Introduction

This is not going to be a lecture on contemporary cultural policy in the Netherlands, although I would like to touch on that briefly later. If this country, and we as people involved in the arts, are supposedly “screaming for culture,” as some people [i.e. the campaign against the public art subsidies cutbacks] are now trying to make us believe, this strikes me as a strangely conservative tactics against conservative politics: conservative in the literal, and bad, sense of wanting to preserve something because that something in itself is thought to represent some “value,” without ever explaining what that value or quality is. If I were to characterize the value of a place like this, Piet Zwart Institute, then that it doesn’t take the arts – and that includes visual arts, media, design and architecture – as some value for its own sake, unquestioned, uncritical; but instead that we are engaged in a constant effort and process of questioning what we do in a larger social context.¹

Henry Flynt vs. Karlheinz Stockhausen

The relationship between art and political activism concerns the concept of art’s autonomy. In the Netherlands, autonomous art is typically understood in a dualism with applied art, which likely has its historical origins in the differentiation of “beaux arts” and “arts décoratifs” in 18th century France. The actual notion of the autonomy of the artwork, however, is rooted in late 18th and early 19th century German aesthetic philosophy, particularly in Immanuel Kant’s notion of “uninteressiertes Wohlgefallen,” “disinterested pleasure” of beauty (Kritik der Urtheilskraft, 1790). It positions autonomy in opposition to mere representation, by implication also to mere mimesis and depiction, and thus laid the conceptual groundwork for art for art’s own sake, including 20th century abstract art. Art was to be given a free pass from social, political and economic interests, an idea taken up by the Dutch liberal politician Johan Rudolph Thorbecke in the 19th century (in his famous 1862 parliamentary speech that “art is no government business”). It also meant that the art should not be judged on political, ethical or moral grounds – a necessary precondition for romanticism, including dark romanticism, up to contemporary industrial body art, or the use of fascist or pornographic visual language as aesthetic transgression in contemporary arts. (Think of Witte de With’s recent exhibitions Bodypoliticx and The Crime Was Almost Perfect.)

This program ultimately means: If art serves activist ends, it will trade in its autonomy because it will be (a) defined by political interests and (b) measured not only by aesthetic, but also by moral criteria (as it had been under the previous regime of the church).

Art-as-activism therefore challenges standard Western notions of art that have been in place from the Enlightenment period to high modernism (represented by such critics as Clement Greenberg, whom I will discuss later). A standard argument against art-as-activism and in favor of aesthetic autonomy is that art-as-activism risks ending up as propaganda, as it did throughout major historical periods and geographical regions in the 20th century, most infamously in fascism and Stalinism. Paradoxically, however, one can use Kant’s and romanticist programs of pure aesthetic pleasure to appreciate art that clearly functioned as propaganda – such as, for example, the Soviet avant-garde cinema of Eisenstein and Vertov, much of Russian constructivism, Italian Futurism where it served as propaganda art for Mussolini.²

The question is more complex for art whose politics could be called critically reflective rather than openly activist, from Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater to Harun Farocki’s films. This is also the kind of political art favored by most contemporary art curators today, and subject to contemporary political-aesthetic philosophies such as Jacques Rancière’s.

But in both cases (activist art that questions the concept of aesthetic autonomy, and reflective art that - however critically - maintains it) the notion of art stays more or less intact: In the former case, through a resorting to simple, established or popular visual languages (from political murals to the media interventions of the Yes Men; socialist realism being the most extreme example of this aesthetic), in the latter case, through leaving the notion of (autonomous) art largely untouched.

But what happens if art and activism get radically short-circuited so that art is being put into question both aesthetically and conceptually? For this, I would like to take the 1960s Fluxus movement as my example. Fluxus is largely known as a New York-based yet international movement of artists that anticipated much of what later became “performance art” and “media art.” But I’d like to focus on a rather unknown or overlooked aspect of Fluxus, namely the radical cultural politics of its founder George Maciunas, and its reverberation into subcultures of the 1970s, 1980s and today.

