ‘political economy’ of fake can be deduced from the one simple principle, which, in a way, causes that ‘added value’ - from the pleasure of feeling their own intelligence and perspicacity.
If the recipient realises by himself the 'fake'-nature of the object of his/her consumption, then s/he is happy, s/he is able to recognise the lie: it is unquestionable proof of their own shrewdness.
In case the recipient from the very beginning knows, what s/he is dealing with, or, if s/he gets to know about it post factum (from our analytical perspective it does not play an important role), the main thing is, that the recipient does not discover the 'fake' nature of the considered object by himself, but is informed about this circumstance from some external sources, then s/he feels his communion with the intelligence of the 'faker' (an artist, film-director or any other producer of the ‘fake’-product). Through the act of a 'fake'-production the 'faker' demonstrates his/her reflexive potential and critical distance in relation to the world, what, together with the recipient's ability to conceive it, evokes the mutual self-flattering feeling of shared deeper understanding of the 'world essence'.
Of course, the described mechanism has a slightly ludicrous character, but an exaggeration as an analytical tactic has often the biggest demystifying potential. This mechanism is that of the pleasure of fake as 'pure form', which should not be confused with the pleasure of its content. The logic of the pleasure of content is different. It is the pleasure of sharing the ideas, an enjoyment of meeting a like-minded person, through which a certain ontologisation of the own Weltbild takes place. This mechanism functions the best in the works with the conscious social-critical intentions. However, these kind of works do not represent the majority of the fake-products. The majority emerges rather from the compromise between traditional demiurgical ambitions of artists and usual low/no-budget conditions of art production. This is one of the most significant reasons, why fake as an art strategy in general and documentary-fake as genre in particular became so widely practiced by art and film students. An important motivational category of doing something for fun , which is often used by ‘fakers’ to explain their intentions, simply implies the primary artistic pleasure of deceit.
Part II. Art and Delusion: Practices of Self-Mystification
"In der wirklich verkehrten Welt ist das Wahre ein Moment des Falschen."
Guy Debord, Rapport über die Konstruktion von Situationen
An idea of art as a place of deceit and illusion has managed to keep its actuality for the diverse aesthetic theories till nowadays. The potential of delusion is something that nearly ‘by nature’ belongs to the very essence of the artistic activity [18] . This old art theoretical topos can be illustrated by an anecdote about the alleged rivalry between two Greek painters of 5th century BC Parrhasios and Zeuxis, which was recorded in the Pliny’s Natural History. He describes an informal competition between these artists in the creation of optical illusions. According to Pliny, Zeuxis painted for the competition a grape, which looked so realistic, that even a bird tried to peck it from the canvas. When Zeuxis in turn came to Parrhasios to look at his work, he saw a curtain covering Parrhasios’ painting. When Zeuxis tried to pull the curtain aside, he realised this curtain was painted. So Zeuxis had to acknowledge defeat [19] .
The anecdote reveals one of the oldest criteria of evaluation of an artwork – its aptitude to delude. The story, on the one hand, entirely remains within the Aristotelian paradigm of art as mimesis. Long before Renaissance notions of central perspective and representationalism, painting was already considered in ancient Greece to be a creation of the optical illusion, as a two-dimensional imitation of the three-dimensional ‘reality’ [20] . But it derived benefit rather from a demonstration of its delusive aptitude in general, than from concrete act of delusion as such.
On the other hand, the mimetic aspect was not so decisive for the result of the rivalry: both painters were convincing with their imitations of nature. But Parrhasios wins not because he can better imitate reality, but because he succeeds in a deception of his craft-brother. Parrhasios’ achievement has something from that unquestioning proof of mastery like theft from a thief, for an apt act of delusion within the professional community of the ‘art-as-illusion producers’ serves as the best evidence of the artistic skilfulness. Through this interpretative shift the category of delusion in the art context reveals the relevance of its social dimension along with the aforementioned metaphysical one.
1. Art and its Relation to Other Social Systems
To scrutinise this delusive aspect of art, art in itself should be considered not just as a pure aesthetic, but also as a social phenomenon. In social theory, at least since Emile Durkheim’s definition of modern societies as societies with a certain degree of the subdivision of labour, art is understood as one of the constituent parts (like economy, politics, science etc.) within the functionally differentiated society as a whole. As any other constituent part of the society art is defined by its own system of rules and social expectations.
The system theory of Niklas Luhman follows this sociological tradition of the horizontal differentiation of society into functional parts. In his work “Die Ausdifferenzierung des Kunstsystems” Luhman defines art as a social system, which is the crucial concept for his theory in general:
“Mit “soziales System” ist ein System gemeint, das sich durch eigene kommunikative Operationen selbst etabliert. Es handelt sich demnach um ein selbstreferentielles System oder, wenn man auf die Operation der “Reproduktion” abstellt, um ein autopoetisches System. Solche Systeme werden auch als operativ geschlossene und in diesem Sinne als autonome Systeme bezeichnet.” [21]
Thus, art is presented as equal partner among others - economy, politics, science, religion etc. - in this idyllic conglomeration of autopoetic systems, which constitute society and which represent society as such. This model, however, functions only as a pure theoretical construction of social science. An amendment caused by the referent, i.e. of that ‘social reality’, which is not the product of this theory within its ad linguistic paradigm, consists in an inevitable appearance of the hierarchy of the social systems instead of the offered project of their 'égalité'. Despite self-referentiality and autopoiesis of social systems, they are nevertheless only constituent parts of a bigger social system – system of society as a whole. As subsystems, they have different functions, and exactly a significance of their functions for the working of the whole society is the ground for the above-mentioned hierarchy. This hierarchy does not have an absolute objective nature, but a relative one. It would make even more sense to talk about hierarchies of social systems , because each social system provides its own hierarchical model, which is based on the evaluation of its own significance in society as well as on evaluations of other systems.
