Is there anything noteworthy about artists’ use of language in their work? We expect it to be different from our everyday use of language, but is it different from—to propose the antipodes—that of Stéphane Mallarmé or Nikolai Lenin? Well, let’s say it’s a little bit like both, but not the way you’d expect: as exemplified here, it involves the manipulation of truisms to the esoteric end of consciousness-raising—a transformation of belief, a revolution in attitude. None of these works—from the epistemological mumbo jumbo of Joseph Kosuth to Anthony lannacci’s high school yearbook, from Jenny Holzer’s manic self-contradictions to Barbara Kruger’s manipulations of the self-evident—provide information that is not available elsewhere. None of them demystify what hasn’t already been debunked and exposed. We are given what we already know, in capsulated yet socially assimilable form—over-the-counter, nonprescription medicine, no doubt with some temporary curative, enlightening power, but with no lasting effect. To again cite the extremes, we get either language as a somewhat porous vessel which can hardly hold thought any longer (from the “populist” artists), or language as a thick, dense vessel serving more ornamental than communicative purpose (from the “cognoscenti”). In both cases it is a rather pasty language, which sticks but does not bind.
Hans Haacke’s work perhaps best represents the first extreme, involving as it does the manipulation of public statements—so much of this art language appropriates advertising strategy—and Kosuth’s, with its heavy, commissar-style proclamations which try to cast a witch doctor’s spell over us, typifies the second. Both extremes try to use language to infiltrate our consciousnesses, a guerrilla behind the lines of our defenses; in an effort to upset conventional expectation, ordinary perception, familiar knowledge, they force language to implode. They beg us to question what the world’s about and what we’re about in it. The problem is that the language, whatever it subversively says and in whatever convenient format (poster, postcard), often ends up being ornamental—another display in the general spectacle of our society, involuntarily serving the society’s interest in the spectacular. It becomes intellectual entertainment, losing all its provocativeness, subversiveness, air of intrigue, and energy of outrage.
It may be that the intimacy of this small avant-garde space and the resultant cluster effect—the condensation onto a few planes and into a few vitrines of a lot of material, visually concentrating but intellectually neutralizing it—put me off, while at the same time fascinating me. I felt I was in a display of messages that failed, a kind of diorama entitled “Communication” in a museum of social history—a dusty corner attractive to archaeologists, specialists. The whole thing needed more room, the individual messages needed to be separated out, above all needed the everyday public space to make their point and have impact. Instead, I sensed that an art-world point was being made: “We are the Left, a united front, ‘solidarity’ ” (and not at all in the disarray of the Left in our society). These are the moralists who know what’s wrong and, implicitly, what’s good for us. It’s the old problem: art as psychosocial criticism, and the critics celebrating themselves. Simultaneously to this show, Kruger exhibited a few works in larger spaces elsewhere (appropriately overblown, in contrast to her miniaturized works in the avant-garde setting), vividly making the point about the entertainment value of criticality—its inflated status as tickler of our fancies, its deflated status as penetrating critique worthy of serious attention. What’s happened to criticality in art today is that its nihilistic tendencies have been checked. Disguised in the “new” strategy of going around in everyday costume, like a king among his subjects to find out what they’re really thinking (about him), it in fact adheres to an old ideal. This kind of criticality is not specious, but it has a tragicomic conformity to it. The exhibition was wonderful for art history, but trenchancy was lost through self-fascination.
—Donald Kuspit