“DEMOLISH SERIOUS CULTURE” was a slogan that circulated on various subcultural stickers and flyers in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

This logo was designed by the British artist Mark Pawson in 1989 whose mail art booklets are also available at PrintRoom and WORM.shop in Rotterdam. Since 1989, it has circulated in countless zines, leaflets and graffiti, until it ended up as t-shirt merchandise:

The slogan had been coined in 1964 by Henry Flynt, a philosopher and musician closely associated to Fluxus founder George Maciunas. What is remarkable about Flynt, amongst others, is that he was against highbrow art while having coined the term “concept art” at the same time. Let me try to unwrap this seeming contradiction. In 1963 and 1964, Henry Flynt – along with Tony Conrad and the filmmaker Jack Smith – picketed the Museum of Modern Art and a concert by Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Lincoln center.

The group distributed a leaflet that claimed that Stockhausen had said in a Harvard lecture in 1958 `that “jazz [Black music] is primitive… barbaric… beat and a few simple chords… garbage… [or words to that effect].” Against that, Flynt’s leaflet stated that

Whatever path of development the non-European, non-white peoples chose for their cultures, we will fight to break out of the stifling bondage of white, plutocratic European Art’s domination. STOCKHAUSEN-PATRICIAN “THEORIST” OF WHITE SUPREMACY: GO TO HELL!”

Interviewed by the writer Stewart Home in 1989, Flynt said that

I have a lot of problems with modern European culture. I find European music to be very four-square, it really lends itself to computerisation. […] At the same time I was listening to black music and I began to think that the best musicians were receiving the worst treatment. The people who were doing the greatest work were despised as lower class, with no dignity accorded to what they did, while the stuff being promoted as serious culture and performed in the Lincoln Centre was absolutely worthless. There was no real emotion in it, the possibility of ingenuous experience had been replaced by an ideology of science and scientism.

It should be noted that in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno (who was a professional classical musician and music critic closely associated to the serialism of the Viennese School of Schönberg, Berg and Webern) and Horkheimer had infamously dismissed jazz as commercially commodified music. With his Aesthetic Theory written in the 1960s, Adorno defended aesthetic autonomy through a dialectical twist, redefining the late romanticist and symbolist notion of l’art pour l’art as art’s critically and politically resistant quality in a commodified culture.³

Standard histories and dictionary articles on Fluxus likewise put the movement into a seemingly autonomous-aesthetic tradition of the Black Mountain school and John Cage’s composition classes. While Cage’s principle of indeterminacy contradicted that of rigorous structure in serialist composition, and was informed by political anarchism, both schools nevertheless coexisted in the same system of contemporary classical music.

However, if we read Flynt and Maciunas, the story becomes quite different, and we get insight into an battlefield between applied and autonomous, Western and Anti-Western arts.

Henry Flynt’s concept art

The “scientism” which Flynt attacked in Stockhausen referred to 12-tone and serial musical composition based on mathematical permutations of musical parameters split up into rows of discrete numerical values (established in the Second Viennese School before World War II and continued in the serialist composition of Stockhausen, Boulez and others after 1945). In the visual arts, the analog phenomenon, and aesthetic, was abstract painting. Both serialist composition and visual abstraction shared what the American art critic Clement Greenberg had advocated as the aesthetic programme of artistic Modernism:

[that] the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. […] Thus would each art be rendered ‘pure,’ and in its ‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. […] It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium.

Greenberg thought of artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, perhaps also our namesake Willem de Kooning (who was a teacher at Black Mountain College).⁴ From a philosophical point of view, Greenberg oddly mixes the aesthetic theory of Kant and later 19th century philosophy with an applied ontological materialism – i.e. his focus on matter rather than ideas – when he links the purism of the artistic medium to a notion of modernism as an “intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant”; i.e. as if self-reflection lies in the medium of paint rather than in ideas.

This of course makes me doubt what I said earlier about the ethos of questioning our practices; is this just rehashing a Greenbergian trope?

And how does Flynt actually formulate a real opposition to this formalism, beyond an anecdotal appreciation of jazz over Stockhausen? His 1963 essay Concept Art defines concept art as an art “of which the material is ‘concepts,’ as the material of for ex. music is sound.” This seems surprisingly close to Greenberg if one only replaces the word “material” with “medium.”

The concept artist, in other words, becomes an expert for concepts just like the abstract painter is an expert for the material or medium painting, or the musician a quasi-scientific expert for arranging sound. Flynt himself names “structure art” as a precursor to concept art, and goes on saying that “[m]odern examples of structure art are the fugue and total serial music,” with mathematics as a second precursor.