The validity of every particular evaluation is legitimised by its conformity with the evaluations presented by other systems. So, for instance, a ‘big importance’ of the social system ‘economy’ in the society can be always found in the self-representations of this system, both for the inner and outer world and is never disputed by the other systems. Surely, the distribution of the ‘coefficient of importance’ among social systems cannot be characterized by the primitive liberal principle of simple majority. To understand this mechanism we should rather bear in mind the hermeneutic circle called social dialectics. It is hardly possible here to distinguish, if the ‘actual’ significance of the system for the society defines an evaluation of its importance and thereby evokes the hierarchy, or, if belief in this hierarchy endows the system with its ‘actual’ significance. As a result, the systems that have an approved higher ‘coefficient of importance’ are empowered to distribute the places in the hierarchy for the systems with the lower ‘coefficient’.
From this perspective art as a social system obviously does not take the first place in the hierarchy of the functional significance. The very definition of the function of art system is quite a delicate issue, and it noticeably differs depending on the instance, which gives this definition [22] . But, however, all the possible perspectives on the role of art in society – those from the outside (given by other systems) or those from within (provided by the art system itself) – have in common that circumstance, that art is never meant to supply some primary needs. Using Marxist categories of basis and superstructure , which still, despite all the provoked connotations, keep their potential of powerful ‘understanding metaphors’, art can be even concerned as a secondary superstructure, because the other systems (politics, economy etc.) theoretically can function independently of the existence of the art system. From their perspective art is usually considered as a supplementary tool that can be used as an additional means of propaganda or as sign of particular social dispositions, but not as a necessary element for the functioning of the social mechanism as a whole.
In view of its avowed superstructural nature the art system has very limited sphere of influence on the other systems. Within this ‘family’ of social systems the role of ‘poor cousin’ is imposed on art. In the absence of forcible arguments to resist this circumstance, the art system nevertheless manages to derive benefit from the existing distribution of the roles developing a kind of rhetoric of complaining about the injustice of its status. But in fact art readily collaborates with the ‘powerful’ systems, resignedly playing a victim of their ‘conspiracy’. Art takes advantage of being victim, for the discourse of victim implies the rhetoric of self-justification, which tends to reveal some ‘truth’. In this case the truth to be revealed is a ‘true’ essence of art and ensuing from that its ‘true’ function in the society, which were not understood by the other systems.
The instance that is mostly authorised to reveal, or, to be more terminologically correct, to construct the truth about art as social system, is the art system itself. This process of construction of the ‘true’ essence and the ‘true’ function of art is nothing else than the production of its own image for the ‘outer world’, made up of the other social systems.
The ‘PR-strategies’ used by the art system for this purpose, i.e. the modes of self-representation transmitted through the communicative acts with the other systems, are intended to persuade in its social significance. In fact these acts of persuasion are a pure, although quite self-conscious bluff. In the absence of convincing proofs of its importance, the art system uses offensive tactics, blaming the ‘outer world’ for the lack of understanding of art’s real nature and inner rules of its system. At the same time, the art system, as a rule, does not propose any comprehensive and articulated version of this ‘right understanding’. Its statements about the essence and functions of the art systems ‘for export’, i.e. for the outer world, could be defined as a practice of self-mystification that provides an image of a hermetic elitist system that is far beyond the comprehension of ‘non-residents’.
From these premises arises certain splitting of the discourse produced by the art system about itself into the discourse for internal use and its ‘ export version’ . The discourse for internal use insists on the absolute autonomy and autopoiesis of the art system, therefore its social uselessness , accepting as relevant only immanent rules and exaggerating its self-referent nature. The principle of disinterestedness and many other aesthetic conceptions has become possible only within this internal discourse. This discourse for external use , on the contrary, supposes that art is an integrated subsystem, which plays certain roles for the society in general and other subsystems in particular.
The art system introduces into its discourse the statement about an execution of social functions in order to maintain its autonomy. At the same moment namely this socially non-functional autonomy causes the social functions of art system. The other systems are also getting involved in this confusing dialectics of the socially useless autonomy and simultaneous functionality of the social systems. Thus, for instance, on the one hand, the system of state is supposed to support the system of art, because by its definition it should support the systems, which are unable to maintain their existence by themselves. On the other hand, the system of state by its definition supports only those systems, which the state as a social subsystem needs for its proper functioning. In other words, to be supported by the state, the system of art should prove somehow its use for the state system.
Forced to balance on the border of immanent aesthetic autonomy and inevitable social engagement, the art system develops a kind of double moral, which is, paradoxically, not only accepted, but also supported by the other systems. In its discursive self-representations the art system pretends that it executes some social functions in order to maintain the autonomy. The other systems, which are empowered to provide the art system with the support, first of all financial, pretend that they believe in this pretension. Nowadays almost all established forms of financial support of the art system - scholarships, grants, awards, residencies etc. - are based on this principle of the false pretension and false belief. The legitimated lie becomes a survival strategy for art system and an unspoken premise for the official policy of the art support.
