For as long as it is ineffective, magic = knowledge at rest.
- Friedrich Schelling, On the Nature of Philosophy as Science
I. The Magic of Muscovy
On the whole, the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007) wasn't that memorable an affair, but it did have its fair share of fine, amusingly symbolic and/or revelatory moments: having to weave one's way through the fur-clad, shopaholic trophy wives of oligarchs (I presumed) on the upper floor of the TsUM (Tsentralniy Universalniy Magazin, or Central Universal Store) to reach the biennial's venue dedicated to showcasing recent video art from the US (a bizarre navigational experience made even more disorienting by the relentless broadcasting, throughout the whole of TsUM, of the proceedings of the biennial's opening conference, featuring the likes of Giorgio Agamben and Chantal Mouffe); seeing art on the thirty-third floor, if I remember well, of a World Trade Center-style skyscraper still in the process of being constructed - most of the art on display, which was predominantly painting and photography, seemed to be merely waiting for the office furniture that would soon surround it); the decidedly oddball installation of Jeff Wall's Cibachromes, some of them tilted at extraordinary angles, in the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture (the selection of still-lifes and 'diagonal compositions' a sly, angular nod to the city's troubled constructivist legacy); Oleg Kulik's exuberant Moscow art extravaganza at the former wine-bottling plant Winzavod, a show simply named 'I Believe' - a choice of title we shall be returning to shortly. Best of all, however, was the experience of meeting biennial director Joseph Backstein, a highly-regarded veteran of Moscow's 1970s Conceptual art scene, in his brightly lit, paper-littered office inside the deserted, gloomy maze of the former Lenin Museum just off Red Square - quite the choice of location, it turned out, for an extended conversation on the precise meaning of the biennial's overall title, 'Footnotes on Geopolitics, Market and Amnesia'.
When asked to expand upon contemporary art's 'footnote condition', as one of the catalogue's introductory essays put it, Backstein's deep, shrugging sigh seemed to confirm our deepest suspicion that retreating to the disused top floor of a glitzy department store on Ulitsa Petrovka pretty much equalled contenting ourselves with fidgeting about with footnote-style commentary-upon-commentary - interpretation - instead of (an old, potent Russian longing) aiming to rewrite or, better still, change the world.1 Rather than being an event itself, Backstein argued, art has become a mere footnote to the actual events - all firmly located outside art's once-universal reach - that shape both contemporary society and culture in general. 'Visual art is the citadel of the elite, and one has to admit that the days of this citadel are coming to an end,' he wrote in his preface to the exhibition catalogue, with barely concealed disillusionment over art's loss of status (presumably in Russia in particular) in recent decades.2 And much of the art that seemed to respond to this state of affairs, either by reclaiming this long-lost elitist status or by naïvely continuing to insist on art's impact on social and political affairs, just wasn't very interesting - anymore. In the end, Backstein queried, sitting in his stuffy office in the desolate darkness of the former Lenin Museum, what is, and what makes good art? His answer quietly shocked me, even then, in such dramatic circumstances: simply 'magic' - the inexplicable ('magical') transformation, that is, of one thing into another. Transubstantiation even, to further deepen the reach of religious metaphor: the artist's magical touch, sprinkling the gold dust of creation and invention over a previously inanimate, dull object - so as to endlessly renew and endow it with the timeless, auratic mystery of value.
