OTR Comment - October, 2003

The American Effect
Whitney Museum of American Art
July 3 – October 12, 2003

The most obvious complement to the Whitney Museum’s show “The American Effect” is not to be found in the art world at all. It is found at the Pew Research Center, specifically, in their yearly reports about global public opinion. The connection between these two things can be seen in a caption to Kim Levin’s review of the show in The Village Voice. The caption says, “How are we seen through the eyes of others.” The answer, as one might expect, is both complicated and simple at the same time. As the Pew Report for 2003 states, “The speed of the war in Iraq and the prevailing belief that the Iraqi people are better off as a result have modestly improved the image of America. But in most countries, opinions of the U.S. are markedly lower than they were a year ago. The war has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans, further inflamed the Muslim world, softened support for the war on terrorism, and significantly weakened global public support for the pillars of the post-World War II era – the U.N. and the North Atlantic alliance.” The show at the Whitney broadly reflects this mood. It also manages to capture an interesting way in which art is dumb.

Art is dumb in a very specific, one might say literal, sense. Art is dumb in that it doesn’t speak. It is non-discoursive, it doesn’t lay out thoughts and arguments in a linear or developed way. Generally, it isn’t structured in the way speech is structured or in the manner in which one might make a point in a discussion. If art has a language it has it in the way that images have a language. But the language of images has a great deal of indeterminacy. Images do not tell you what they are saying even though they are parasitic on language and lend themselves to interpretation.

Still, the word ‘lend’ in the phrase ‘lend themselves to interpretation’ shows that there is a gap between the language of everyday speech, politics, writing, etc., and the way that art relates to language. That gap marks art off as something that, while related to the broader world it is located within, has something of its own domain. Exactly what constitutes this domain has been a preoccupation of art for quite some time now. It is a version of the sometimes tiresome and frustrating über-question ‘What is Art?’ But it doesn’t go away. Art is still partly about that, about what it is, persistently and fundamentally.

As the old boundaries between art and not-art began to give way in a rapid and palpable manner at the end of the 19th century, various reactions to the problem sprang up. One of the more interesting claims, partially due to its extreme nature, was the claim that art existed ‘for its own sake’. Among other things, the movement should be taken as a radical attempt to shore up the internal identity of art while conceding that art no longer emerged out of the traditions and social relations that had given it meaning and identity previously.

Really there was something desperate about it, desperate and honest. It saw one thing with absolute clarity: art has lost its particular social role and with that loss comes either its complete absorption into other things or its complete autonomy. ‘Art for art’s sake’ opted for autonomy. In a way, ‘art for art’s sake’ was insane. And down the years its lineage led to rather insane, if fascinating and wonderful, claims by people like Ad Reinhardt and Robert Smithson that connected art, if to anything at all, with the sublime and the absolute.

The outcome of it all was that a lot of people realized that it’s ridiculous to think about autonomy in as severe a way as the art for art’s sake movement did. Whatever it is that art does, it exists in the same world that everything else does and, moreover, it is constantly cycling everything in that world through itself as its matter and content. The extreme formalism of ‘art for art’s sake’ can’t hold. It is constantly being refuted by empirical reflection. For every piece of art that claims a radical formal autonomy and complete immanence of meaning there is a viewer who looks at it and realizes that it could have only been produced hinc et nunc, here and now, or there and then as the case may be. Paradoxically, the only way that art could truly exist for its own sake would be to become nothing at all. Like Goethe’s Young Werther, the logic of purity culminates in suicide.

But this does not mean that art is simply politics, or sociology, or urban studies, or science. Art does things in its own way, it has its own language even if it must be recognized that that language is not a self-enclosed system. As some who have thought about the problem have put it, it has a relative autonomy.

One of the most interesting and sometimes absurd things about the Whitney exhibit is how much it relies on the curatorial wall text to explain just how each work exemplifies ‘Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003’. Lawrence Rinder, the curator of the show, explains that the “American Effect is about the ways in which America’s real and imagined effects intertwine to become a compelling source of themes, images, and ideas for artists around the world.” But there is something disingenuous about the statement. The show is about politics and Mr. Rinder ought to admit it. It isn’t about the themes, images, and ideas that America evokes, it is about the felt need to address the relatively sudden worldwide realization that the US is the sole global power. It is a show about a political problem. And this single, overriding curatorial concern is mapped onto a medium that simply doesn’t have the resources to talk in that way.

Peter Schjeldahl indirectly captures this feel in his review of the show for The New Yorker when he says that the specific works “don’t so much advance the show’s theme as huddle under it.” It is like a circus in which the curatorial ringmaster cracks the whip and demands that each work speak. But they cannot speak. In exasperation, the ringmaster tacks up a series of statements that often feel as if they would be more comfortable replacing the works altogether. From a curatorial standpoint, the show would have been most consistent had it printed out the contents of the Pew Report and printed them on white placards in an otherwise empty gallery space. The most interesting aspects of the show are the works that slip out from beneath the curatorial conceit and get back to the task of operating as art. But it is hard for them to do so. Those who defend “The American Effect” will do so because they are either openly or tacitly in agreement with the political idea that there is a problem with American hubris. But that is to have switched categories. There is a problem with American hubris. But we don’t need art to tell us that. Art does something else.

Author Notes