To understand the reasons of these confusing relations of mutual lie we should briefly outline the historical genesis of social functions of the art system.
2. Historical Genesis of the Social Functions of Art
Throughout all the history of differentiation of art as an autonomous social system its social function never succeeded in getting a clear definition. Only in the Middle Ages, when visual arts served the purpose of popularisation of the religious dogmata, the role of art in society could be defined with a certain credibility. Since the beginning of the process of the autonomisation of art as a social phenomenon (of course, we can talk about this autonomisation only in terms of relative autonomisation) at the epoch of Renaissance, the social function of art system has lost its unambiguity. The art system becomes multifunctional.
The current multifunctionality of the art system is the product of the accumulation of all those functions, which ever were implemented by art in the society. These functions never disappear; they just get another degree of acknowledged significance. At some periods in the history of this social system certain functions can be distinguished as dominant [23] , but this dominance is always a derivative of the analytical perspective.
The process of the liberation of the artworks from its original status of the ritual object, like any other social process, is the consistent part and simultaneously the result of the more general process of differentiation of the art system. Getting freed from any direct practical usability, artwork starts to play the role of a luxury object. Luxury, as a cultural category, was always seen as a symbol of the economic well-being, so the art object thereby was turned out to be the sign of prosperity, the symbol of a certain social status. This ability of the artwork to be status symbol had started to be actively used already at the epoch of Renaissance, in particular in 14th century Italy.
At the same period another important social function of art comes on to the stage. In accordance with the enhancement of the representationalist tendencies in visual arts, art was meant to depict the world ‘how it is’, which implies also to display an existing social order. From this point of view, art could perfectly serve the particular ideological and political purposes, so, already in that time the local governors used art as an instrument of propaganda [24] . The sovereigns used a promotion of the arts as a means of political self-representation. The arts and an artist as a social agent representing art system became their refugium at the sovereign’s court. Certainly, we can find the examples of the symbiosis of art and power in the Middle Ages and Antiquity, but only in Renaissance it became a form of conscious strategy.
With the development of courteous culture and enlargement of the courtiers’ leisure time an entertaining function of art begins to prevail. The consumption of the products of the diverse artistic activities - visual arts, literature, music, and theatre - commences for the aristocracy a convenient way to structure free time.
Later, the Enlightenment endowed art with the tasks to educate, to teach and to cultivate. We are indebted to the Aesthetics of Enlightenment for the merging of ethical and aesthetical values, which can still be found, using the term of Pierre Bourdieu, in middle-brow art [25] . Antique equivalence of Good and Beautiful came on again to the stage of aesthetic thought in the writings of Shaftesbury, Hogarth and Hutcheson [26] .
At the time of French Revolution a differentiation of functions of art received an ideological significance. Enlightenment’s educational mission of art was distinctly opposed to its role of mere entertainment under the Ancien Régime. The modern conception of the art museum has grown on the ground of this opposing. The practice of turning the royal palace into an art museum, as was the case of The Louvre, The Hermitage etc., perfectly illustrates the principle - what yesterday was an amusement for aristocracy, today serves for the education of the people.
Reacting on the exaggerated social engagement of art at the Enlightenment, Romanticism preached artistic autonomy. The conception of autonomy of art received at that time a solid philosophical background. At first, the aesthetics was already segregated as a philosophical discipline. Traditionally acknowledged as its founder, Alexander Baumgarten, considered aesthetics only as a theory of sensual perception. But beginning with Kantian Critique of Judgment , aesthetics acquired the form of art theory. Secondly, thanks to the Critique of Judgment again , art got a kind of metaphysical legitimation of its autonomy.
In an aesthetic judgment, i.e. in a judgment of taste (e.g. "This is beautiful"), the representation is "referred to" a subject in conjunction with a feeling. The judgment of taste is subjective, but because of some sensus communis, which every subject - this abstract construct of the classical philosophy – is supposed to have, it has an intersubjective validity, i.e. everyone is expected to agree with such a judgment. So the aesthetic judgment is universal. The judgment of taste is purely contemplative and therefore disinterested, i.e. it does not produce a desire or interest in possession of the object of contemplation.
The concept of disinterestedness is closely intertwined with that of purposiveness without purpose . When we regard something as if it had a purpose, but we have no particular purpose in mind, then the thing is experienced as having "purposiveness without purpose", an experience which produces a harmony of the cognitive faculties. Aesthetic pleasure arises from the felling of the harmony of Imagination and Understanding - a free play of the cognitive faculties. Thus, in an aesthetic judgment, the form of the object is connected with a feeling of harmony - a disinterested pleasure.
In other words, Kantian aesthetics in its simplified interpretation implies, that for aesthetic judgment it is important how an object is represented, but not what is represented. An aesthetic value is defined by the way of representation, but not by a represented object, i.e. we can talk, for instance, about the beautiful representation of ugly objects. Aesthetic criteria become immanent, artistic activity is regulated by some inner rules. The art system is given some more metaphysical explanation of its self-referentiality.