It is easy (and tempting) to discount Backstein's shrugs and sighs as the tired, only half-reluctant ramblings of a cynic; it is equally easy, perhaps, to align his claims, cynical or not, for the magical, transformative essence of art with the nouvelle vague of 'romantic conceptualism' and comparable instances of the resurgence of 'the spiritual in art', which have done so much to restore the mystical, aspirational qualities of artisthood in our contemporary, post-ironic cultural climate. The current 'post-ironic' era is that of a New Sincerity, a New Earnestness and Authenticity - in both politics and art, probably related to the way our world has changed following the events of 11 September 2001 - without which the very concept of a 'romantic conceptualism', like any other recourse to the Romantic tradition, has become increasingly hard to imagine. The canonisation of Bas Jan Ader, the teary-eyed martyred saint of this sentimentalist réveil, is perhaps the most defining moment of this post-ironic climate, which has helped to shape the precise conditions for what I would argue is the return of art as a soul-searching-type activity, a return to the art of soul-searching.) But the phrase stuck in my mind, no doubt helped by the visceral experience of seeing Kulik's 'I Believe';3 the triangular cultural complex of magic, mysticism and spirituality - terms which could easily be replaced by 'the occult', 'transcendence' and 'religion' - has since become a dominant preoccupation, both in the curatorial field and in the realm of artistic practice and production proper, so much so that a little disenchantment (again) seems to be in order.4
II. Traces, Tricks & Spirit-Catchers
Twenty years after the pioneering (and controversial) 'Magiciens de la terre', the Centre Pompidou in Paris once again hosted a show of (partly extra-)terrestrial magic last year, called 'Traces du sacré', or 'Traces of the Sacred'. A richly textured blockbuster exhibition in the institution's fine (if unabashedly Eurocentric) discursive style, it featured some 350 works by close to 200 artists: a massive investigation, in the words of the Pompidou, into 'the ways in which art continues to demonstrate, often in unexpected forms, a vision that goes beyond the ordinariness of things and how, in a completely secular world, it remains the secular outlet for an irrepressible need for spirituality'. 56 The Pompidou's pilgrimage started, rather predictably, under the aegis of Bruce Nauman's famous spiralling 1967 neon mantra The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) (again, presented rather literally, with little of the work's initial irony left intact), meandered its way past many a canonical signpost of modern, angst-driven art (Edvard Munch, Constantin Brancusi, Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Mark Rothko - an overwhelmingly phallocentric affair too, then), and concluded, messily and inconclusively, with the shadow-play of Paul Chan and with Jonathan Monk's Sentence Removed (Emphasis Remains)(2000), a parodic homage to Nauman's classic neon piece that keeps the spiral but does away with the words. A handful of installations by contemporary artists punctured the grand teleological arc of the exhibition's journey into (or out of) the light, but there was very little in the way of a cautious, critical 'materialism' here, and indeed, alarmingly, even less irony - offering seemingly conclusive proof that notions of the 'post-secular' are deeply entwined with the 'post-ironic'.7
Indeed, the avowed objective of the exhibition was 'to explore the meaning of the persistence of this investigation throughout the twentieth century and to show how - as an essential key to understanding the history of modern art - it continues to contribute to the creation of contemporary forms'.
The 'Spectre of the Spirit' - rather than 'Spectres of Marx', which may perhaps come in much more handy at this precise point in time8 - likewise loomed large in at least one (both the most widely acclaimed and most convincing) section of last year's Manifesta, the eagerly awaited seventh instalment after the political fiasco in Cyprus in 2006. 9 Making maximum use of its location in Trento, the small town made famous by the sixteenth-century Council of Trent - during which the Catholic Church first formulated its response to the tides of religious protest then washing over Northern Europe - Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg curated an exhibition titled 'The Soul, or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls', taking the Council of Trent as a referential point of departure for the writing and activation of an 'inner self':
Among the decisions taken by the Council was the expansion of the scope of confession to also demand from members of the Catholic community the confession of their inner thoughts and fantasies, no longer only of those sins actually committed. As it requested the believers to lay bare their innermost thoughts in front of the Church's representatives, the Council's decision can be understood as a milestone in the internalisation of power in modern history. 10
A more-or-less straightforward continuation, it seems, of Franke's long-standing critical interest in (and occasional deployment of) animism, 'spectrality' and superstition, interiority and voodoo curating - in what he himself has called, in the introduction to the publication that accompanied his 2006 exhibition 'No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night' at Kunst-Werke in Berlin, 'ghostly matters': 'things present and things absent', our 'spectral presence inside others, and the presence of others inside us' (already here, there is talk of a 'theft of the soul'), the 'shadow world of absent presence'.11 Franke and Peleg use a quote by Joachim Koester, an artist known for his interest in the occult and the various strands of psychedelic culture that may afford a glimpse into this remote realm of esoteric knowledge, to conclude their curatorial statement:
