Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present

Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present is a collection of essays edited by Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson. Designed as a multifaceted introduction to the field, the book contains contributions by the likes of Ina Blom, Sabeth Buchmann, T.J. Demos, Liam Gillick and Maria Lind, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Julian Stallabrass and Jan Verwoert. The section titled "The Rise of Fundamentalism" contains my article "Monotheism à la Mode." It recapitulates and develops some strands from Idols of the Market.

While it looks like an excellent job editorially, it must be said that the pricing by Wiley-Blackwell is rather obscene. That's the academic textbook market for you: capitalism at its most Stalinist. 

Gert Jan Kocken

The Office in Berlin has a series called The World According to, and The World According to Gert Jan Kocken is out now. It takes the form of a Bilderatlas compiling and arranging aniconic and iconic images of God—including of course His Incarnation. 

Since I had a tiny advisory role, I guess I can plug the project here without turning this into an actual blog.

The publication can be ordered here.




Image: studio wall, February 2012. 

End of year roundup: book reviews, book in progress

Reviews of Idols of the Market have recently been published in Metropolis M, Open, and Texte zur Kunst. Meanwhile, aside from a grant application for a big project, I’m working on another book called, tentatively, History in Motion. This quotation from a film by Harun Farocki gives an idea of its point of departure: “Camera and event. Since its invention, film has seemed destined to make history visible. It has been able to portray the past and to stage the present. We have seen Napoleon on horseback and Lenin on the train. Film was possible because there was history. Almost imperceptibly, like moving forward on a Moebius strip, the side was flipped. We look on, and have to think: if film is possible then history, too, is possible.”

Which consequences did the rise of moving images (film and video) have for the representation and the production of history? If film was destined to “portray the past and to stage the present”, as Harun Farocki states, History in Motion wants to focus on the interconnection between these two activities—not only in relation to film, but also in relation to other time-based media, including live performance and its afterimages. If it was traditionally a fleeting presence, the stuff of elusive memories, in modernity the moving image became storable. How does this influence the relation between representation and event, between the time of the image and historical time, and between past history and the history-in-progress of a contested present?

The book’s analysis is mainly aimed at the past few decades, at the post-Fordist phase and its temporal specificities: flexibility, the erosion of the distinction between work and leisure, permanent media presence. However, the temporal transformations of society and culture associated with post-Fordism, dominated by the permanent presence of television and then the internet, but haunted by the afterlife of cinema, will be related back to earlier shifts, in particular to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century capitalism—the early years of film.

This probably gives a highly inadequate impression. Analog, concrete thinker that I am, I’m notoriously bad at giving a priori summaries of what work in progress will end up being like. Although I’ve already done a lot of groundwork with various articles—tagged "history in motion" on this blog—things crystallize, dissolve and coalesce during the (re)writing process, and if I knew beforehand what I would end up with, I couldn’t muster the energy to actually do it. Admittedly, this is something of a handicap in a society in which you rarely get credit on the basis of your history – only on the basis of meticulously drafted, carefully planned futures.

Image: Stan Douglas, Overture, 1986, installed at Witte de With in 1994.

Return of Religion Reader

The final installment of the three-part project I did at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht: the publication of The Return of Religion and Other Myths: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, co-edited with Maria Hlavajova and Jill Winder.

Co-published by BAK and post editions, Rotterdam, the reader contains contributions by Jan Assmann, Christina von Braun, Paul Chan, Boris Groys (an interview by Maria Hlavajova), Arnoud Holleman, Marc De Kesel, Kenan Malik, Maria Pask, Dieter Roelstraete and Jorinde Seijdel.

As well as completing the BAK project, which also included a lecture series and my exhibition The Art of Iconoclasm, this publication can also be seen as a companion piece to my recent book Idols of the Market.

http://www.bak-utrecht.nl
http://www.post-editions.com

Bug report: It seems that at some point, someone decided to turn the title of Arnoud Holleman's text from "On ne touche pas" into "On ne touché pas." It's French, so there should be plenty of accents, oui? My apologies to Arnoud for this faux-pas.