Derived from this aesthetic autonomization a new social function of art was explicitly outlined by Bourdieu in the ’Postscript’ to Distinction, titled ’Towards a „Vulgar“ Critique of „Pure“ Critiques’. Bourdieu argues that the aesthetics of ‚pure’ taste are based on a refusal of ‚impure’ taste, or taste reduced to the pleasure of the senses, as well as on a refusal of the facile. This refusal, however, is not universally accessible. Rather, the opposition between ‚pure’and ‚impure’ or ‚barbarous’ taste is grounded, like the difference between the tastes of distinction and the taste for necessity, in the opposition between the cultivated and the uncultivated or between the dominant and the dominated. In Kant’s words: „Taste that requires an added element of charm and emotion for ist delight, not to speak of adopting this as the measure of ist approval, has not yet emerged from barbarism“. [27]
A pure aesthetic expresses, in rationalized form, the ethos of a cultured elite or, in other words, of the dominated fraction of the dominant class. As such, it is a misrecognized social relationship: “The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile – in a word, natural – enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences . (My cursive. L.V.)” [28]
Kantian aesthetic theory breakes an old interdependence of the category of aesthetical with that of ethical. In the following romantic conceptions art turned into „world of art“ [29] , which was thought as the free world of unresricted imagination that differentiates itself from the world of the constraints of everyday reality. The artist, moved by a notion of genius important for the aesthetic theory of Romanticism, was endowed with the deus artifex power to create the transcendent world of the imaginary. The „world of art“ with its attribute of transcendence is empowered to keep the ideal , this profan romantic version of platonic idea , from ever changing unperfect reality. The Romantic „world of art“ is nothing but aesthetic emmanation of the platonic „word of ideas“ – metaphysically legitimated domain of Truth.
All the later significant contributions into matephysics of art, like, for instance, those of Schelling Schopenhauers or even Nietzsche of his early periods, remained within this paradigm, where „Kunst wird als Medium beschrieben, das den Blick auf höhere, transhistorische Wahrheiten zu eröffnen vermag, die für jeden, der die Fähigkeit zur Rezeption entsprechender Werke mitbringt, uneingeschränkte Geltung besitzen sollen“ [30] .
In the 20th century, when modernism comes to the stage, innovation and experiment become the main virtues of artistic activity and art itself turns out to be an experimental realm of society. Modernism develops a slightly militarised rhetoric of avant-garde first in order to articulate its own agenda for itself. The last one implies an imperative to break the art conventions and through dynamics, intensity, intelligence and originality to provoke new unusual artistic perspectives. Artists begin to consider themselves as ‘the heroes of the present’ [31] and art turns into a symbol of modern, open and actively self-confident savoir-vivre. At this period the art system starts its self-heroisation, using for the self-representations adjectives like dynamic, open, creative, innovative, brave, progressive etc.
The rhetoric of modernism, which originally was set aside by the art system to define some artistic tendencies from within, now is applied to represent modern art from outside. The vocabulary that was in use in the art manifests at the beginning of the last century nowadays is to be found in reviews of local art events in regional press and TV-reports in news programs. The obsolete modernist discourse for internal use today constructs the image of contemporary art for the outer world, i.e. for the society in general and other social systems in particular. Ironically, this circumstance is not the result of some conscious and well-planed PR-strategy of the art system. Simply the petit bourgeois consciousness as an ideological background of all the social systems of modern society, the art system included, needed more than a half of the century to digest and then to appropriate the discourse, which is no longer relevant for the current art practices. The art system, however, doesn’t intend to dissuade the other systems, on the contrary, its policy is a policy of collaborationism, which allows it to profit from the given image of the avant-garde in modern society.
Until this construction is approved by the other systems, the old function of art as a status symbol is activated again [32] . Art commenced to be actively used in the processes of image-making, first of all by the system of politics and that of economy.
Considering art system nowadays, we can hardly define any social function of art as dominant. All the described above social functions of art still, in this or that form, can be found in the present system. Some of them with the time experienced certain transformations, but none had disappeared entirely. With the general economical, political, ideological and technical changes in the society and its infrastructures, the old functions acquired some new aspects and intensity.
So, for instance, the development of technologies and ever growing mechanisation of everyday life increases the amount of free time in post-industrial society. The filling in and structuring of the free time became the real social problem of the moment. The leisure-time, which earlier was the privilege of the dominant class, becomes a property of the whole society. This ‘plebeianisation’, speaking from the perspective of the 18th century, of the category of leisure revives an entertaining function of art. Artistic activity, with its huge potential to canalise creative energies, can be perfectly used as “Freizeitgestaltung in der Erlebnisgesellschaft” [33] .
Being a self-regulating system, society provides the ways to occupy the social agents with diverse time-consuming activities. The boom of computer and digital technologies in the last decades is one of the main constituent parts of the self-regulating processes in the society. Artistic activity, as a representative of a broader field of creative activities, is also deeply influenced by the general tendencies of self-regulation.
As a way of the free time structuring art obtains some new aspects, which were not very significant when art served the purposes of courteous amusement. At the moment the acts of art production, to a big extent enabled through the generally accessible market of digital technologies, acquire nearly the same spreading as the large-scale “Freizeitgestaltung” in society as earlier only the acts of art consumption had.
Both art production and art consumption are getting integrated into general mechanisms of free time structuring. Thus art commences to be more and more involved in the industry of entertainment – one of the most efficient of these mechanisms. Art obtains its own distinguished field of activity, providing the entertaining services for a certain target group. As a part of entertaining industry art also becomes a theme of the mass media.