In the nineteenth century exploration was geographic. Journeys were made into impassable jungles or the ice deserts of the Arctic in an attempt to map the last 'white' spots on the globe. But in the twentieth century this notion of the 'unknown' changed. Exploration turned inward. The new realms to be explored were the molecule (Niels Bohr), the unconscious (Sigmund Freud), language (Gertrude Stein) or the outskirts of the mind (Henri Michaux).12
Koester's work figured prominently in Manifesta 7 - as it did in the third exhibition to mark last year's witching season, 'The Great Transformation: Art and Tactical Magic', organised by Chus Martínez at the Frankfurter Kunstverein and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo in Spain. Whether named after the widely-read classic of economic history penned by Karl Polanyi (published in 1944) or after the much more recent bestseller by religious historian Karen Armstrong (published in 2006 and shedding light on the beginnings of our religious traditions), 'The Great Transformation' was certainly the one exhibition that took the notion of magic and/ or sorcery in a most literal way, understanding it as a metaphor, first and foremost, for the experimental methodology of art production that can in fact be turned against the reactionary forces of ritual and superstition, of obscurantism and occultism - as well as against the potential dangers of a one-dimensional curatorial investment in ideas and notions of mystical insularity, interiority and 'spiritual' self-absorption. For that reason alone, perhaps, it allowed for those moments of critical light-heartedness and irreverent humour that were so painully absent from many other exhibitions in a similar vein - unlike 'Traces du sacré', for instance, it had time and space for irony, the great enemy of all things divine and loftily 'spiritual'. (One particularly comical moment in that exhibition concerned the apparition of Madame Blavatsky, the nineteenth-century founder of the crackpot pseudo-science of theosophy, levitating in mid-air, resting on no more than a pair of wooden chairs. 13)
III. The Cult of Cologne
Speaking of ironies - let us now move towards a tentative first conclusion some 200 kilometres to the north, where a new type of art pilgrimage has reinvigorated Cologne's claim to be home to Germany's best-loved building, its world-famous cathedral. When asked by Artforum in autumn 2007 to single out the past year's most important artistic event for the magazine's traditional year-in-review issue, the grand old man of (a certain type of) American art criticism, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, quite predictably settled for a work by the grand old man of European painting, Gerhard Richter. What was less predictable, perhaps, was the choice of the work in question - one that Buchloh himself clearly felt uneasy with, as was made apparent by the deliberate, apologetic tone of the subsequent essay: the Domfenster or stained-glass window in the city's cathedral. Keenly aware of the straining incompatibility of his own formation and allegiances as a Marxist critic with the world of institutionalised religion - 28 years on he is probably still best known for his ruthless deconstruction of the priestly 'idol' of post-War European art, Joseph Beuys, whose messianic demeanour and mystical leanings he found impossible to stomach - Buchloh mounted an interesting defence, part of which is well worth reiterating here. The piece starts as follows:
[...]under the present circumstances, it could only be expected that serious professional artists, progressive or conservative, would become increasingly desperate to find alternative institutional and discursive spaces to shelter their work from the violent impact of three forces that have dramatically altered every facet and fraction of artistic practice in the past ten years: digital electronic technology, the globalisation of capital and the monolithic power of an industrialised art market that aspires to a fast and final merger with the fashion and music industries. A market that seems to have turned Joseph Beuys's prophecy that 'everybody will become an artist' into a travesty with calamitous consequences. How is a traditional artistic subject with its latently aristocratic or manifestly bourgeois ego formations to respond to a situation in which locust swarms of international mediocrities claiming the status of 'artist' emerge now in greater numbers in a month than the total of number of artists recorded in an entire decade up until the 1980s?14
My interest here lies not so much in addressing Buchloh's provocative assertion that today's art world has been taken over by 'locust swarms of international mediocrities' (though it is telling that he should already revert to biblical rhetoric there!), nor in dismantling his rather simple-minded view of the art market as a monolithic, industrial whole, but in the muted answer to the question raised above, implied in his choice of Richter's Domfenster - in the despair-inducing realisation that the Church, of all places, may as yet emerge as one of only a tiny few spaces left to art that is notreturning to a certain realm of spiritual experience, namely that of institutionalised religion, which Enlightenment thought had discarded and deemed discredited a long time ago - a process of degradation and violent elucidation which was critically helped along by modern (i.e.secular) art itself of course... And this is how it can be done: by turning back the tide of disenchantment either to accept (begrudgingly, of course), embrace or actively promote art's role in the re-enchantment of the world instead.15
