It’s been a long time since I posted here. During that time, somethings have come and gone. Some of these things came from very different places but wanted to be together. They float around the universal.
Last week, Theresa and I went to Miami for the art fairs (Basel, Scope, Pulse, Aqua, Nada, etc.). Our first stop was Scope. One of the first things I noticed there, in several galleries, I think, were animals made out of car tires. They were rather realistic/representational sculptures. Over the four days we were there, I noticed several other sculptures involving animals that were in some ways realistic, but also either very rough or else somehow fantastic/scary (e.g. realistic Siamese twin jackals). Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific than this because given how “busy” our days in Miami were, my memory is a bit muddled.
These sculptures stuck with me primarily because on the plane on the way down there, I was reading over a debate about “Primitivism in Modern Art” that happened in Artforum in the mid-80s. The debate began after the then-editor of Artforum reviewed a recent MOMA exhibition that interspersed a collection of Modernist paintings and sculpture with a collection of objects made in “primitive” tribal cultures. I’m going to breeze past most of the details and most of the generalities, to focus on this point: the editor criticized the exhibition curators from a now-familiar cultural relativist point of view, arguing that they completely ignored the cultural specificity and irreducible difference of the “primitive” “tribes,” in order to prove the Western imperialist claim that beauty is universally recognizable. Though the curators challenged the accuracy and relevance of the claim in public letters to the editor, the main criticism was that the exhibit and subsequently published catalog presented “primitive” works that happened to be formally similar to Modernist without adequately contextualizing them and highlighting differences in driving intention and cultural use. This debate took place when postmodernism was coming to dominate in intellectual and critical circles, and it is a great example of basic pomo relativism.
This debate caught my attention because a few days before we left, I finished reading Alain Badiou’s book on St. Paul and Universalism. Badiou is engaged in a very ambitious project of resuscitating concepts like “Truth,” “Universal,” and “Infinity,” that have become more or less taboo thanks to almost 40 years of post-thought criticism. The more I learn about this project, the more excited I get. I still don’t know much about it, but it seems to be just what I’ve been hoping for: it “brings back” concepts that certainly haven’t really gone away, but does so in a way that affirms and builds on post-thought, rather than dismissing it. All I have to say at this point is that one of types of truth Badiou theorizes is “art.” Whether or not that’s the same as beauty, I don’t know.
About a week before we left for Miami, Theresa and I went to a gallery talk at which the artist explained his former devotion to breaking the conventions and rules of painting, his move to collecting objects when that got tiresome, and his recent return to painting with a newfound acceptance of all its humble conventions. He seemed completely unaware that a devotion to breaking conventions (in the pursuit of some absolute-perfection) is, itself, a classic modernist convention and that, by accepting the more humble conventions of painting–for instance, putting attractive colors on rectangular stretched canvases and hanging them at eye-level in a comfortable white-walled room–he had, in a sense, simply become a post-modern relativist who accepts the contingency and limitations of his specific cultural practices.
Before the plane landed, Theresa and I started talking about some of these things (those that had happened) and she brought up this question: Can the conventions of painting serve as something Universal in Badiou’s sense? Could they be something event-like, to which a Truth procedure could apply and a subject could be committed and constituted?
She also asked if the Universal is just an individual, personal thing or if it is “for everyone” or something…