3. Art as Subject of Mass Media
Within the complex typology of the mass media in this or that way dealing with art we will distinguish two important categories for our concern. The first one is the art-specialized media, like for instance art magazines, where the art is aimed to be the main and usually the only topic. To the second category belong those media instances, which have art as one of the possible, but not immanently necessary theme. So, for example, in the news program on the TV some art phenomena can become a subject of a report if some art-event currently takes place.
The first category consists mainly from the print and web-based electronic media sustaining periodical press of different forms (online publications including): art-journals, magazines, almanacs, even art-newspapers (“Kunstzeitung” for example) etc. This category belongs, using again the terminology of Bourdieu, to “the field of restricted production” [34] , i.e. its target group is the art producers themselves. These medial products are for inner use, they serve the needs of professional community, and, at the same moment, the very community to some extent is constituted through the consumption of these products. Thus, an important function of the art-specialized media is to produce art publicity: “…so besteht dieses zentrale Leistungsvermögen von Medienkommunikation darin, Öffentlichkeit zu schaffen, Personen, Sachverhalten und Prozessen Publizität zu verleihen. Funktionsmäßig handelt es sich … um jene journalistische Struktur, die für Kunstphänomene Öffentlichkeit schafft, indem sie diese in Medienrealität umsetzt.” [35]
A prevalence of print and Internet based media products in this category is determined by the forms of their distribution - namely the low-budget field of restricted production.
The second category contains noticeably bigger diversity of components and includes all the existing media forms. Periodical press, TV and even radio of a general information and entertainment-providing destination have completely different objectives than the first category. This second, not-art-specialised category is representative of “the field of large-scale production”. It is more specifically aimed at a determinate category of non-producers, even if it may eventually reach a socially heterogeneous public, art producers including. In this case the transformation of art phenomena into media-reality is intended to differentiate the art system not from within but from outside. Using their privilege to give definitions, media create an image of art that should be understood by the also medially constructed ‘average’ audience. The process of medial image-making of art, provided by the large-scale orientated mass-media, is meant to fulfil a certain social demand. But the policy standing behind this social demand is quite contradictory.
The large-scale orientated mass media are aimed at the construction of an ideal-typical middle-brow representative [36] of the mass media public, this petit-bourgeois ‘bearer’ of the bourgeois ideology. The bourgeois ideology, which to the big extent was formed by Enlightenment thought, inherited from it a respect for art, which at that epoch was considered as an instrument of education and cultivation of mind and soul. An interest for art as a sign of progressiveness and open-mindedness, which at the same period also became definitely positive characteristics, turned to be an unconditional virtue for the bourgeois consciousness. The fact, that at its background this process had the problem of social differentiation (an attempt of the bourgeoisie to prove their cultural competence in front of aristocracy) was not really reflected by the ‘bearers’ of this type of consciousness.
The bourgeois consciousness in itself is not reflexive (reflexion never managed to become a virtue for the bourgeois consciousness): it takes an assured respect of art for granted, without a redundant questioning. So the media as transmitter of this cultural ideology, specially those, which are financed by the state or from the other public funds, have certain quota for covering cultural and art issues, to ‘educate and cultivate’ its ‘average’ audience.
On the other hand, art is a quite marginalized social institute in the contemporary society. In fact, the audience that actually ‘voluntarily’ has an interest in art issues is a definite minority for the large-scale orientated mass media. The media, motivated by some other virtue of the bourgeois consciousness – being liberally tolerant and democratically justified – try to meet the interests of this cultural and social minority too. So arise the special art devoted programs and documentaries on the television, or even the whole culture-channels, like for example “Arte”.
The common form and structure of art programs grow from the necessity to find the compromise between their two functions – to educate majority and to entertain minority.
As any other television formats, the ones about art issues should contain some narrative-building element. For them the most common narrative-building element is an event or a person. Reports about different art events like exhibitions, festivals, art-fairs etc. build the biggest part of the market of art-concerning TV-products. The range is from very short reports about openings of exhibitions or art festivals in the news-blocks to the proper long documentaries about ‘big events’ like “Documenta”, Biennale in Venice etc.
Another variant of the art presence on television is the ‘portrait of artist’ in the form of a documentary film or TV-program. Quite often an appearance of the portrait of a particular artist is timed to coincide with some event like an artist’s jubilee, an opening of his/her exhibition and others. We also should mention here the special programs and films about some art history issues (certain styles and epochs in the art history, art movements, concrete artworks etc.).
All these diverse genres and formants are quite standardised, what is partly defined by the conditions of media production, and have more or less a common structure that proceeds from the assumption that art, especially contemporary art, should be understood ‘ right ’ by the ‘people’, i.e. an average audience. That is why art on the TV is always commented and explained by the socially acknowledged experts - art critics, art historians, curators and artists themselves. First artwork is shown and then begins a long chain of interviews, where the artwork is ‘explained’.
Often this structure is even more exaggerated by an additionally inserted ‘enlightening” figure - a moderator or a voice-over commentator, who is responsible for the ‘ultimate understanding’ of the stuff shown on the screen by the audience. A moderator or a voice-over commentator even sometimes ‘translates’ the ‘complicated’ explanations of the experts from their hermetic professional argot in the ‘normal’ language of the ‘normal people’ (the degree of ‘normality’ in this case is defined by the TV-Program makers).