dominated by the reductive, instrumentalising rationale of market forces, and that can therefore still guarantee some measure of freedom for art to do its thing (such as, precisely: engage in the urgent business of critique). The answer to Buchloh's rhetorical question, then, seems to be: by
IV. The Fourth Obstruction
No consideration of the current subject - the spiritual in art, again - can be complete without mentioning, however cursorily, the ambivalence that continues to be elicited by the towering figure of Joseph Beuys, the subject of a high-profile, well-attended retrospective at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof last autumn/winter - tellingly, the first comprehensive survey of his work in Germany for more than twenty years. Twenty-eight years ago Buchloh began his scathing attack of the Beuys myth wondering why the Guggenheim Museum in New York (the site, back in 1980, of a big Beuys exhibition), 'that most beautiful building, normally beaming with clarity, warmth and light, is dimly lit in a grey and moody twilight. What is this theatrical trick, creating a setting of "Northern Romantic" light, meant to obscure? What mental semi-trance are we supposed to enter before we are allowed to wander down the spiral of twenty-four stations (whose martyrium, whose mysterium)?'16
Architectural oddities aside, and disregarding the fact, for now, that subsequent decades have seen the gradual darkening of museum spaces to accommodate the influx of moving-image art (itself a measure, perhaps, of the 'return' of certain sediments of pre-Enlightenment thought, a 'return of the repressed' of sorts - such as that embodied by the chimerical dimensions of preand early cinema17), Buchloh's acerbic description and implied criticism of the Beuys/ Guggenheim experience could well be applied to many a highly regarded art exhibition today - and this (obviously) does not only pertain to those group shows, curatorial projects and artistic practices discussed in this essay: indeed, the expressionist technique of 'shadows and fog' has become a pervasive scenographic trope in much curating that is emphatically not about the spectral and/or the occult - it is just there, the nemesis of decades of indulging in boundless luminescence. This 'obscuring' is quite simply a sign of the times, the glossolalic writing on the wall that ushers in yet another dark age, a new obscurantism. Indeed, only now does the Enlightenment seem well and truly over - and not just in the literal sense of receding light values in gallery spaces. Interestingly enough, Buchloh himself has since retracted some of his harshest criticisms of Beuys, most notably the overblown charge of his dabbling in a cryptofascist aestheticism, in an aestheticisation of politics rather than the 'proper' way round - an admittedly half-hearted revision that was occasioned by the posthumous 'discovery', among other things, of a planned memorial Beuys had proposed for Auschwitz-Birkenau. 18
In fact, looking at Beuys's work against the backdrop of today's overwhelming cultural obsession with the spirit world, with twilight, magic and mystery; against the backdrop of today's descent into darkness, the original Eurasian magus's legacy - and this is especially true of its light-flooded constellation at the Hamburger Bahnhof, where the presence of the idol was (thankfully) mediated primarily by way of archival documents, by way of documentation rather than séance - now looks positively positivist, relentlessly chipper in its insistence on the attainability and essential feasibility, through art, of social change: very much an Enlightenment project. (The title of the exhibition is 'Die Revolution sind wir' ['We Are the Revolution'], named after a well-known poster image of Beuys marching steadily towards the viewer, carrying the inscription 'La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi'.) This political, activist image of Beuys was equally crucial to the 2005 Tate Modern exhibition 'Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments'. Sure enough, the shadow of the shaman inevitably looms large (there is no point in falsifying history here), and the alchemist claptrap remains: fat, felt, gold-leaf and honey; blackboards scribbled full of esoteric formulas, crucifixes, denunciations of Marcel Duchamp and, above all, the holy scribble of the artist's signature as the very symbol of art's magical powers of metamorphosis. But at least, and in the final analysis, there is always also the political: his Office for Direct Democracy, engagement with environmental politics, his project for a Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, challenging the basic structures of art education, etc. Not just 'le noir' (the dark, the occult, the satanic), then, but both 'le rouge' and 'le noir' 19 - and that, it must be acknowledged, is a lot more than can be said of so many of Beuys's offspring, who naturally only paid attention when the master - or rather, his ghost - indulged in his (admittedly spellbinding) magical tricks, such as explaining pictures to a dead hare.