How does concept art then differ from Stockhausen’s music, which Flynt attacked? The twist is: not necessarily. Its precursor “structure art” is, for Flynt, a negative term, used only as a vehicle for throwing away the musical traditions he rejects:

“The first step in straightening out for ex. structure music is to stop calling it ‘music,’ and start saying that the sound is used only to carry the structure and that the real point is the structure – and then you will see how limited, impoverished, the structure is. Incidentally, anyone who says that works of structure music do occasionally have musical value just doesn’t know how good real music (the Goli Dance of the Baoule; ‘Cans on Windows’ by LaMonte Young; the contemporary American hit song ‘Sweets for My Sweets,’ by the Drifters) can get.”

Partly differing from the later use of the moniker “concept art” in the 1970s, Flynt sees the term as a description for formal and mathematical phenomena that “are commonly said to ‘have beauty.’” The mathematical and logical phenomena he focuses on are, for example, logical paradoxes such as Goedel’s incompleteness theorem (in a nutshell: the proof that formal systems can not prove their own consistency, effectively an extension of the liar’s paradox).

Hence, Flynt’s concept art is just not a Pythagorean or Platonist art where ideas and materials, numbers and sounds or visuals smoothly coincide to produce beauty, like in Renaissance Neoplatonism, the golden section and other classicist teachings of aesthetic-numerical proportions (or contemporary mathematical aesthetics from Donald Knuth’s computer typography to Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractals).

In Stewart Home’s 1989 interview, Flynt pointed out that for him,

“the purpose of concept art as a genre is to unbrainwash our mathematical and logical faculties. At the same time it’s bound up with aesthetic delectation. I think these two aspects are integral to concept art, it’s not just an artificial pasting together of the two things, they actually change each other in the course of their interaction.”

In other words, the arts were attacked and changed from two sides at once, logical-positivistic (analytic) philosophy, and unrecognized or marginalized non-Western and “popular” arts.

The picketing of the Lincoln center was controversial within Fluxus. Many Fluxus artists saw themselves as working within the paths set by Stockhausen and other contemporary composers. Nam June Paik even had been Stockhausen’s student and assistant in Cologne. In European Fluxus, there had been an unstated rift between artists who followed the American minimalism of the John Cage school and those who followed the Nordic European performance shamanism of Joseph Beuys. In New York, the rift was between the group around Flynt, Maciunas, and the early minimal music composers and performers Tony Conrad and LaMonte Young versus fine arts-oriented Fluxus artists around Yoko Ono whom Flynt later, the catalogue Ubi Fluxus Ibi Motus, derided as “gallery artists.”

George Maciunas, Fluxus as anti-fine art

George Maciunas, who had coined the name Fluxus, gathered the international network of artists and organized most Fluxus events and publications, had supported the demonstration against Stockhausen with the following flyer:

The first cultural task is to publicly expose and FIGHT the domination of white, European-U.S. RULING CLASS ART.”

The typographic design is remarkable, since it uses exclusively American typefaces, Franklin Gothic Bold Condensed, IBM’s Courier typeface, and 19th century-“Western” style American semigrotesque typefaces, creating an in-your-face, populist design. It was fully consistent with Maciunas’ wish to establish Fluxus as a truly working class art form similar to Vaudeville, and working as popular amusement.

Maciunas’ Fluxus manifesto from 1963 demanded to

purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual’, professional & commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionist art, mathematical art, – PURGE the world of ‘EUROPANISM’.”

There is both overlap and disagreement with Flynt: overlap in the anti-art, anti-serious culture anti-Europeanism; potential disagreement in the view on intellectualism and mathematics where Flynt’s position is more complex.

Few people know that Maciunas was a studied graphic designer and architect, financed the European Fluxus festivals through his work as a graphic designer for the U.S. Army, and even intended Fluxus to be an applied arts rather than a fine art movement while ultimately questioning these distinctions. (A major reason why I picked Fluxus as my example in this lecture.)

Against the dogmas of modernist graphic design, Maciunas didn’t shy away from using tacky and populist illustration elements. Fittingly, he demanded that artists should work in nonparasitic, nonelite” ways:

In collaboration with other Fluxus artists, he designed objects that could be used as popular games and amusement:

…trying to sell them in a “Fluxshop & Mail Order.”

