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Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity
Johanna Drucker's "sweet dream" is for a new and more positive approach to contemporary art. Calling for a revamping of the academic critical vocabulary used to discuss art into one more befitting current creative practices, Drucker argues that contemporary art is fully engaged with material culture—yet still struggling to escape the oppositional legacy of the early twentieth-century avant-garde.
Drucker shows that artists today are aware of working within the ideologies of mainstream culture and have replaced avant-garde defiance with eager complicity. Finding their materials at flea markets or exploring celebrity culture, contemporary artists have created a vibrantly participatory movement that exudes enthusiasm and affirmation—all while critics continue to cling to an outmoded vocabulary of opposition and radical negativity that defined modernism's avant-garde. At the cutting edge of new media research, Drucker surveys a wide range of exciting contemporary artists, demonstrating their clear departure from the past and petitioning viewers and critics to shift their terms and sensibilities as well. Sweet Dreams is a testament to the creative processes and self-conscious heterogeneity of art today as well as a revolutionary effort to solicit collaboration that will encourage the production of imaginative thought and contribute to contemporary life.
Drucker shows that artists today are aware of working within the ideologies of mainstream culture and have replaced avant-garde defiance with eager complicity. Finding their materials at flea markets or exploring celebrity culture, contemporary artists have created a vibrantly participatory movement that exudes enthusiasm and affirmation—all while critics continue to cling to an outmoded vocabulary of opposition and radical negativity that defined modernism's avant-garde. At the cutting edge of new media research, Drucker surveys a wide range of exciting contemporary artists, demonstrating their clear departure from the past and petitioning viewers and critics to shift their terms and sensibilities as well. Sweet Dreams is a testament to the creative processes and self-conscious heterogeneity of art today as well as a revolutionary effort to solicit collaboration that will encourage the production of imaginative thought and contribute to contemporary life.
- GenresArtVisual Art
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
4 people are currently reading
83 people want to read
About the author
Johanna Drucker
97 books39 followersJohanna Drucker, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic, is Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 26, 2025
Feeling horny? Grab this book and flip to page 153. You'll find a photo of Family Romance, a "mixed media" piece comprised of four half-realistic, fully naked mannequins representing mom, dad, bro and sis.
Really need your hands free while you ogle? Break the spine of the book along this page; that way it'll lay flat on the table all by itself. Or, if you live in Southern California, you can head to the Central Library in LA and grab their copy, which has already had its spine broken in precisely this spot and is prone to fall open to precisely this page and this image.
I hesitate to add, " . . . for precisely this purpose," because there is no way I could know for sure what the "purpose" of the spine-breaker was, no way to know if this purpose was shared or how widely, no way to know if there was in fact any purpose at all. Among hundreds of LAPL books I've checked out, dozens have had broken spines. I can't remember another one that had an image of nude children anywhere in it, let alone precisely where the spine was broken; but let's imagine, in a mashup of the Infinite Monkey Theorem with Lacan's Missing Signifier, that there is at least one other book in these particular stacks that would seem, to me, to depict nude children in a semi-realistic manner, and that there is at least one other person in Southern California who would agree with me that this is what it depicts. Were this all to be true, the book I happened to check out wouldn't be special even in this regard. All that would be special about it from my
standpoint, perhaps, is that I happened to read some other inscrutable, overlong art-crit book which mentioned this one favorably, my interest was piqued, I swapped one for the other at the circulation desk, and I was unlucky (lucky?) enough to find my latest heist literally falling open to an unusally pungent image before I was able to read a single word. This is all that I ought to be certain of. Nothing I can observe about the book proves anything further.
This has been my inner rationalist speaking. My inner empiricist is not as sanguine. I was a library security guard during the early days of the internet and I found that lots and lots of people go to the library solely to look at things they're not able (or not allowed) to look at otherwise. I was an adolescent male during the very early days of the internet; I am now an adult male who is, I assure you, attracted exclusively to adult women; and I have had anytime access to the post-implosion internet for a long time. I think that the mom and dad of Family Romance aren't going to . . . work for most people like me. I think that this spine did not break itself and that it most likely was broken for the sake of the children.