V. Paging Diogenes of Sinope
Now what does this current cultural interest in magic and the occult, in the spiritual realm and religious experience mean politically? What are the ideological overtones of this particular enthusiasm, which has all the makings and markings of a cultural pathology? And is much of the art currently produced under the aegis of this (largely curatorial) enthusiasm merely a symptom of this emergent pathology, or possibly - the more desirable option, I would venture - its most effective diagnostic tool? Furthermore, if it is no longer that of (or for) the masses, whose opiate is such a notion of magic, really?
How much (or, more to the point, how little) irony is still left in art's obsessive exploration of New Age phenomena at this point in time? Will contemporary art's stubborn drive towards a re-enchantment of the world plunge us back into the dark abyss of superstition from which the men and women of the Enlightenment took such great pains to rescue us, bathing its bathetic depths in the light of earthly knowledge? For 'as long as it is ineffective, magic = knowledge at rest', as Friedrich Schelling pointed out more than two hundred years ago - a sentence written in the same year (1797) as Francisco Goya's apocalyptic vision of the 'sleep of reason': leading us into the magical world of bedazzling dreams and interior experience for sure - but also producing monsters in the process.20 I will admit that I have long entertained fantasies of switching the lights back on - in museums, art institutions and galleries around the world. Literally so, if necessary. Let there be light! A harsh and pitiless glare, violent elucidation! And let us radically re-ignite the legacy of Enlightenment thought as that great unfinished project (or simply procedure) of disenchantment. A radical identification, that is, of art's secular thought with a defiant, ruthless materialism, with scepsis and godlessness - a refusal of all transcendence. May all that is post-secular melt back into air!
Twenty-six years ago, at the height of postmodernism, the enfant terrible of the German philosophical establishment Peter Sloterdijk published his magnum opus Critique of Cynical Reasondouble entendre implied in the notion of cynicism: that of the well-known, widely disseminated modern variety on the one hand (the dominant version, to be sure), and that of the original, ancient Greek 'canine' philosophy on the other (Diogenes's Cynicism, etymologically related to the Greek word for dog, kuon). Sloterdijk famously used this original Cynicism, with its well-known, part-legendary record of bodily disrespect for power, tradition and everything else that is serious and true in this world, to formulate his Nietzschean critique of contemporary cynical reason. The farting, foul-mouthed and masturbating Diogenes is the book's immortal hero, introduced to the reader on the very first page:
- a partly provocative title alluding to the
The ancient world knows the cynic (better: kynic) as a lone owl and as a provocative, stubborn moralist. Diogenes in his tub is the archetype of this figure. In the picture book of social characters he has always appeared as a distance-creating mocker, as a biting and malicious individualist who acts as though he needs nobody and who is loved by nobody because nobody escapes his crude unmasking gaze uninjured. Socially he is an urban figure who maintains his cutting edge in the goings-on of the ancient metropolises. He could be characterised as the earliest example of declassed or plebeian intelligence. His 'cynical' turn against the arrogance and the moral trade secrets of higher civilisation presupposes the city, together with its successes and shadows.21
Two elements stand out in Sloterdijk's presentation of the archetypal cynic (who is now more commonly known as an ironist): the notion of a 'declassed or plebeian intelligence' - concepts that figure prominently in most accepted genealogies of the figure of the modern artist, of the 'painter of modern life', of modern art as a habitus - and a remarkable emphasis on the city, an 'urban intelligence'. The process of disenchantment and Enlightenment - in both its established 'poetic' and literal sense - are inextricably linked to processes of urbanisation. 22 The 'kynic' has no place or confidence in nature (he is 'against nature', much like the dandy Jean Des Esseintes: an inspiring cynic), that murky netherworld of spells, mysteries, mirages and all kinds of 'natural' magic which belongs to the decidedly anti-urban Romantic imagination, but also to the ancien régime, with its rituals and Rasputins, its opiate and its masses: religious services, that is, not people.
'To write notes upon notes, to produce glosses upon glosses and to always remain subordinated to the "main text" could be a condition that for a long time - say, since the disappearance of a certain type of "modernist" understanding of art and thought - has haunted contemporary experience: a sense of being relegated to the margins of history, power, geopolitical space, language and culture.' Sven-Olov Wallenstein, 'The Footnote Condition', in Nikolai Molok (ed.), 2. Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art: Footnotes (exh. cat.), Moscow: Artchronika, 2007, p.24.