Here is a catalogue page of the Fluxshop:

Here is the European Fluxshop created by Willem de Ridder in Amsterdam in 1964:

In other words, art, design and retail – departments that we also have at Piet Zwart Institute – were all integrated into Fluxus, with one common, critical artistic vision. While there are later examples for such combinations, from Carol Goodden’s, Tina Girouard’s and Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Food” restaurant in the 1970s to the invitation of Motto Books as an art project at Witte de With in 2010, they seem to lack a similarly comprehensive artistic and political vision as Fluxus (how partly dated other aspects of Fluxus may be).

Maciunas’ art and design populism soon drew criticism particularly from European Fluxus artists. (My friend) Tomas Schmit attacked Maciunas for what he saw as Vaudeville and kitsch typography whereupon Maciunas replied in a letter:

“Fluxus objectives are social (not aesthetic). They are connected to the LEF group of 1929 [sic] in Soviet Union (ideologically) and they [are] concern[ed] with: Gradual elimination of fine arts (music, theater, poetry, fiction, painting, sculpt–etc. etc.). This is motivated by the desire to stop the waste of material and human resources (like yourself) and divert it to socially constructive ends. Such as [sic] applied arts would be (industrial design, journalism, architecture, engineering, graphic-typographic arts, printing, etc.) these are all most closely related fields to fine arts and offer best alternative profession to fine artists. (All clear until now?) Thus Fluxus is definitely against [the] art-object as non-functional commodity…. Fluxus therefore, should tend towards collective spirit, anonymity and ANTI-INDIVIDUALISM.”

Maciunas’ idea was to use Fluxus as a collective identity, having objects in the Fluxstore (such as the puzzle above) simply bear the signature “Fluxus” as a collective identity, and not artificially limiting the number of copies of Fluxus objects. What is normal practice in design became a provocation in the arts. His letter to Schmit continues as follows:

“These Fluxus concerts, publications etc – are at best transitional (a few years) & temporary until such time when fine art can be totally eliminated (or at least its institutional forms) and artists find other employment…. All LEF revolutionaries . . . were working as journalists or applied artists.”

It reads like a perfect fusion of Hegel and Marx: In the Marxist and Leninist tradition, reintegration of fine artists into production; in a Hegelian tradition, the end of art at the end of intellectual history. At the same time, it aligns with a deeply capitalist tendency of today, namely to eliminate the arts and redefine them as creative industries. The coincidence is one of materialism, or – to use Adorno’s terminology – commodification.⁵ Although formulated around the same time and being radically critical left-wing, the two aesthetic programs of Adorno and Maciunas could not be more different. And while Maciunas relinquishes art as an autonomous field of production, his ultimate aim is to create autonomous forms of communal living through art practice.⁶

LEF, Piet Zwart, Arts and Crafts

The LEF group Maciunas referred to was the “Left Front of the Arts,” an association of avant-garde artists the Soviet Union of the 1920s, whose members and contributors included Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Rodchenko and Sergei Eisenstein. It may surprise many of you that Fluxus was intended to be modeled after constructivism rather than Dada or John Cage. LEF’s manifesto, written by Mayakovsky, stated that “LEF shall fight for the art-construction of life,” against an “Oscar Wilde-like self-indulgence in aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics, in revolt for the sake of revolt.” This was, a clear statement against aesthetic autonomy as defined in 19th romanticism, but also in 20th century bohemian arts.

The fusion of fine and applied arts for social engagement, however, not just a program of communist agitprop. It also influenced Dutch (bourgeois) modernist art and design around the time.

Piet Zwart famously said in 1920 that “to make beautiful creations for the sake of their aesthetic value will have no social significance tomorrow” – a different, less ideological wording, but essentially the same message as LEF’s and later Maciunas’.

This program ultimately had its roots in the 19th century British Arts and Crafts movement. It informed Bauhaus, De Stijl, postwar modernism such as in the German design schools of Ulm and Dutch Design, typography and architecture, and even the “unitary urbanism” of the Situationist International (which was opposed to functionalism, but not to constructivism, proposing an “imaginist Bauhaus”).