Attending to Things Online

The group Chto delat has put online a PDF of my article "Attending to Abstract Things" from New Left Review no. 54 (November/December 2008), making it available for those who don't have a NLR subscription. Here it is:

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=694%3Asven-luetticken-attending-to-abstract-things&catid=203%3Amagazine&Itemid=300&lang=en

The site also contains the contents of various issues of the Chto delat newspaper. The discussion in issue 01-25 in particular resonates with some of my present and nascent concerns, but there's more stuff that is well worth checking out - including texts by Peio Aguirre, Gene Ray and others on dialectical method in issue 03-27.

Consummatum Est

My book Idols of the Market has finally taken on physical form. An impression of the contents:

An extensive introduction, "Welcome to the Image Wars", sets the stakes for my analysis of the double legacy of the monotheistic discourse on idolatry, in religious fundamentalisms on the one hand and in modern and contemporary art and philosophy on the other; I argue that "secular" critical discourse should not give in to secularist reflexes, but acknowledge ist own monotheistic genealogy, and turn the critique of religion against its fundamentalist appropriation (the latter being itself a thoroughly modern détournement of religious tradition). The first chapter, "Myths of Iconoclasm", continues this analysis with a discussion of various theoretical approaches to (and narratives of) iconoclasm in different contexts.

In chapter two, "From One Spectacle to Another", religious and leftist conceptualizations of the spectacle are scrutinized. The spectacle as a theater of commodities, of capital that has become image, leads to a discussion of the status of the material side of commodities, and of dematerialization, in chapter three - which is called "Atttending to Things (some more material than others)." The modern concept of fetishism, an offspring of the monotheistic notion of idolatry, is central to this part. Chapter four, "Living with Abstraction", argues that the increasingly "dematerialized" spectacle is marked by an increasing concretization of abstraction. Finally, the fifth chapter focuses on that abstract speck in the Western spectacle - the veil, associated with the Other that is Islam, seen by Hegel and many other writers as the religion of abstraction par excellence.

Idols of the Market will be for sale at the Venice Biennale bookstore, and soon elsewhere.

Amazon in Germany already lists it: http://www.amazon.de/Sven-Lutticken-Iconoclasm-Fundamentalist-Spectacle/dp/1933128267/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books-intl-de&qid=1244462648&sr=8-8

Edit: It is now available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Idols-Market-Iconoclasm-Fundamentalist-Spectacle/dp/1933128267/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247829188&sr=8-1

A correction: Arriving a bit too late in the last volume of Guy Debord's correspondence (covering the years 1988-1994), I found out only now that the attribution of the phrase "Rome is no longer in Rome" in the English translation of Guy Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle to Racine is incorrect; the phrase is by Corneille. Debord's remarks on the matter seem to have confused the translator, Malcolm Imrie. The phrase is the motto of my second chapter.

Update: Books and Exhibitions

My upcoming book Idols of the Market has been slightly delayed, mainly because the original editor decided to prioritize her son's budding career as a child actor, but it is now entering the final stage of production. The related exhibition The Art of Iconoclasm at BAK in Utrecht closed on March 1, 2009.

The project The Return of Religion and Other Myths, of which The Art of Iconoclasm was one part, will be completed this summer with a "critical reader" that collects lectures delived in the context of The Return of Religion, as well as some new contributions. But while this closes the BAK project, a version or a sequel of The Art of Iconoclasm may be shown early next year in New York - funding permitting.

Interesting reviews of The Art of Iconoclasm have appeared in, among others, Springerin and Texte zur Kunst. Whereas the Springerin review seems to be print only, the The Texte zur Kunst review has only been published on their web site, and can be found here:

http://www.textezurkunst.de/daily/category/gesehen-und-bewertet/

The Art of Iconoclasm

Until 1 March 2009, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht is showing my exhibition The Art of Iconoclasm as part of the project The Return of Religion and Other Myths, which is related to my book Idols of the Market. The Return of Religion and Other Myths also includes a series of lectures and presentations in early 2009, from January 11 to March 1, with speakers ranging from theorists such as Jan Assmann, Silvia Naef and Marc De Kesel to some of the artists in the exhibition. Their contributions, as well as other texts, will figure in the critical reader that will close the project later in 2009. As usual, reviews in the Dutch press are a pile of populist bile, with critics (Jip, Janneke, and the rest) screaming blue murder over a show that dares to posit an and emancipated viewer. The most absurd case was that of a glorified intern writing for the protestant daily Trouw who spent weeks working on a piece, talking to me for hours on the phone in the process, only to devote half her piece to the rantings of an employee of the Museum for Religious Art in the tiny town of Uden, who was predicably enraged by the whole project. I must be doing something right.