In this thesis was not intended to provide a detailed analysis of representations of the art in the mass media. It is rather an agenda for a proper research oscillating between sociology of art and media studies. The offered briefly outlined model was just meant to present that theoretical background and that interpretative field, which would enable a conceptualization of the objectives for the practical part of this scrutiny – an essay film “ The Art of Lying Down. Toward a Cultural Iconography of Thought”.
Conclusion: Vom Lügen zum Liegen / From Lying to Lying Down
Script to a film by Lioudmila Voropai
The Art of Lying Down
Towards a Cultural Iconography of Thought
(Documentary Fake, 25 min., 2005)
Poleshaev (Philosopher, Author ofA Short Cultural History of Recumbency, fictive character):
... from the historical point of view, lying down as a socio-cultural phenomenon is closely intertwined with the history of thought. In a certain sense the history of lying down IS the history of thought...
Nabochkova (Novelist, Author ofOblomova, fictive character):
... to lie down, for me, means first of all to think and constantly ask the question: what is to be done, and how, and why, what for...
Off Commentary:
Intellectual activity remains, in itself, always invisible for an outside observer. In contrast to many other human activities mental activity as such has no distinctly recognisable form in which it appears. The world of one’s thoughts is kept deeply hidden behind the facade of the human body.
Without being able to observe them in any way, we can only assume that processes of thinking take place in others.
Poleshaev:
In spite of all the efforts of classical Philosophy the thinking being, or in Kantian terms the transcendental subject, has never managed to completely ignore (as transcendental guarantee of its own transcendence – or, in other words, as the necessary condition of its very presence in the world) the fact of its own body.
Not only does this realisation of the corporeality of consciousness suspend or dissolve that classical dichotomy in western metaphysics of Mind and Body, of the outer and inner worlds; it also forms the theoretical basis for a correlation between mental processes and bodily states.
Nabochkova:
You could say, of course, that I have merely written a remake of a classical novel. And you would be right. Like Goncharov 150 years ago in his “Oblomov” I have portrayed a certain social phenomenon and a certain social type. And just like Goncharov, my book also has a certain socio-critical pathos.
Poleshaev:
It is of course not possible to create a comprehensive typology of all the forms of intellectual activity. But we can at least differentiate its two principle forms.
The first one would be the thinking which has to solve some concrete economic, scientific or even artistic problem. This is the act of disciplined and socially useful intellectual production, which must perform a particular practical task. I would define it as Applied Thinking.
Off Commentary:
The disciplining of thought implies a bodily discipline, for which corresponding corporeal techniques have been developed in each society. For instance, a seated posture at work.
Neither Greek nor Roman Antiquity knew the act of sitting as a cultural practice. It first emerges in the Middle Ages as the craftsman sitting at the workbench. With the beginning of the Modern Period we reach the age of “bourgeois” sitting – the sedentary position of the moneychanger, ancestor of today’s sitting army of office workers, billion strong.
Sitting at school should not be underestimated as a method whereby the future citizen will learn his subordination to the established system of rules.
Despite the damaging effects of this unnatural body position for the human organism, or perhaps exactly due to these, the act of sitting became one of the most useful corporal disciplinary practices for imprinting a program of submission onto the body of a bourgeois individual.
Poleshaev:
The other principle form of thinking would be a spontaneous, theoretical intellectual activity, in the sense of the ancient Greek notion “theorea”, meaning contemplation, a thinking, which is not aimed at any result. This act of thought contains its aim in itself. It could be defined as Free Thought.
Off Commentary:
In contrast to disciplined thought the bodily position in a process of free thinking should be correspondingly natural and comfortable for the body.
In a lying down position our neuro-physiological potential for introspection is essentially stronger than in any other bodily position. The influence of sensory perception and motor processes on the body are reduced to a minimum, with the result that our facility for differentiated perception increases exponentially. We are enabled to concentrate on the process of perception and to think about the process of thinking itself.
Nabochkova:
I would say that since my childhood I have been lying down. A lot, and long. And that’s why I was often already then compared to Oblomov; which is what, in fact, made me read the book at all. At that age I wasn’t even old enough to know who Oblomov actually was.
Fragment from the film „Oblomow“
Off Commentary:
In Western culture lying down has never been granted the status of a rational act. Lying down, by a person who was both healthy and awake, and caused neither by sleep nor sickness, was always seen in Judaeo-Christian tradition as lazily doing nothing, as idleness and sloth, that is as sin.
Poleshaev:
From the perspective of cultural history, of course, a rational foundation for the act of doing nothing being declared a sin can be found in the implicated dangers of starvation, or a death by thirst and cold.
Off Commentary:
In paradise, doing nothing was still not a sin. Adam and Eve, day in day out, lie on the greensward without the need to earn their bread by sweat of the brow. Such a Golden Age has left its traces in the iconography of lying down, raising it to one of the primary Paradise motifs in the fine arts.
Poleshaev:
The attitude of different cultures to doing nothing is determined by natural geographic and climatic givens as well as by the particularities of their socio-historical development.
A combination of these factors originally determined whether the doing nothing of any single individual would entail a danger for the normal functioning of society.
The more leisure a particular culture could economically afford, the more tolerant its social self-regulation could be – in the form of ethical and religious sanctions – against doing nothing: and its most obvious expression, lying down.
Nabochkova:
In my novel, as in the classical Oblomov, simply lying down is my protagonist’s main activity. But I didn’t want to just transfer the story, as it stands, to the present day. I wanted rather to find in today’s social reality a set of equivalences for both the plot and the reclining characters.