In art-theoretical terminology, it marks a shift from aesthetics to poetics, in the literal sense of a shift from perception (“aisthesis”) to construction (“poiesis”). It was in sync with the shift in European continental philosophy from metaphysics to ontology in the early 20th century, from Husserl to Derrida. This is why I think that Jacques Rancière’s influential coinage of a contemporary “aesthetic regime” is problematic, because it lumps together opposing tendencies of the last two centuries. Fluxus, in its inner conflict of a social constructivist arts-and-crafts poetics with the reality of an early performance art movement that aestheticized daily life, is the perfect example of the clash of two regimes in the same practice.

The principal question and issues put up by Arts and Crafts in the 19th century are still not resolved: the traditional departments, practices and professions still exist as separate entities although in reality, there is more and more porosity between them. (From artist-run spaces like Schieblock that integrate interior architecture, retail, media design and graphic design next to fine art; or the fact that increasingly, projects of architects, designers, filmmakers and media creators are being shown as contemporary art.)

Intermedia and post-media

If Maciunas most clearly represented the populist arts-and-crafts side of Fluxus, then perhaps the most significant counter-tendency of canonizing the movement with high art reputability was Dick Higgins’ coinage of the word “intermedia.”

The first sentence of Higgins’ 1966 “Statement on Intermedia” reads like a rebuttal of Maciunas: “Art is one of the ways that people communicate. It is difficult for me to imagine a serious person attacking any means of communication per se.” But the text also goes up again Greenberg’s call for purism of artistic means of expression: “For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference.” From the earlier 1960s term “mixed media” to “intermedia,” it seems like a logical progression to Rosalind Krauss’ later term of “post-media” which she coined in reflection of 1970s conceptual art (which, as name says, was about concepts rather than materials) and in fully intentional opposition to her former teacher Greenberg.

Arguably, Higgins remains a traditional artist indebted to Greenberg because he still thinks of artistic practice as being focused on means of expression, only that these means could now be freely exchanged and combined – from the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, performances of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, minimal events by George Brecht, to Higgins’ own shooting with a gun on empty score paper and having the result performed by an orchestra.

“Post-media” ultimately did away with the material fixation inherent in traditional artistic practices like painting, and has become an important concept with which many contemporary artists identify, but it is also plagued with problems. From a media-theoretical understanding of the word “medium,” Post-media” simply is an abstruse term, since there can be no communication and therefore no art without some medium.

At the heart of the controversies and rifts about “media” in contemporary art is a simple linguistic misunderstanding. Greenberg, Higgins and Krauss understand “medium” in a traditional arts sense of “material or technical means of artistic expression” (Merriam-Webster), a notion existing in anglophone art criticism since the 18th century.⁷ This notion was canonical for defining the single departments of art academies until the 1970s, and to some degree still today: painting, sculpture, drawing, nowadays also photography, performance, video etc.. “New media” departments in art schools in most cases were simply courses where then-new means of artistic expression (such as film, video and later computers) were explored, often rather naively.

Here at Piet Zwart Institute we have tried to establish a media department on a critical media studies notion of media: namely media in the comprehensive sense of “channel[s] or system[s] of communication, information” (Merriam-Webster, same article, different definition), that means: systems where social, technological, political, economical and artistic issues intersect, and where artists and designers need to be aware of theses issues rather than naively playing with technology.

When many “intermedia” artists of the 1960s teamed up with engineers and scientists, finding employment in university electronic music studios and research labs, the critical dimension were often neglected. When Nam June Paik first built installations from record players, TV sets, video and other electronic mass media, he effectively reverted the ‘system[s] of communication’ into media in the traditional sense of ‘technical means of artistic expression’.

Still today, only very few so-called media artists and media designers use mass communication media as a means of questioning and redefining the arts – moving it away from objects and trademark performances to often collective, anonymous, mass-reproducible works and interventions that question the established economics of art. In this sense, Maciunas was a more critical “media” thinker than Higgins, the coiner of “intermedia.”

The biggest downside of a notion like “post-media” is that it gives artists and curators an easy excuse for no longer critically reflecting the media (and politics) of art display and distribution but retreat, as now massively the case, to white cube installations with no further questions asked. The white cube paradigm, by the way, marks yet another popular oversight: The issue of presentation, and space, is fundamentally one of interior architecture and, increasingly, network media – in a time where artists’ video work, for example, can be better watched online than in an exhibition.⁸

[video : Coolhaven, Art Is a Luxury]

Art is a luxury: autonomy versus heteronomy

I would like to apologize for having used the old-fashioned dichotomy of applied versus fine arts so excessively here.