This is the text on the show in the project guide:

"The news of God’s death appears to have been premature. Religion is everywhere in contemporary politics and in the media; it has returned on the scene as a politicized media phenomenon creating controversies around righteous beliefs and their images. Religion is increasingly a matter of media controversy, of “image wars,” rather than daily observance or sophisticated theology.

"In a way, this development can be understood as consequential: monotheism was always deeply concerned with appearances, with images—after all, it was defined by the rejection of idols. In many religious teachings false gods, worshipped in the guise of “graven images,” are defined in visual terms. In the Christian tradition, the Second Commandment dictates that of the true God no images must be made. Visibility is the realm of the false gods. The Christian doctrine of the incarnation further mitigated this ban on representing God, since in Jesus God had taken on the form of a mortal man; however, the representation of Christ remained potentially contentious, as various episodes of iconoclasm show. On the other hand, while Islam is exceedingly strict in its ban on images (tasweer) that may lead to the idolatrous “association” (shirk) of other deities with Allah, it also has a history of depictions of the Prophet, including a still-living tradition of popular images in Shiite Islam. As much as demagogues would like us to believe otherwise, no religion is monolithic, and nothing is more unstable and contested than the definition of idolatry.

"With the rise of fundamentalist movements, many authors have come to see monotheism itself as pathological or evil. From the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas and 9/11 to the murder of Theo van Gogh over the film Submission, the Danish cartoon riots and the “Muhammad the Bear” affair, it is Islam that is often singled out for attacks; others, however, blame monotheism as such. Renowned Egyptologist and scholar of religion Jan Assmann has sparked fierce debates with his assertion that the “Mosaic distinction between the true God and idols created a kind of intolerance and violence not known before.” In the context of today’s images, monotheism and the rejection of idols are often presented as inevitably leading to intolerance, iconoclasm, and violence. This grim portrayal is one of the dominant contemporary myths about religion.

"Since Roman times, the “Greek” critique of mythic narratives and the “Jewish” critique of idolatrous images have become entwined in numerous ways. On the one hand, the Christian church adopted the philosophical critique of myths for their attacks on “idolatrous” religions; on the other hand, since the Enlightenment monotheism itself came to be criticized as being riddled with myths, as modern thinkers such as Feuerbach and Nietzsche appropriated monotheistic iconoclasm and Greek philosophy and turned it against religion itself. Originated in the wake of the Enlightenment, modern art was always a deconstruction of the rules of representation and of the images of Christian and other gods. There is not one single history of iconoclasm, but various interlinked and overlapping genealogies. While secularists create a radical distinction between “the secular West” on the one hand and religion (especially Islam) on the other, modern culture is profoundly indebted to religion; it sets free the secularizing impulse inherent in monotheism itself. The rejection of idolatry can be seen as a criticism of images that, while still dogmatic, was radicalized in modern thought and art.

"In refusing to regard iconoclasm merely as a pathological phenomenon associated with the religious other, this exhibition offers a counter-myth of iconoclasm. If both the narrative of secularization and that of the return of religion can be characterized as myths, this does not mean that they are simply untrue; according to a contemporary understanding of the term, myths are not just imaginary stories, but narratives that give historical events a contemporary meaning and can thereby, to some extent, shape reality. Rather than as “iconophobic” vandalism, iconoclasm at its most interesting can be seen as an attempt to redefine and re-imagine the image and to question what passes for visual culture—a culture whose images, including the images of religious confrontations that we are fed on a daily basis, may in fact be insufficiently visual. Do they not seem to be designed to obscure rather than reveal those processes that engender hatred and justify violence?