So my story is not about a Russian aristocrat called Ilya Oblomov, who lives in the middle of the 19th century in St. Petersburg, but about a Russian conceptual artist Dusia Oblomova, living nowadays in Amsterdam.
And in contrast to “Oblomov” my novel has a happy end.
Poleshaev:
An important moment in the social history of lying down is the emergence of class society along with an intensification of economic inequality. While idleness and doing nothing among poor people is defined as sin, and is a sign of social divergence, for the aristocracy it is presented as a virtue and a symbol of social status.
Off Commentary:
In Greek and Roman Antiquity lying down was a respected cultural practice, for instance in the symposia.
A symposium was not just a banquet, where one ate and drank while lying down; it was an established sphere, where socio-political and philosophical discussions would regularly take place.
The human body’s freedom, its natural tendency to comfort and pleasure fulfilled, was considered a guarantee for the freedom of the mind.
With the decline of the ancient world and the spread of Christianity a hard time arises for lying down. Biblical categories of ‘sin’ and ‘virtue’ obtain an ever-growing importance in people’s lives.
In the Renaissance, however, as a result of a return to antique ideals, we see a partial return into cultural practice of the art of lying down. But the Christian conception of idleness as a sin remains widespread even among the most intelligent and critically thinking people. Thus they continue: indecisively torn between avita activa and avita contemplativa .
In the modern age, at last, the arch enemies of all lying down enter the scene: protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism.
Poleshaev:
The older feudal system, which involved the external exercise of power and rule, is replaced by upcoming modern society and its system of bourgeois individuals, whose inner mechanisms of self-control are to be developed. The emergence of self-discipline was really a result of this internalisation of the earlier outer violence.
Consequently, in the realm of bodily practice this confrontation has found its expression in a struggle between the aristocratic reclining and the bourgeois sedentary pose.
Off Commentary:
Not only because it sabotaged the expansion of disciplinary practices did lying down become an enemy of the new social ideology. And not only because it was, by the standards of protestant asceticism, an infuriatingly hedonistic gesture.
One of the most significant factors in the development of capitalist society is a neurotic hyper-activity, still incurable today, which leads to a ceaseless production of goods and services.
Only the final results of the production process are regarded here as proof of work done, thus providing an obvious expression of the individual’s loyalty to the prevailing social order.
Lying down slowly becomes a danger, in that it evades the neurosis of production, which the social system decrees.
Poleshaev:
With the emergence in the 19th century of the bohemian lifestyle a new chapter in the cultural history of lying down begins.
The reclining or recumbent subject has been transformed; no longer a bored and reactionary member of the aristocracy, this is now a self-legitimated aristocrat of the spirit.
Out of a passive and idle lying down in salons has grown an act of social protest. As a self-confident gesture of pure wastefulness it opposes itself to the official bourgeois ideology of savings and excessive productivity.
Lying down becomes a social criticism in theory and practice.
Off Commentary:
One’s belonging to the boheme was not the result, in this period, of any respective cultural production, but of a modus vivendi: that is, through everyday social practices, in which lying down obtained a prominent role.
This led to a further Renaissance of lying down, which becomes not only the ritual practice of a critically attuned person, but also a manifestation of their life-style.
Nabochkova:
I never understood Oblomov, as it was always represented in the Russian literary criticism of the 19th century, to be a book about the disintegration of Russian aristocracy. And, for me, Oblomov himself wasn’t only some sort of Russian Hamlet – as they have always fobbed him off in the West – whose answer to the question “To be or not to be?” is simply “Not to be.”
Fragment from the film „Oblomow“
Nabochkova:
With his ‘oblomovism’, for me, Oblomov is a truly revolutionary figure; because his act of lying down is the adequate answer to his superfluousness in society. Through the way he conducts his life he simply ignores the demands society makes, to keep always unconsciously busy. Because to ignore is sometimes the best and the only way to fight.
Fragment from the film „Oblomow“
Poleshaev:
The bohemian milieu of the 19th century was a kind of breeding ground for the differentiation of the ‘intellectual’ as a new social class. Yet until the second half of the century the intellectual remained, as a social type, of marginal significance. The fact that he had no allocated place in society only strengthened his revolutionary potential. The need to institutionally integrate the intellectuals slowly became a question of internal security.
Off Commentary:
This project of integration was markedly successful: intellectuals became the official producers of culture. The establishment of freelance working methods in the market of cultural production had as its goal the transformation of rebellious lying down into a productive version of lying down.
The whole of neo-liberal cultural policy with its grants system in the form of stipendiums and prizes for the fine arts and literature and film is nothing other than an attempt to regain control over the act of lying down and to weaken its subversive potential.
Nabochkova:
In my novel, of course, lying down is a multi-layered metaphor, which must remain open to interpretation. Sometimes, though, this metaphor transgresses its own metaphorical status so that it becomes a metaphor almost of the metaphor itself. So in this self-referentiality lying down comes to signify simply “lying down” and thus returns to itself.
Lying down, as something I like, something I like doing, and something I’ve written about in my book.
Fragment from the novel / voice over:
Dusia turned lazily onto her back and half closed her eyes. Simply lying down in the middle of the day transported her to an inexplicable but completely convincing blissful state. The act of lying down brought on a wonderful feeling of the unity of body and soul.
The feeling of unity wasn’t limited to the soul and the body but extended itself to everything around her. And it was out of this trinity, Dusia suspected, of body, soul and surrounding world that her bliss arose.