It is a reality that one experiences as being much stricter and more divisive in an art school than even in the contemporary art world. In The Field of Cultural Production, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu proposes a radical revision of the terms “autonomous” and “heteronomous” (rather than “applied”) in relation to the arts. For Bourdieu, all arts are autonomous as soon as they are not based on a commission but independently produced to find their own market. According to this model, all Hollywood films and all pop music is just as “autonomous” as gallery art. Conversely, fine art is not “autonomous” when it has been specifically produced for a curated exhibition, a public or private collector, a competition, a stipend, a residency or a study degree. In that sense, the work made at an art school for study credit is never autonomous.

In reality, I would insist that there is no such thing as artistic autonomy, or autonomous art, in any absolute sense, simply because there is no art practice outside social, cultural, economic and institutional forces. (Saying that, I of course refer to Michel Foucault’s discourse theory, and I would like to come back to the notion of discourse at this institute later.) There are artistic programs that claim the contrary – from Adorno’s aesthetic theory (which still positions art in a dialectic tension between autonomy and “fait social”), the situationist “constructed situations” to Hakim Bey’s “temporary autonomous zones” or the various appropriations of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy into art practice; they all have, I am afraid, some romanticist and vitalist cores. While the same could be said for Flynt’s and Maciunas’ political utopianism, they nevertheless propose different answers than the aesthetic as the last resort of criticality and commodification resistance.

Fluxus and punk vs. discourse art

For Fluxus, “Demolish Serious Culture” became a self-fulfilling prophecy. In its own time, when abstract painting and pop art were mainstream, Fluxus was rarely perceived as contemporary art, but rather as a subculture of artistic performance happenings. The same is true for the Situationist International which had not been part of any art history before the late 1980s and had almost no art critical coverage in its own time.

Today, this history seems to repeat itself with a later subculture: punk and post-punk of the 1970s and 1980s. Given the recent flood of exhibitions, catalogues and essay books on punk, it seems as if punk and post-punk are on their way of being newly appreciated as a major art movement of its period, while artistic tendencies from the same period which were canonized in their own time – such as 1980s appropriation art and neo-expressionist painting – may even end up being historicized as part of post-punk. On close inspection, punk and post-punk could be read as another arts-and-crafts movement that seamlessly combined music, fashion, graphic design and commerce, which in its early beginnings even involved professional illustrators, fashion and graphic designers like John Holmstrom, Vivienne Westwood and Jamie Reid. And looking at the legacies of both Fluxus and punk, it seems as if the do-it-yourself media they developed – artists’ books, performance, no-budget super 8 and video moving images, zines – have become key forms of publishing in today’s art and design practice.

It seems as if materiality is becoming discursive. The aforementioned practices cut through old Platonic and Hegelian dichotomies of the material versus the conceptual. In 2010, students of the Piet Zwart Institute Fine Art Masters created a video documentary “Show and Tell: The Politics of Silence and the Power of Discourse,” based on interviews with artists, critics and curators affiliated to the course. In the video, Martha Rosler explains how her art school was divided between an anti-discursive painting program – which strictly did not want their students to critically research, but act as naive medium, in the occult metaphysical sense – and the conceptual art programs that ended up as an asylum for students who were frustrated with the painting program’s anti-intellectual approach. The dichotomy of these two programs replicates the old Platonic and Cartesian divide between idea (or mind) and matter.

The fact that these old dichotomies still exist in the Western visual arts is because of their history of trying to emancipate themselves from the lower crafts. In the European middle ages, the words “arts” had an entirely different meaning from today’s, referring to all professional disciplines of knowledge and craft. The “liberal arts” – among others: astronomy, mathematics, geometry, dialectics, rhetoric – later became the academic sciences while the forerunners of today’s visual arts, painting and sculpture, were part of the lower arts (or “artes mechanicae”) such as farming, shoemaking and carpentering.

From the Renaissance to today, from Michelangelo to Martha Rosler and Liam Gillick, artists struggled to be accepted as researchers rather than as the likes of farmers and carpenters. This is why in Rosler’s interview, “discourse” has a positive, liberating connotation which it doesn’t have at all in Foucault’s philosophy. And of course our present-day institutional struggles – the arts being in hogescholen/vocational educational system instead of the university system, the introduction of artist Ph.D.s – are all part of this history.