"In seeking to go “beyond the image wars,” the 2002 exhibition Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe disparaged iconoclasm as such in favor of an “iconoclash” that amounts to a questioning and examination of images that suspends the urge to smash them. However, iconoclasm was always more than mere image-smashing, and amidst today’s spectacular battle over images it is crucial to reclaim iconoclasm—and religion—from its fundamentalist appropriators. As a criticism of images, the monotheistic discourse on idolatry also paved the way for modern critiques—of tradition, of religion itself, of the com-modity, and of capitalism. Regarding religious criticism and secular critique as being of the same ilk, Iconoclash co-organizer sociologist Bruno Latour goes so far as to say that “suspicion has rendered us dumb.” Governments from Washington to Teheran must rejoice at such prose. The efficacy of critique in the face of terror and counter-terror is indeed doubtful, but rather than a disparagement of it as such, what is needed is a reexamination of our cultural and political deadlock, in which critique is either institutionalized and neutralized, or equated with dangerous political dissent and terrorism.

"This show is conceived as a three-dimensional essay in two parts, which stages a confrontation between various kinds of iconoclasm in order to chart the (im)possibilities of contemporary iconoclasm in art, theory, and cultural and political practice in general. These notes indicate some of the possible relations between the images and non-images in the show, without presuming to curtail their interplay.

Part 1: From Idol to Artwork (BAK)

"While iconoclasm is often equated with the destruction of art, it has, more interestingly, produced art. This part of the exhibition reflects on this process and on its consequences. Iconoclastic erasures can even come to function as an integral part of an artwork. Furthermore, the critique of cult images as idols stimulates their recontextualization as art: after centuries of neglect, from the Renaissance onward Apollo finds a new home in the museum, as fallen idols are reborn as art. By questioning cult images and removing them from their sacred context, monotheism facilitated their eventual transformation into objets d’art with a secularized aura. Certain objects associated with monotheism—medieval Madonnas, Persian illuminations—even came to be regarded primarily as priceless works of art. In the museum, one could say that Christ, Buddha, and Muhammad exist on the same abstract plane (even if didactic wall texts or visitor guides may treat them differently). At the same time, some critics have argued that the work of art remains ever in the service of “cult value.” Marx’s concept of the commodity fetish was based in part on eighteenth-century writer Charles De Brosses’s notion of African fetishism, which in his view was a worship of random objects that constituted a “primitive” prelude to idolatry; as the commodity fetish par excellence, is the modern artwork not just a barely secularized idol? If we look to the recent history of modern art, iconoclastic attacks on Greek and Roman idols-turned-art and the critique of representation in general led—among other things—to abstract paintings that seem to obey a secular Second Commandment, banning representation not because of a religious dogma, but as a consequence of a critique of art and its conditions.

"Even if artists such as Piet Mondrian had long abandoned the faith in which they were raised by the time they made their mature work, this rejection of representation mirrors the old monotheistic condemnation of idolatry, which has become an integral part of modern critical thought. In the current context, however, abstraction often comes to be associated with Islam: think for example of last year, when Cologne’s Cardinal Meisner complained that Gerhard Richter’s new abstract stainedglass window for his cathedral would be better suited for a mosque, or how full-body veils are seen by some as symptomatic of Islam’s abstract rejection of western “visual culture.” But then, is the “spectacle” of our media-saturated society not itself abstract to the core, programmed as it is by digital codes? Just how visible is our “visual culture”?

Part 2: Attacking the Spectacle (CM Studio)

"The second part of the exhibition, Attacking the Spectacle, focuses on the political contestations of what philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have characterized as the “Empire” of global capitalism. Here again the religious and the secular are in dialogue with each other. Modern theory and activism contain secularized traces of the Christian attack on Roman spectacles. For the early Christians, the Roman Empire was the paradigmatic idolatrous society. The early Christian rejection of spectacles remained a potent trope in western culture, ready to be reactivated, for instance by Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This “anti-spectacular” discourse was transformed and radicalized by modern theorists and artists; building on Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism for example, filmmaker and theorist Guy Debord attacked capitalism as a “society of the spectacle” whose images barely disguised that it is a system of exploitation and living death.

"Such critics may be truer descendants of monotheistic thinking than current fundamentalist terrorists who seem to outdo each other in the embrace of today’s spectacle of the media, and whose strategies are shaped by modern terrorism. Rather than resolutely rejecting the capitalist spectacle, fundamentalists transform it into a spectacle of their own, dominated by dualistic clashes between good and evil and effects-laden scenes, of which the images from 9/11 are the most famous example. How can we imagine forms of theory and practice that break the deadlock created by the war of images and counter-images, of terror and counterterror?"