The way to bliss was simple, and she was familiar with it. The Way was lying down itself, and she followed it unswervingly and without compromise. She was a loyal, yes, you could even call it fanatical adept of this path. And as one may expect from fanatics, Dusia also asked heretical questions. The most weighty of her heretical questions was this: “Is lying down merely the way to bliss, or is it Bliss itself?”
Notes
[1] Bazon Brock, „Imitation – die echte Lust am Falschen“, in Imitationen. Nachahmung und Modell: Von der Lust am Falschen, Jörg Huber, Martin Heller, Hans Ulrich Reck (Hg.), Museum für Gestaltung Zürich (Ausstellungskatalog), 1989.
[2] See, for example, Werner Flud, Lexikon der Fälschungen, Frankfurt/M., 1999. Also Karl Corino (Hg.), Gefälscht! Betrug in Politik, Literatur,Wissenschaft, Kunst und Musik, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1988.
[3] For the detailed review of existing literature regarding this issue see Stefan Römer, Künstlerische Strategien des Fake: Kritik von Original und Fälschung, Köln: DuMont, 2001.
[4] See P. B. Coremans, Van Meegeren's Faked Vermeers and de Hoochs: A Scientific Examination, London 1949.
[5] See T. Keating, G. Norman, The Fake's Progress, London, 1977.
[6] Here the meaning of term ‚reality’ is limited to ist use in the common language, i.e. to the Husserlian „naturliche Einstellung“.
[7] Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
[8] www.pixelhouse.de
[9] Stefan Römer, Künstlerische Strategien des Fake: Kritik von Original und Fälschung, Köln: DuMont, 2001.
P. 14.
[10] Peter Weibel, „Errata“ in Inszenierte Kunstgeschichte. MAK, Wien, 1989. P. 18.
[11] Of course the concept of original and copy existed before, but we are considering now the construction of the concepts within the analysed discourse.
[12] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, (trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman), New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. P. 11.
[13] Gilles Deleuze, "Plato and the Simulacrum" Rosalind Krauss (translator) in October 27 (Winter 1983), P.47.
[14] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, (trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane), New York: Viking, 1977. P. 210.
[15] Martin Heidegger, Ursprung des Kunstwerks, cited in Martin Heidegger, Selected Works, Moscow: Logos, 1994. P. 56.
[16] Peter Weibel, „Errata“ in Inszenierte Kunstgeschichte. MAK, Wien, 1989. P. 26.
[17] This interpretation perfectly corresponds an almost 'obligatory' for the contemporary art practices pathos of revaluation, and positioning itself into the opposition to the classical aesthetics as ‘emanation’ of bourgeois ideology.
[18] See Ernst Gombrich, Kunst und Illusion. Zur Psychologie der bildlichen Darstellung, Stuttgart, Zürich: Belser, 1986.
[19] See Pliny, Natural History XXXV.xxxvi.65. These accounts may be apocryphal; it hardly plays any role. What important is, that this story can be perfectly used as a suitable background for further building of a theory. And also it is a typical example of that common for Geisteswissenschaften situation when an historical anecdote is turned into a proof of sufficiency for a certain conceptual statement, especially when it is taken from such a reliable and academically recognised source as Pliny’s Natural History.
[20] See J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art, New Haven, 1974.
[21] Niklas Luhman, Die Ausdifferenzierung des Kunstsystems, Benteli Verlag Bern, 1994. P. 8.
[22] See Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmannn, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise on Sociology of Knowledge, Moscow: Medium, 1995.
[23] This circumstance even enables a kind of periodization of the history of art as social system, which is based on the principle, which function was considered to be dominant at the certain period. In many respects this periodization would be congruent with the traditional periodization of the art history
[24] For more detailes see Martin Warnke, Hofkünstler: Zur Vorgeschichte des modernen Künstlers, Köln, 1985.
[25] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods” in The Field of Cultural Production, Polity Press, 1993. P.125.
[26] See Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, written with a view of fixing the fluctuating Ideas of Taste; Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.
[27] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, cited in Distinction, p. 490.
[28] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, (trans. Richard Nice), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. P. 7.
[29] „World of art“ is a pure aesthetic construction in contradistinction to the „art-world“ of Arthur C. Danto.
[30] Hans Zitko, (Hg.), Kunst und Gesellschaft. Beiträge zu einem komplexen Verhältnis, Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2000. P. 11.
[31] See Wolfgang Ullrich, „Mit dem Rücken zur Kunst. Ein neues Statussymbol der Macht“, in Kunst und Gesellschaft. Beiträge zu einem komplexen Verhältnis, Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2000. P. 49-67.
[32] Ibid.
[33] This term is taken from: Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart. Frankfurt a. M. / New York: Campus, 1992.
[34] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods” in The Field of Cultural Production, Polity Press, 1993. P.115.
[35] Ulrich Saxer, “Kunstberichterstattung als Institutuion: Longitudinalanalyse einer Pressestruktur”, in Soziologie der Kunst. Produzenten, Vermittler und Rezipienten, Jürgen Gerhards (Hrsg.), Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997. P. 244.
[36] In a sense the function of this average representative within the media discourse is similar to the function of the subject in the classical philosophy. But the typological and functional similarity of the ideal-typical consumer of medial products with, for instance, the subject of the judgment of taste in Kantian aesthetics is the topic for another research.