Is art the conscience of culture?
Clement Greenberg, "Avant Garde and Kitsch"
Rosalind Krauss, "Reinventing the Medium"
Guy Debord, excerpts from the Society of the Spectacle (Chapter 8)
Richard Hamilton, "For the Finest Art, Try Pop"
Riding upon the melancholy, hopeless wave that I felt from last weeks set of readings; of our inability to separate ourselves from the structure of our culture as a bourgeoisie controlled apparatus and industry, one that consumes everything in its path and mutates it for its own means I felt a little lost as an artist. But, though my understanding of the readings assigned for this week I have come to have a more optimistic outlook on myself as an individual and for the art industry as a whole.
Art can be used as a weapon against the Culture Industry and Ideological Apparatuses of our society by creating works that directly reference our understanding and acknowledgment to this structure in which everything in our lives is contained. We may not be able to be free of these structures, but by utilizing various artistic mediums to illustrate our awareness of this predicament we can turn it back on itself and use the cycle of Culture Industry for our own purposes.
In "Reinventing the Medium" by Rosalind Krauss she specifically equates a "reinventing" of all art to photography and that through its obsolescence all other medium changed from mere resemblence to awareness. I believe that Krauss uses the word "obsolecence" to define the idea that photograph's reference to the world it captures is also a reference to itself, therefore it is obsolete because it is continually referring to itself while referring to itself. This obsolescence is what transformed photography into a theoretical object and "in becoming a theoretical object, photography loses its specificity as a medium," once again the cyclical nature of photography is highlighted in its essence and purpose. Photography has become more than aesthetics and historical relations, it is a theoretical object that has transformed the preconceived notions found within all mediums. After the introduction of photography in the 1800s, painter during the early 1900s responded to photography's superior method of resemblance by creating paintings which referred to the very aestheticism of painting, its method of being as a physical technical form; painting was referencing itself to itself much like photography has the innate capacity to do. And although this has been viewed by many, including Clement Greenberg in "Avant Garde and Kitch," as an unproductive period of time for painting I believe that it was vital for the medium to show it's awareness of the photographic medium by this shift towards aestheticism and obsolescence so that it may transcend beyond itself and become reinvented as relevant instance within society.
It is this mode of transformation and evolution highlighted in "Reinvention of the Medium" that we must be aware of and use when creating works of art so that we may use the structure and Culture Industry system to sustain artistic forms and combat the dumbing down, repetitious, and "kitschy" modes of the Culture Industry and Ideological Structure. We must take back kitsch and use it for our own means as discussed in "Avant Garde and Kitsch" to make it less useful for the bourgeoisie (ruling class) and to turn its impact against the cyclical structure that the Apparatus and Industry has created by using the idea of the politeriate as a collective whole, as a "mass" against ourselves. We will then use their "kitsch" against them. In recent contemporary art it has been Pop Art which I feel that has been the most useful in utalizing this method against the Industry/Apparatus and it is the idea of the "Happening" which may reinvent it anew. As long as we continue to cycle ourselves, reinvent, and evolve with the overarching culture structures we will be able to contend with its overpowering domination of the idea of the individual and in some instances, keep ourselves one step ahead.
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