Joseph Backstein, 'The Origin of Species (Theses on Art in the Era of Social Darwinism)', in N. Molok (ed.), 2. Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, op. cit. , p. 30.
A group show consisting of some sixty-plus, primarily Moscow-based artists, this exhibition sought to address, without the slightest trace of irony, 'the mystery of being'. See N. Molok (ed.), 2. Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, op. cit. , p.93-95. The historical echoes of Russian mysticism and nineteenth-century Slavophilia resonated in the exhibition's righteous ambition 'to take a look at man … not from the perspective of the latest fashionable philosophy, but through the eyes of someone who believes in life in all its manifestations, which is a radical departure from the conventional outlook of modern art'. Kulik's short catalogue entry concluded on the following note: 'The "I Believe" project will not be about religious doctrines. Central to it is not the believer, who already knows the truth, but the doubting person still seeking the truth. Central to it is the shaking experiences when person [sic] is faced with the mystery of life that is akin to a religious revelation.' Ibid., p.95. See also Slavoj Žižek in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: 'In our officially atheistic, hedonistic, post-traditional secular culture, where nobody is ready to confess his belief in public, the underlying structure of belief is all the more pervasive - we all secretly believe.' Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion, London and New York: Verso, 2001, p.88.
Etymological precision, of course, is everything in this semantic minefield; when discussing 'magic', it is clear that we are not referring to the illusionist art of conjuring tricks (although that 'reduced' view of magic has become a powerful artistic and curatorial metaphor in its own right; we will be coming back to this point later in this essay), but to the generalised realm of the 'supernatural', and to the regime of the spiritual as opposed to the material. 'Magic' (or sorcery) here signifies both a technique and a model of essentially religious thought - either a type of 'enchantment', in Max Weber's sense of the word, or a form of thought that is anchored in an enchanted view of the world.
Press release for the exhibition, available at http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Manifs.nsf/ AllExpositions/8FFCAB4983627A50C12574B00043BDF9?OpenDocument&sessionM=2.9.1&L=2 (last accessed on 30 October 2008).
Ibid.
As we already know, the curators of 'Traces du sacré' departed from a view of art that identifies it as 'the secular outlet for an irrepressible need for spirituality in a completely secular world'. Many critics and commentators have argued, however, that we no longer live in such a secularised world (did we ever?) but in a 'post-secular' one instead; see for instance Jürgen Habermas's widely read 'Notes on a Post-Secular Society', first published in German in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik in April 2008. If anything, the deluge of spiritual-themed, occultist or 'mystical' art exhibitions in the last couple of years - and perhaps we could even go as far as including documenta 12 (2007) in this list - has certainly signalled the advent of such a post-secular society: a society, precisely, that looks at art with explicit hopes of partial re-enchantment as a way out of the arid cul-de-sac of complete secularisation. It is clear that the revival of strong (and strongly politicised) religious passions in East (Islamic fundamentalism) and West (Christian fundamentalism) is part of this cultural shift - as is the general pathology of that which is known as 'New Age': a throwback, in fact, to a really Old Age.
I am writing this essay at a time when everywhere around us financial markets are teetering on the brink of collapse, forcing governments around the world to come to the rescue of bankers who built their improbable fortunes on deregulation, on haute finance as sheer hocus-pocus (no pun intended) - a fact which has led some impatient commentators to venture the rebirth of socialism. One particularly stirring example has been the BBC's feature on the renewed popularity of Marxist thought (complete with seriously increased sales of Capital) amid the credit crunch; see http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/europe/7679758.stm (last accessed on 30 October 2008).
Manifesta 6 was cancelled following a dispute between the curators - Mai Abu El Dahab, Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel - and Nicosia for Art Ltd., a city-run organisation in charge of coordinating the exhibition. The dispute originated in the curators' intention to locate the 'exhibition' (an experimental art school) on both the Turkish and the Greek sides of the island. For the curators' account of the dispute, see http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/3270 (last accessed on 18 November 2008).
Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg, 'The Soul, or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls', in Rana Dasgupta, Stephen Haswell Todd and Dan Kidner (eds.), Manifesta 7: Index (exh. cat.), Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2008, p.119.