What has any of this to do with "reviewing" the present book?
The last thing I want is for authors and artists to be held responsible for the ill deeds of nameless, faceless library patrons. If you declared that author and artist here are "complicit" in pedophilia, you would have a certain kind of point, but I don't think you would actually want to live in a world where that kind of reasoning carries the day. I certainly do not want to live in a world where any court of law would buy my story about the broken spine, even as I myself remain convinced of it. What I want is expansive civil liberties and a very high epistemic threshhold for curtailing them. And I want virtual places like this one, where bloated conjectures thrown out of court can be haltingly floated into the public square while all the other armchair art-philosophers reach for their squirtguns and slingshots.
In the padded cell of art-crit, expansive civil liberties are exercised profligately and defended courageously, and there is no shortage of playful conjecture; but I do fear that the prevailing epistemic threshhold is far too low, if there is one at all.
+=+=+
Drucker here practices the kind of criticism that I would be practicing if I, based on my ill-fated trip to the library, labeled Family Romance as a "pedophilic" artwork. There is only one difference: pedophilia is highly stigmatized and harshly punished everywhere a hard copy of this book is likely to show up; whereas "complicity" and its innumerable epiphenomena are mere rhetorical ciphers for art-critters to bicker over endlessly with no expectation of resolution and no fear of consequences for libelous (or just plain idiotic) statements. If an offense is harshly punished, so too false accusations of that offense; and if not, then not.
You object: The book consists almost entirely of laudations, not "accusations." What about that? Laudations can be false, as can accusations; we might suspect certain false laudations and certain false accusations to have common etiologies; conventionally, however, laudations cannot be "libelous." It's certainly possible to construct a farfetched hypothetical wherein what I am calling a false laudation does inflict reputational harm on its mark; but this merely suggests that one person's "laudation" turned out to be another's "accusation." I take that not to be the case here. When it's Positive Vibes Only, we are left without the conventional epistemic safety net that Liberal Democracies have settled upon to deal with false public ascriptions of action and intent. Yes, it feels heavy-handed to say it that way. It feels (and is) heavy-handed to compare freewheeling art criticism to false accuasation of a crime. But the only actual difference is the severity and poignance of the matters at hand. Epistemically and dialogically there is no difference.
I'm sure this argument is underwhelming if you serially bake yourself into cakes or sew pillows shaped like buttocks, but I don't know how else to parse the assertion, e.g., that the artwork blessing the cover of the book "plays with the inconceivable unreality of a staged image, daring us to believe in the fantasy it projects." I thought it was a pretty weak dare, hardly bold enough to be worth taking. Similarly, I don't know how else to parse the assertion, mere pages later, that another artist's works inherently "are works of spectacle, made for consumption," that "to characterize this work as a critique . . . would be extremely difficult." Nothing seems to be stopping Drucker from "characterizing" artworks pretty much however she wants. Why not? I am suggesting that no one is going to feel litigious as long as these ascriptions enhance rather than harm their reputation. That explains why the book was able to be published but not why it was able to be written.
+=+=+
For Drucker, media imagery permeates life widely and deeply enough as to permit most any contemporary artwork to be read in light of it, and to ascribe meanings and intents on this basis.
"We are so inhabited by the images of media life and so complicit with their fascination that taking them apart would serve very little function. How does one undo the image according to which the very terms of self and culture are constructed? An impossible task, like perceiving oneself as whole from within the embodied mind. We are fully interpolated subjects."
In this respect she has indeed sold short those more skeptical, "oppositional" semioticians from the golden age of Word Salad, those who simply can't abide such notions as that
"the function of aesthetics is to understand the way thought appears and is preserved in sensible form,"
or that
"reading cultural artifacts for what they conceal and how, as well as for what they reveal, is a crucial analytic instrument in understanding the social production of meaning and symbolic value in cultural systems,"
or that in
"the realm of symbolic discourse...representation constructs our shared, imaginary sense of the real."