Artists: Carl Andre, Carel Blotkamp, Guy Debord/Jean-Léon Gérôme, Rod Dickinson & Tom McCarthy, Hans Haacke, Arnoud Holleman, Imi Knoebel, Gert Jan Kocken, Krijn de Koning, Willem Oorebeek, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Haim Steinbach, Rosemarie Trockel, and Lidwien van de Ven.

http://www.bak-utrecht.nl/?click[id_projekt]=59

New Left Review no. 54: Attending to Abstract Things

New Left Review no. 54 (November/December 2008) contains my essay Attending to Abstract Things (pp. 101-122), which comprises parts of my upcoming book Idols of the Market. The text attempts to arrive at a materialist theory of our seemingly abstract and dematerialized culture, revisiting theories of fetishism and of the symbol from De Brosses and Creuzer to Marx and Baudrillard, and using works of art as implicit - and sometimes prophetic - forms of theory in their own right. The opening paragraph:

"It has become a moderately popular pastime to accuse modern philosophy and theory, particularly Marxism, of evincing a crypto-idealist aversion to objecthood. Bruno Latour claims that the quintessential modern project is to liberate the subject from its dependency on the object, one prominent instance of which is the Marxian critique of the commodity fetish, that archetypal ‘bad object’. Is materialism, then, in the grips of a religious impulse to spurn the material world and ‘attend to things invisible’—in the form of grand theoretical notions? In fact, for dialectical materialism theoretical abstractions are necessitated by the abstraction inherent in the economic system; the commodity is regarded as insufficiently material, as too ‘theological’, prone to idealist pretenses. In Terry Eagleton’s words, ‘As pure exchange-value, the commodity erases from itself every particle of matter; as alluring auratic object, it parades its own unique sensual being in a kind of spurious show of materiality’. But this inherent duality of the commodity is not static; over time, the ‘spurious’ materiality of the ‘auratic object’ seems to become more so, the commodity becoming increasingly dematerialized and abstract. As Vilém Flusser noted, to abstract means to subtract, and specifically to subtract data from matter; throughout history, abstraction has been a movement towards information. In the ‘information economy’, capitalism has embraced a quasi-theological narrative of dematerialization, creating a need to redefine materialism that is only heightened by the turmoil in which this economy now finds itself."

I received some interesting feedback from Paul Chan, who also sent me the text of a lecture he gave earlier in 2008, The Spirit of Recession, which reveals lines of thinking very close to my own, in condensed and elegant prose. Here's what Paul wrote: "Just wanted to tell you that I really appreciate your piece in NLR 54. It's a big piece and to try to bring into relationship the spirit of abstraction in both concept and coinage is important and right. Many things to think about. Almost reads like a... manifesto of sorts. Please let me know when you plan to storm the gates. Any gates will do, for me anyways. One question. I took it as a rhetorical provocation (and question) when you asked how anyone can posit a narrative of increasing abstraction. But I can't believe you really believe that there has not been an increase of the spirit of abstraction in the everydayness of life and in every demand of the day. The divison of (manual, intellectual, emotional, pleasurable) labor increases with each passing business cycle. And the more they are divided, the more each divided part takes on the aura of a whole - a purer whole, since the point of the division was to reduce human potentialities to an efficient productive "fullness", whether as consumer, producer, or parishioner. This feeling of unbearable fullness is precisely what has increased."

Paul is right, of course, and that he feels uneasy about the conclusion of my text suggests that I got carried away by my opposition to the habitual complains about increasing abstraction, which fail to see that every increase in abstraction is also an increasing concretion of abstraction itself, and that there is a potential for praxis (to use an old-fashioned term) in this process. Thanks to Paul, this point will hopefully be made in a clearer manner in the book, which will also be free from the typos that have crept into the NLR text due to an excessively frantic editing process - notably a "2009" that should be "2008" and a French "département" surreptitiously transformed into "department" by Word's intrusive spell check. These glitches have been corrected in the online version (for which you need a NLR account): http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2755

Image: an African "fetish" with shells, formerly in the collection of Tristan Tzara.