The situation can sometimes be absurd. This weekend, I just discussed with a colleague of mine, the American media studies scholar Wendy Chun, how the field of critical theory has almost completely migrated from university humanities to art schools. The cultural studies texts which I read myself as a university student in the 1990s now make up art school curricula – albeit often in reverse. From Nietzsche via Heidegger to Foucault and Derrida, much of 20th century continental philosophy denounced the old idealist divisions of matter and idea, making and intellect. Art schools, however, imported them as (supposed) conceptualism and part of their striving for intellectual credibility.

When closely reading “Demolish Serious Culture,” it is more than only a 1960s agitprop slogan, but an implication of these philosophies: Nietzsche’s favoring of Dionysian debauchery over Apollonian high art, Heidegger’s meditation on van Gogh’s peasant shoe, Foucault’s questioning of the structures of knowledge and representation, and Derrida’s “deconstruction” as a momentum of permanent denouncement of implicit metaphysics in any system.

How art is questioned today

On top of that, there seems to be massive loss of critical interest in the arts in contemporary humanities. With the turn from aesthetics to cultural studies, the arts have simply become only a few of many cultural practices and phenomena. What Flynt demanded in the early 1960s – that critics pay more attention to popular culture than high art – has happened in the meantime. Today, there’s infinitely more cultural studies research on Madonna than on Stockhausen. The academic discipline of art history is at a crossroads of relaunching itself as visual culture studies. (We recently published a booklet on this subject, post.pic.) Visual culture studies deal with any visual phenomena, from comic books to advertising to news photographs, and it deals with fine art only peripherally.

It therefore seems as is the emancipation of contemporary arts from popular culture came with its own drawbacks. If you are, outside museums and galleries, an experimental filmmaker, your DVD may end up being sold or rented next to a Steven Spielberg movie; if you are making experimental music, your CD will likely end up in a shop where also Lady Gaga’s music is being sold. But if you are a contemporary artist, your work will never be shown at Tattoo Bob (for example) unless you make that a conceptual art project.

Post-media, in Rosalind Krauss’ sense, boils down to artists having emancipated themselves from being visual producers, or producers of any specific means of expression. But if I am describing this as being problematic, then not because I want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is of course easy to say, with Bourdieu and Foucault among others, that as an institution we contribute to an institutional field of art, which in the end is the heir of the “high arts” that were originally controlled and heteronomously commissioned by churches and aristocrats, whose role has been taken over either by public institutions, private buyers, or a mix of both. By educating professional artists and designers, we are necessarily and intentionally part of that field.

However, what we see is that this field is not set in stone: Not only in the historical transformation of the medieval to the contemporary arts, the questioning of the arts in Dada, Situationism, Fluxus and punk, the revisions of the aesthetic paradigm in 20th century philosophy and cultural theory, and the reorientation of humanities to cultural studies. At least as important is globalization. We currently experience a globalization of contemporary art and design mostly because Western art paradigms are imported into countries like China as part of their self-initiated modernization efforts. (Basically, China and other non-Western countries import and create Western-style arts in the same way they import and create Western-style architecture, design and engineering.) The logic behind this is still an export model, if not a colonial model. In a culturally globalized world, Europe and America will face the situation that their notion of art will, at some point, not longer be accepted as universal, which includes the (Western-specific) distinction between fine art and design.

I would not surprised if the contemporary global boom of Japanese and East Asian popular visual culture will end up transforming Western and global visual culture and arts in similarly profound ways as Afro-American music has changed Western and global musical culture in the second half of the 20th century. This brings us back to square one, Flynt’s criticism of Stockhausen. In the interview from 1989, Flynt concludes that, at some point, his opposition to European contemporary classical music had become obsolete: “What happened was that rock became an incredible commercial success, people just became bored with serious music and it was forgotten. It was not an intellectual battle or a battle of principle at all.”

Populist cultural politics and being serious after all

Were Flynt and Maciunas thus of avant-garde of the creative industries? (Which might prove Adorno’s defense of, and insistence on serious culture right in the end.) Could the slogan “Demolish Serious Culture” nowadays also be used by Geert Wilders?