Anselm Franke, 'Something Is Missing', in Anselm Franke et al. (eds.), No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night(exh. cat.), Berlin: Kunst-Werke, 2006. The work of American anthropologist Michael Taussig (who also participated, as an artist, in Manifesta 7) is an important point of reference here, in particular his seminal 1987 study Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, in which Taussig sought to prove the anchorage of the 'demonic power of colonialism in the foundational difference and binary opposition of civilisation and savagery'. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p.467.) It is interesting, of course, to revisit this notion of shamanism in the current post-Beuysian art climate, marked by endless oscillations between the (apparently) opposing extremes of lethal cynicism and New Sincerity.
A. Franke and H. Peleg, 'The Soul, or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls', op. cit., p.122.
A life-size wooden sculpture dressed in a dark velvet robe, Goshka Macuga's Madame Blavatsky
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, 'Best of 2007: Gerhard Richter/Cologne Cathedral', Artforum, December 2007, p.306.
Witnessing the sunlight filter through Richter's 11,500-plus colour mosaic and light up the musty interior of the Cologne cathedral is an enchanting experience for sure, and it would be disingenuous to discount the sheer beauty of the work - which has of course played its part in the Domfenster's popular success, bringing to mind the highly ambiguous triumph of Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project at Tate Modern in London in 2003. Back in London, however, a recent exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery of the same colour charts that were used in the Cologne Cathedral window project thankfully helped to remind us of Richter's unscathed gift for ironic (some will probably say cynical) deflation: they were described, by at least one colleague of mine, as 'bathroom tiles' - a far cry from the lofty claims of sublime, luminous ecstasy that incessantly spiral around the Domfenster.
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, 'Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol, Preliminary Notes for a Critique', Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, Cambridge, Mass and London: The MIT Press, 2000, p.42.
The historical conflation of early cinema and magical practices is a well-researched subject, theorised by Tom Gunning in his landmark essay 'The Cinema of Attractions' (1989) among others; it centres, in part, on the pre-eminence of Georges Méliès (who saw cinema as a vehicle of boundless fantasy) over Thomas Edison (whose impulses were more journalistic). See Tom Gunning, 'The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde', in Robert Stam and Toby Miller (eds.), Film and Theory: An Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000, pp.229-35. Early cinema's roots in a culture of illusionism and related spectral concerns or 'ghostly matters' (dreamstates, hypnagogia) have been dug up time and again in the laborious process of film artists' transformation of the white cube, as the quintessential, primordial space of art, into a black box. Matthew Barney's appropriation of Harry Houdini is an interesting case in point - as is that of Aleister Crowley by Joachim Koester.
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, 'Reconsidering Joseph Beuys, Once Again', in Gene Ray (ed.), Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, Sarasota, Florida and New York: The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and D.A.P., 2001, p.75-90.
The reference here is to Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir (Scarlet and Black, 1830), the story of Julien Sorel, an aspiring dreamer of humble birth whose status-anxiety casts him back and forth between the contrasting worlds of the military (black uniforms, worldly power) and the Catholic church (red robes, celestial power). Marcel Broodthaers invoked Stendhal's binary symbolism of black and red in a now-famous letter sent to Joseph Beuys, then still a colleague of Broodthaers's at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, in which he criticised (with a good deal of neo-Dada humour, it should be added) Beuys's Wagnerian inclinations. Broodthaers's indictment of Beuys's delusions of grandeur, written in 1972, took the shape of a fabricated letter from Jacques Offenbach to Richard Wagner, dated sometime in the late 1850s. Broodthaers/Offenbach's letter to Beuys/Wagner (published in a German newspaper that same year under the title 'Politik oder Magie') served as an important point of reference for Buchloh's subsequent assault on the Beuys myth; it ends with the following exclamation, prefiguring the air of resignation I recognised in Joseph Backstein's voice back in 2007: 'Wagner, à quelles fins servons-nous? Pourquoi? Comment? Pauvres artistes que nous sommes! Vive la musique!' ('Wagner, what purposes do we serve? Why? How? Poor artists that we are! Long live music!')
Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, 1797-98.
Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (trans. Michael Eldred), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp.3-4.
See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