Springerin, Fall 2008

The Fall 2008 issue of the Austrian art magazine Springerin is dedicated to religion, and it includes my article Schleierspektakel (only in German, pp. 18-23). The text, which is an extract from my forthcoming book Idols of the Market, deals with the Islamic veil as a prop in the current image wars.

The English version, pretty much unedited, is online here, http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=2132&lang=en

Grey Room no. 32: From One Spectacle to Another

Issue no. 32 of Grey Room (Summer 2008) contains my essay From One Spectacle to Another (pp. 63-87). The text, which examines the afterlife of the Christian theoretization and condemnation of idolatrous Roman spectacles in modern culture and Situationist theory, is based on chapter two of my forthcoming book Idols of the Market.

"Although Egypt and Babylon were the idolatrous societies par excellence of the Old Testament, for the early Christians the Roman Empire was the paradigmatic idolatrous society. Tertullian, the most puritanical of the important early Christian authors, went furthest in denouncing idolatry as an all-encompassing system. In his De Spectaculis, he argued that something as seemingly “secular” as the Roman games was in fact suffused with idolatria; the games were dedicated to the false gods and thus part of the heathen cults. In part because of Tertullian and his central place in the Christian tradition, the term spectacle—referring to all kinds of theatrical entertainments—was always ready to take on negative connotations and be used as a weapon. Protestant communities in particular inherited Tertullian’s attitude, and in the eighteenth century the Protestant criticism of spectacles was secularized by Rousseau. In his Letter to d’Alembert (1758), Rousseau objected to the latter’s suggestion that Calvinist Geneva might be ameliorated by building a theater and allowing actors to perform. Even while citing Calvin and referring to “notre religion,” Rousseau attempts to justify banning spectacles on secular grounds: an important argument is that the theater is antisocial and stimulates the citizen to withdraw into a world of make-believe in which family, neighbors, and duties are forgotten. "

"Rousseau’s complaints conjure up the famous image from English-language editions of The Society of the Spectaclean audience of passive zombies donned with 3-D goggles, and Martin Jay detected in Debord’s stance “a touch of the stern Rousseauist injunction to force people to be free by compelling them to shut their eyes to illusion, whether they wanted to or not.” While such a remark neglects that in Debord’s work Enlightenment moralizing has been replaced by an analysis of the political economy, just as les spectacles have given way to le spectacle, anachronisms are an integral part of the spectacle and of its critique. Neo-Roman posturing is met with contestations that derive some of their strength far from contemporaneous sources. “Disguises” in cultural production should be taken as seriously as survivals and returns in theory—without neglecting crucial differences and transformations. Now that both religious fundamentalists and "Enlightenment fundamentalists” proclaim a Manichaean opposition between faith and secular reason, the attempts by some to break through this deadlock by “re-sacralizing” the critique of the current imperial spectacle are of great significance."

A small erratum: In the article, Ellen Meiksins Wood's name was misspelt "Meiskins Wood," which will of course be corrected in the upcoming book version, like so many other glitches!

Image: Jean-Léon Gérôme's Pollice Verso as reproduced in the journal Spur (1961).

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/grey/current

Open no. 14: Sacred Sites

Issue no. 14 of Open, a publication on "art and the public domain"edited by Jorinde Seijdel, is dedicated to art institutions and the reinvention of publicness. This issue contains contributions by Chantal Mouffe, Nina Möntmann, Jan Verwoert and Bik Van der Pol, among others, as well as my essay Exhibiting Cult Value: On Sacred Spaces as Public Spaces and Vice Versa (pp. 38-55 in the English edition). The text analyses the relations between museum, cathedral and mosque, arguing against the popular tendency to either define museums and other art spaces as bullwarks of "Western"secularism or demand that they become so. An extract:

"For Enlightenment fundamentalists, mosque and museum are radically opposed to each other, while the cathedral is politely or opportunistically ignored. If the Qur’an is seen as the enemy of Western “free word” and its media, the mosque stands in a similar opposition to the museum, the home of “free art” that is under threat from sinister fundamentalists. In this way the mosque comes to be opposed to the museum as representative of the secular public sphere. Recently, when the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague refused to exhibit photographs that showed gay men wearing masks representing Muhammed and Ali, his son-in-law, the museum was attacked for betraying its mission to be a space of secular freedom against theocratic tyranny. Thus there are two opposed interpretations of the museum: in contrast to the authors who argue that the museum is too sacred, that it is insufficiently profane, others ideologize the museum as a prototypical space for Western secularism, for free words and images. Both positions are militantly secularist. In both cases, the sacred as such is seen as ominous.

