For the sake of argument: if works of art were anonymous, considerable parts of the hidden agendas would vanish. It would be harder to involve art in the power plays which continuously take place below the surface and harder to use it as a destructive force there. By making art anonymous we would get rid of the misleading notion that the artist's subjectivity is important. This notion blocks the view of art and art will only become free the moment that it is removed.
However, already at this point I need to hesitate because, firstly,'free has a hollow ring and, secondly, the concept freedom has a demagogic side. An illustrative example of this is the kind of freedom which was part of the concept 'Liberty (freedom), Equality and Fraternity'. This was, among other things, the freedom for some people to behead some other people. When freedom was invented, it was equipped with numerous, much more subtle subtexts than the one I mentioned above. They constitute the sides of freedom which are still uncharted, and what characterizes them is that they have to do with suppression of individuals and with the exercise of power. Freedom is, like all other humanistic ideas, a vital part of a power web which art seems to be suppressed by although it also helps sustaining it.
Art is, like man and freedom, an invention. Art seems to be almost totally dependent on fixed ideas about the artist's subjectivity and the artist's position. The maintenance of subjectivity - of the delimitation of the self and its position as a privileged place for creation - is a result of, but also a prerequisite for the programme whose inertia serves only to maintain the status quo - as regards art and everything else. It is like breathing by means of a respirator which is powered by oneself.
The fact that art is so very intertwined with models which determine what kind of works of art it is possible to produce - what kind of thoughts are possible - is diametrically opposed to the often pathetic statements about art as a means of cognition and transcendence. The truth is - if anything is true - that the artist's subjectivity as the privileged place where art is created is, if not imaginary, then nothing more than an utterly incomplete notion; we are both productive and produced; we are not placed in privileged positions and something manifests itself through us.
The fact that art - as regards both production and perception - is dependent on the notion of subjectivity results in limitations that are more severe than we would like to see. The well-known triangle: artist, work of art and observer is one of the visible manifestations of the discreet guidelines which determine the way in which thoughts and emotions take place. This triangle was invented in the 18th century and it still lives on in our mental landscape among other forces of compulsion. Together with these it fixes the directions in which we move and the ways in which we are moved.
A lot has been said and written about the extended concept of art and, obviously, one can contend that art has changed a great many formal boundaries; that it has in this way led to cognition. But it seems that this has taken place in a locked room; like the changes in form merely alternates with the discoveries of new fields of activity without any real changes being made. Art has not changed the way it works as art. The fact that art has moved away from its traditional space and found new contexts in recent decades seems to have been nothing more than an institutional relocation which has not really changed anything. We carry the past into the future: the conditions which existed within the old rooms have moved imperceptibly into the new ones. Among these are the continuous efforts to keep the finger on the pulse in order to pin down phenomenons. This seems to take place in parallel with or in connection with the almost obscene registration and surveillance of citizens in modern and post modern society. The programme has the effect that everything is objectified and identified. Subsequently, it is placed in the appropriate place in the order of things; an order which demands a label, an artist, an owner, a description of the work of art and, in addition, a positioning in society and history, a positioning in the web of the discourse. It seems as if in this way death can be kept at a distance: the more efficient the identification, the more secure the programme.
Radical changes of art - the reinvention of art - can happen without a struggle against all this, but it is necessary to abandon concepts like freedom and identity, which are often used as weapons. These concepts have negative sides which force every new wave into old patterns that refer only to themselves. These patterns are prerequisites for the existence of old-fashioned thinking; a kind of thinking which only takes place inside restricted areas and 'autistic' coteries.
In order to find an illustration of this whole wretched business one has only to consider the apparently endless debate about what kind of media and forms are the most interesting; a debate which has confronted installations, video, etc (medias which, seemingly, are different from traditional works of art) with painting and sculpture. I could not care less if artists are doing the one thing or the other, and I think that this nonsense cannot be described more precisely than as an expression of the deadly monotenous inclination towards objectifying every single phenomenon (there is hardly one single phenomenon which is able to escape this). This dispute is not only idiotic; it is explicitly reactionary because it maintains antiquated ideas which make communication and attempts to change things part of a power play which contributes to hindering the cognition that the justification of art is determined by whether it is able to constitute a space where every contributor can provide something which is not already inherent in the programme, and whether it is a meetingplace. The objectification process (and, naturally, the pursuance of career; but that is not what this text is about) contributes to the dispute disguised as the struggle between antiquated ideas and new ideas. This is something which ought to have been over and done with together with modernism. What is both comical and tragic, is that if one chooses to place oneself on one side or the other in this dispute, one will have reduced one's work to missiles. No matter how strong one's efforts have been to make both one's art and one's persona seem important, one will have launched an antiquated project from square one.
In the extreme consequence of this, the fight for freedom and identity is a sure path to degradation; not only the degradation of oneself and of one's work but of one's surroundings too. One simply provides power for the respirator which keeps the system running.
Have a look at the very important artist and his friends/enemies, the critics, the curators and the art historians: are they anything else but replaceable parts of the respirator? (I choose to ignore the outright cynical arse-holes. I might mention the fact that sometimes one can learn a lot by meeting them because through their actions they unambiguously display the fact that we have to do with a game - nothing but a game).
There is no such thing as freedom. There is no such thing as an isolated self.
What one could try to find is the rooms where the subtext is written. In order to be able to do this, one has to leave something behind. I doubt if it would be possible to find these rooms by means of introspection. But the fact that the notions of subjectivity and its privileges are being debunked is not a catastrophe. We might as well interpret this as one of the events that has to take place in order to make a much wider set of opportunities possible; a set of opportunities which include other concepts of art, greater knowledge, a wider mental horizon, and the chance to think in ways which are not possible at present. Perhaps our lives and work can run transversely to the hidden guidelines.
Roland Barthes once wrote that the I who writes the text is never more than a paper-I. ('De l'oeuvre au texte', 1971).
Names are not important. Your name and my name are not important. The labels which are pinned on art are not important. It does not matter who the artist is and and it does not matter who the observer is. Far more beneficial questions could be asked.
It is a great deal more interesting to dissolve identity than it is to pin it down. Discontinuity is far more worthy to be coveted than continuity. As regards cognition, hybrid and flowing ideas are a lot more fruitful than established identities, and discontinuity and oblivion of the self are prerequisites for the reinvention of art; prerequisites for being able to move from one's own position to another and for being able to put oneself in someone else's place; for being able to devote oneself.
Some expressions come to mind:
'I was deeply concentrated!'
What does that mean? Was he the owner of large qauntities of I? A really strong solution, pure alcohol? (spirits!) Was he drunk on the Holy Spirit or was he simply
drunk?
Here are some more beautiful, that is, more articulate, examples of the abilities of language:
'I was carried away!
- or even better:
'I was totally absolved!'
What precision!
It is worth noticing that these sentences, when they refer to the experience of the speaker, only make sense in the past tense. You can test how much meaning there is in the present tense by saying (aloud, please):
'I'm totally absolved!'
Haha.
It will now be obvious that there are at least two radically different states of consciousness; I find one of them more seducing than the other.
Lars Buchardt, Copenhagen, September 1996
Danish-English translation: Morten Buchardt