If "fully interpolated subjects" can neither "oppose" nor "undo" their self-consitutive image environs, then what possible basis is there for thinking that we can "read" these images for "concealed" or "revealed" content? How on earth are we to simply decode "sensible form" to reveal the "thought" which it "preserves?"
Drucker has no positive account of this; there is only a negative account of the conceits to "oppositional resistance" and "oppositional critique." But the proverbial fish who doesn't know about water is no more able to "read" the water he swims in than to "critique" it. There is nothing even in a VISA logo, e.g., which says any one thing unequivocally, just as there may be nothing in a broken book spine to indicate precisely how or why it was broken; nothing to record the amount of time the book has been open to that page; nothing to record the location of the "reader's" hands while looking at that page; and so on.
Dare I say, also, that with 8 billion people in the world, someone somewhere is not "sharing" in your "imaginary sense of the real." If you want to be sure to find them you can look on the other side of the globe, as McLuhan did, e.g., but nowadays you probably don't have to (just like he predicted). Maybe just start with the public library and work out from there.
+=+=+=+
For Drucker, the foremost problem with those ever-oppositional
"aesthetics of negativity"
is that such theories and theorists
"never had a language for form in which material properties and their aesthetic appeal could be appreciated,"
not unless the artwork in question
"served some other "critical" purpose."
But this privileging of some such "purposes" over others is undue. After all,
"moral, political, and critical issues are equally rooted in belief systems that operate on tenets of faith. We've just come to assume that "political" values somehow possess, by their secular quality, a different relation to symbolic formations"
as compared with those more overtly faith-based "beliefs."
Drucker's tack here
"isn't to engage in celebration of religious works but to defamiliarize a habit of thought accustomed to construe the symbolic engagement of art with "politics" as more real than that of its engagement with other belief systems."
In other words,
"modern secularization shifted the values that fine art's autonomy was supposed to serve, not the role it was to play."
Indeed, this "symbolic engagement" with "politics" or with any other "belief system" can only be as "real" as can symbolic life writ large; hence the "critical" repression of "material properties" and "aesthetic appeal" to save maximum space for oppositional politicking was never as virtuous or as rational as it purported to be.
This point hits its mark squarely enough that the text might have broken off right here, or at any number of other early junctures, and would be better for it. Instead there follows nearly two hundred pages of question-begging laudation, a professorial love letter to "symbolic engagement," signed, YOU'LL ALWAYS BE REAL TO ME. That is the whole problem.
The thesis of "fully interpolated subjects," somehow able to "read" but not to "oppose," is the thesis that guides Drucker's parsing of not just "millennial aestheticism" but also of seminal abstractionism. In her account,
"Material indices and thematic threads are as inherent in the language of abstraction as they were in realist and figurative modes of image making. ...
"Abstraction is dialogic, and the dialogue was with figurative reference, networked connections to the real context of meaning production."
But this "dialogic" parsing of modernist abstraction as latent or unwitting reference is not quite the chess move she thinks it is. Really it just throws us back on the semantics problem: What exactly is happening with and to "meaning" as it is transacted, now in "dialogue?" What are "intentions" but a subset of "meanings," subject to the same sorts of signal degradation as the rest? And of course the real "political" question (the properly political question) is: How much of "meaning" is politically bankable, and what are we willing to bank on it?
Drucker seems to think that the understanding of all "symbolic engagement" as equally (un)real sounds the death knell for the founding abstractionist ideologies; that the understanding of all contemporary artifacts of "figurative reference" as being necessarily-and-always in "dialogue" with every other such artifact leads inexorably to the conclusion that "the search for universal languages of form" was a fool's errand. Without necessarily wishing to recapitulate those ideologies or that search exactly as they unfolded a century ago, I would ask: what sort of "symbolic engagement" can reasonably and responsibly be read into a Rothko or a Pollock today? We should be willing to stake everything on our answer! We probably never will have to stake anything on it, and we can all be thankful for that! But if we are chilled by the very thought of stakes, we probably have the wrong answer.