"Emile Durkheim noted that “[t]here are two kinds of sacred, one auspicious, the other inauspicious;” for Enlightenment fundamentalists, there only seems to be bad sacrality. But does not the concept of the secular itself come to play the part of the “good” sacred? After all, the Enlightenment fundamentalists effectively sacralize “the Enlightenment”, “the West”, “free speech”, “free art”—while using such slogans to avoid any discussion of Western complicitness in the situations they denounce, in the Middle East and elsewhere. If secularization means the questioning of dogmas and stifling celestial and earthly hierarchies, a revolt against a culture of fear and taboo, then secularization is indeed crucial, but many secularists seem intent on sabotaging this process by nurturing Manichaean dichotomies. This goes for art-bashers as well as for Islam-bashers; while the latter use the bogeyman of Evil Islam to prevent a serious contestation Western neoliberal policies and economic imperialism, the former seem intent on disabling whatever potential for dissent art may still have. Yes, the museum needs to be critiqued, but Ulrich’s “profane” museum, which is no longer distinct from the surrounding culture, would itself be as critical as Fox News.

"Perhaps the museum’s insufficient secularization, its elitist and mystifying form of publicness, also enables critical practices that would not be possible otherwise. And did not churches, at various moments in history, function as public places that enabled the articulation of dissenting practices and forms of resistance, both from a Christian and from a post-Christian perspective? No doubt some mosques deserve to be eyed with suspicion, and there are many obstacles to be overcome, but one can give a positive twist to the mosque’s difference from (and in) the current order, as in the case of the museum. Some works of art stage a tentative dialogue between art context and mosque. Lidwien van de Ven’s photo of a Viennese mosque, in which men are seen from behind, praying with their faces to the wall, is pasted directly on the wall of the white cube; thus one space of concentration, however myth-ridden, is presented as an extension of the next."

Image: Lidwien van de Ven, Islamic Centre, Vienna, 2000.

The complete text is online here: http://www.skor.nl/article-3635-nl.html?lang=en

En de nederlandse versie is hier: http://www.skor.nl/article-3635-nl.html?lang=nl


[Correction: Although in recent years Lidwien van de Ven often shows her photographs in the form of poster prints glued directly on the wall, the picture of the Islamic Center in Vienna has not been shown in this way yet.]

Work in Progress: Idols of the Market

Several posts on this pseudo-blog are labelled "Idolatry"; the texts in question pertain to a book that will be published early in 2009 by Sternberg Press. Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle reexamines the legacies of modern theoretical and artistic iconoclasm in the context of the current religious-political image wars.

In a letter written shortly after Adorno’s death, in which he attempted to explain why his friend had not been buried according to Jewish rites, Max Horkheimer claimed that critical theory was based on the Second Commandment – the ban on representations of God or, in more fundamentalist interpretations, of representations of all living beings. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the monotheistic concept of idolatry had been gradually replaced by modern conceptions of myth and mythology; later it was integrated in critical conceptions of commodity fetishism, ideology, the spectacle, or Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry. This secularization of the concept of idolatry is now increasingly being revoked; the critique of the spectacle is seemingly "resacralized" by various religious factions.

The fundamentalists’ apparent fetishization of their religion’s aboriginal essence is rather questionable; their fight of the idolatrous spectacle takes place within this spectacle and fortifies it—all the while reducing the space for critique and dissent. This book examines both the afterlife of religious elements in modern culture and possible responses to the current religious reappropriation of this critique of modern capitalist culture by both Christian fundamentalists and radical Islamists. Rather than dismissing monotheistic idolatry critique, the aim is to once more set free its (self-)critical potential, in opposition to those “Enlightenment fundamentalists” who save the status quo by creating a manicheist opposition between the secular West and the pure otherness of Islam.

http://www.sternberg-press.com/

Image: Hans Haacke's Poster Project, 2002.