Indeed, if we read the [2010] election program of the PVV, then its vision of culture (on page 35) is “kievietseieren zoeken in Friesland, carnaval in Limburg” and “kunstsubsidies schaffen we af” (“lapwing eggs searching in Frisia, carnival in Limburg” and “abolish all art subsidies”). Is this a program with which Nietzsche and Michael Bakhtin, with their love for the Dionysian and the carnival, would have agreed?

I only quoted fragments of Wilders’ text. For him, searching birds eggs in Frisia and celebrating carnival in Limburg are expressions of the “respect for the many local traditions” whereas Nietzsche, Bakhtin and Flynt saw popular culture as the opposite: as subversive expressions and, at least partly, as disrespect and counter-currents to officially sanctioned discourses and traditions. Wilders, however, clarifies his demand to cut all art subsidies with the note that “we honor the subsidies for museums, libraries and our cultural heritage” (“We houden de subsidies voor musea, bibliotheken en ons erfgoed in ere”). Similarly, the Dutch coalition agreement from 2010, which radical revised post-war Dutch cultural politics, emphasized culture as static “heritage” and its preservation, while Flynt and Maciunas on the contrary opposed such a conservative and historicist view. The very reason for “Demolishing Serious Culture” was, after all, rescuing culture from petrification. The slogan itself became re-appropriated into fine art, as this painting by Ben Vautier demonstrates:

If we – at this institution – are, more or less and if we like it or not, in the developing business of “serious” culture – serious in the sense of the arts as a professional and institutional occupation –, then we likely do not want art to be considered a thing of the past, no matter what the Dutch governing coalition thinks, what Henry Flynt thinks or what visual culture research thinks. I do not mean art as fine art, but the whole of the arts; art as a dispositive, or a way of perceiving, thinking and making that might be driven by a certain habitus (to adopt Bourdieu’s critical perspective), or – more positively – a position or stance (Dutch: houding) of awareness and knowledge, maybe even sophistication, in one’s practice. But if this position is still being framed as “conceptual,” we’re stuck in old paradigm of concepts versus materials, and potentially in an infinite Duchampian deadlock of discursive self-reflections. (By the way, this infinite loop, had been anticipated and theorized as early as in 1790s romanticist aesthetic theory.)

I see some value with what the contemporary art critic and curator Marius Babias said in an interview a few years ago (although I disagree with the things I skipped from the full quotation): “If art is not a means of self-fulfillment and expression, what is it then? A kind of parascience […]. It does not suffice to have an art school degree, to be able to stretch up a canvas, somehow organize things visually and think that this would amount to a work of art. Nevertheless, an artwork may be greatly successful out of that misunderstanding.” While this statement generalizes Western art paradigms and lacks reflection of the social dimension of arts, it still puts the finger on our typical failures as art schools.

I like the notion of parascience because it is a useful description of what artistic research can be, beyond an inflated buzzword. Contemporary art also nominally took upon the form of parascience in few well-known cases: Alfred Jarry’s pataphyics and the Parisian Collège de Pataphysique, the Critique and Acéphale groups around Georges Bataille, the Situationist International, Art & Language, in our time perhaps Nettime and the e-flux journal (to lesser degree because both are dominated by professional academics). The reasons why many traditional academics feel attracted to these artistic parasciences is because they are just as much frustrated with traditional academia as Henry Flynt was with Stockhausen and contemporary classical music. Potentially, there lurks a big misunderstanding that the art school system conversely expects to be promoted to Platonic Academy ranks by institutionalizing the parascience and giving PhD degrees for it. But this is a can of worms I do not want go into tonight.

Earlier in this lecture, I quoted Clement Greenberg’s characterization of artistic modernism as an “intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant.” There still remains the question of how the ethos of permanently questioning and rethinking one’s practice that I outlined in this lecture, using Flynt and Maciunas as my key witnesses, differs from what Greenberg describes. The difference not only lies in the (seeming…) detail that Greenberg uses this criticality to promote “Western civilization” as having gone furthest in doing so.” Greenberg’s statement also deconstructs itself – in the sense of Derrida’s use of that word – by actually serving the opposite: the criticality Greenberg demands does not really question the system, but is only a rhetorical device to affirm it. Another example of such an argumentation is John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing from 1950, a text that tactically contradicts and crosses out itself over its entire duration. At the end, the performer asks the audience whether there are any questions, but no questions can be asked any more.⁹

I hope this will not be the case with what I just presented.