If college students taking a final exam were presented some Rothko or Pollock and were railroaded (as many undoubtedly have been, perhaps not in these words) into reasoning their way inductively to arrive at those other, more familiar, more widely-circulating "symbols" the painting in front of them is nowadays in "dialogue" with, to transcribe such bits of this "dialogue" as the voice of God can be made out to articulate during this brief undertaking, and to say as best they can what it is about the work's "form" that enables or necessitates precisely this "dialogue" to manifest itself, what are the boundaries of reason and responsibility within which this exercise ought to be carried out? As my art-school cohort used to say, channelling the "oppositional" true-believers in their midst only to mock them: "What's at stake?" How much should we be willing to bet that any given student's exam will evince precisely that "imaginary sense of the real" which is "shared" rather than some merely "unreal" epiphenomena of individual standpoint?
Drucker's avowed art-loves as portrayed here indeed expand greatly the boundaries of reason and responsibility under which the student might venture to eavesdrop on and attempt to transcribe the "dialogue" among art-images. If exemplifying this expansion of leeway was one of her objectives here, then she has succeeded at least in this.
+=+=+=+
Family Romance may be an anomaly, but it's not an outlier. Ostensibly if Drucker can offer this work as illustrative of a wider phenomenon called "complicity" then it enjoys full membership in her symbolic world and it is in "dialogue," latently if not manifestly, with such other members as she has experienced. If so, then this furnishes a certain kind of contemporary viewer (my kind, who is left utterly cold by the conceptual turn) with some highly bankable observations and assertions about the whole media-saturated mess.
Start here:
A very traditional musician I sometimes work with claims of John Coltrane's music:
"It won't make you laugh, and it won't make you cry."
The rejoinder of course comes from LeRoi Jones, who reports his cohort's response to the charge that you can't dance to bebop:
"No, YOU can't dance to it."
To find the limits of this kind of ecological relativism, we need to go further; we need consider inlier-anomalies on the order of Family Romance.
So . . .
Can a pedophile whack off to Rothko? Perhaps. But why would he?
He may surprise us:
"No, YOU can't whack off to it."
Or, unsarcastically:
"If you feel nothing for this music, you need a soul transplant. I'll perform it."
(Near paraphrase of something my college wind ensemble conductor actually said to us in rehearsal.)
As always, there's no accounting for taste, except when there is. I have seen people sit on drums and drum on chairs. Neither is routine but both are at least familiar and even expected in certain situations. Construing this as a matter of taste doesn't totally work. When faced with actions themselves, now, as opposed to mere symbolic residues of prior actions, the prospect of "reading" them as somehow in "dialogue" with each other suddenly is much less appealing. We have pretty good Bullshit Detectors for actions; less so for words and thoughts. And we are not even dealing with words and thoughts when we confront some canonical artifact of Drucker's "millennial aestheticism" but with something further yet down the proximate causal chain, hence something even less amenable to folk-psychological Bullshit Detection:
namely,
the "symbolic" aftermath of some action;
the action being the aftermath of some purported cognition;
the cognition being the aftermath of our purported "full interpolation" in and by media;
media being, now, one member larger in number, i.e. x+ 1 ;
and the circle of image-life being, finally, ripe for recapitulation, i.e. re-interpolation.
Of course x was so large to begin with that adding 1 to it is quantitatively negligible; but in the "dialogical" realm the humongousness of x means that we get a humongous dialogue payout, 2x + 1 , simply by entering one new art-image into dialogue with all those which preexist it. As easy as it is to create an image, to account for its entry-into-dialogue is pragmatically impossible. It jus' ain't gonna happen. So, the purported "fullness" of our own "interpolation" by media is not matched by a corresponding ability to parse the fullness of dialogue. We can hardly catch a glimpse at it at all, let alone harness it as an "analytic instrument." That's crazy talk!