Gert Jan Kocken: Defacing

From September 16 to November 11, Gert Jan Kocken's photographs of the traces of Reformation iconoclasm are on view at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. Kocken's life-size and hyper-detailed pictures show "defaced" Medieval art from Holland, England, Germany and Switzerland as as the sum of markings and erasures, of construction and de(con)struction—at times suggesting anachronistic connections between Reformation iconoclasm and that of modern art. Indicative of the show's status as part of Kocken's wider project on historical turning-points, it also includes a picture of a microfilm showing the New York Times front-page of September 11, 2001. For some time Gert Jan Kocken and I had been discussing the possibility of me writing a text about these works of his, and when Jelle Bouhuis agreed to show the photographs at SMBA, their newsletter offered itself as the logical medium for this essay, which is also part of the preparations for my upcoming book on contemporary art and the resurgence of monotheistic attacks on "idolatrous" images.

The newsletter can be downloaded here: http://www.smba.nl/static/en/exhibitions/defacing/newsletter-kocken.pdf

Essay in critical reader "Citizens and Subjects"

Citizens and Subjects: The Netherlands, for example (co-edited by Rosi Braidotti, Charles Esche and Maria Hlavajova) is the reader accompanying the Dutch pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. “The critical reader Citizens and Subjects: The Netherlands, for example is a site where issues of fear, anxiety and (illegal) immigration - but also cultural resistance and emancipation - are discussed through the example of the Netherlands, which stands here as neither a particular nor universal case for discussing the so-called western condition. It asks how art and artists can react to these issues and what possibilities they can create to see things differently. The reader is co-edited by philosopher Rosi Braidotti, curator and writer Charles Esche and Maria Hlavajova." My contribution, “Art and the New Image Wars” (pp. 159-173), investigates the renewed religious contestation of images, of the spectacle. Modern art and theory secularized and thus radically transformed the monotheistic rejection of idolatry; monotheistic “idolatry critique” was pried from its dogmatic context, used reflexively and frequently turned against monotheism itself. How do (or can) art and theory react to the increasing resacralization of the critique of images, which marks contemporary culture? The article discusses works by a number of artists, including De Rijke/De Rooij, Fransje Killaars, Krijn de Koning and Gert Jan Kocken and Lidwien van de Ven.

http://www.citizensandsubjects.nl/

A slightly different version of this text, which is part of a more extensive project that will result in a book, was published under the title “Idolatry and Its Discontents” in New Left Review no. 44 (March-April 2007), pp. 107-119: http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2662. Someone has put the entire text online here: http://www.forliberation.org/site/archive/issue0507/article040507.htm

Image: Fransje Killaars, Figures no. 4 (2006).

Artforum, March 2007

In addition to three reviews, the Rancière-studded March 2007 issue of Artforum contains my text "Black Block, White Penguin: Reconsidering Representation Critique" (pp. 298-303, 341, 344). Moving from Bernadette Corporation and Pierre Hughe back to Mallarmé and Malevich via Debord, Rancière, Baudrillard and Halley, the text seeks to investigate the relevancy of modern representation critique in the context of contemporary fundamentalisms.

A few extracts: "Far from constituting some narrowly neo-modernist or formalist project, Bernadette Corporation’s references to Mallarmé and Malevich are reminders of the complexity and contradictions of the modern critique of representation in the face of the all too simplistic anti-representationalism of many performative practices. "
"Huyghe brings out the opaqueness of signs, opposing the suggestions of transparency implied both by mass-media images and by many pictures of social art pieces, transforming the nineteenth-century imperialist cliché of the expedition to uncharted lands into a self-reflexive journey to the limits of representations."
"Some images of black bloc members in [Bernadette Corporation's video] Get Rid of Yourself recall another kind of mask – the niqabs and burqas increasingly worn by Muslim women in European cities. The Taliban, who banned TV and film, also mandated the burqa for Afghan women: outlawing media and occluding women’s bodies and faces were both part of the Islamist critique of Western spectacle as the pinnacle of idolatry. [...] The critique of the spectacle’s representations, then, is hardly the monopoly of artists or critical theorists: increasingly, this critique has been reappropriated by various religious factions, and thus in a sense returned to its origins in the Judeo-Christian tradition’s ban on graven images."

http://http://artforum.com/html/issues/200703/new

Image: still from Bernadette Corporation's Get Rid of Yourself (2003).