Hence the latent pedophilic aspect of Family Romance
is just that: it remains dialogically latent, not manifest, even after it has in fact been manifested, now in deed rather than mere word, thought, or image, at least once, somewhere; and even after some third party has publicly noted the fact. Yet in this deed there is, somehow, no "complicity" of artist or author, even though their actions did, in a manner of speaking, make the later actions of the spine-breaker possible. How tf can that be?
Really need your hands free while you ogle? Break the spine of the book along this page; that way it'll lay flat on the table all by itself. Or, if you live in Southern California, you can head to the Central Library in LA and grab their copy, which has already had its spine broken in precisely this spot and is prone to fall open to precisely this page and this image.
I hesitate to add, " . . . for precisely this purpose," because there is no way I could know for sure what the "purpose" of the spine-breaker was, no way to know if this purpose was shared or how widely, no way to know if there was in fact any purpose at all. Among hundreds of LAPL books I've checked out, dozens have had broken spines. I can't remember another one that had an image of nude children anywhere in it, let alone precisely where the spine was broken; but let's imagine, in a mashup of the Infinite Monkey Theorem with Lacan's Missing Signifier, that there is at least one other book in these particular stacks that would seem, to me, to depict nude children in a semi-realistic manner, and that there is at least one other person in Southern California who would agree with me that this is what it depicts. Were this all to be true, the book I happened to check out wouldn't be special even in this regard. All that would be special about it from my
standpoint, perhaps, is that I happened to read some other inscrutable, overlong art-crit book which mentioned this one favorably, my interest was piqued, I swapped one for the other at the circulation desk, and I was unlucky (lucky?) enough to find my latest heist literally falling open to an unusally pungent image before I was able to read a single word. This is all that I ought to be certain of. Nothing I can observe about the book proves anything further.
This has been my inner rationalist speaking. My inner empiricist is not as sanguine. I was a library security guard during the early days of the internet and I found that lots and lots of people go to the library solely to look at things they're not able (or not allowed) to look at otherwise. I was an adolescent male during the very early days of the internet; I am now an adult male who is, I assure you, attracted exclusively to adult women; and I have had anytime access to the post-implosion internet for a long time. I think that the mom and dad of Family Romance aren't going to . . . work for most people like me. I think that this spine did not break itself and that it most likely was broken for the sake of the children.
What has any of this to do with "reviewing" the present book?
The last thing I want is for authors and artists to be held responsible for the ill deeds of nameless, faceless library patrons. If you declared that author and artist here are "complicit" in pedophilia, you would have a certain kind of point, but I don't think you would actually want to live in a world where that kind of reasoning carries the day. I certainly do not want to live in a world where any court of law would buy my story about the broken spine, even as I myself remain convinced of it. What I want is expansive civil liberties and a very high epistemic threshhold for curtailing them. And I want virtual places like this one, where bloated conjectures thrown out of court can be haltingly floated into the public square while all the other armchair art-philosophers reach for their squirtguns and slingshots.
In the padded cell of art-crit, expansive civil liberties are exercised profligately and defended courageously, and there is no shortage of playful conjecture; but I do fear that the prevailing epistemic threshhold is far too low, if there is one at all.
+=+=+
Drucker here practices the kind of criticism that I would be practicing if I, based on my ill-fated trip to the library, labeled Family Romance as a "pedophilic" artwork. There is only one difference: pedophilia is highly stigmatized and harshly punished everywhere a hard copy of this book is likely to show up; whereas "complicity" and its innumerable epiphenomena are mere rhetorical ciphers for art-critters to bicker over endlessly with no expectation of resolution and no fear of consequences for libelous (or just plain idiotic) statements. If an offense is harshly punished, so too false accusations of that offense; and if not, then not.
You object: The book consists almost entirely of laudations, not "accusations." What about that? Laudations can be false, as can accusations; we might suspect certain false laudations and certain false accusations to have common etiologies; conventionally, however, laudations cannot be "libelous." It's certainly possible to construct a farfetched hypothetical wherein what I am calling a false laudation does inflict reputational harm on its mark; but this merely suggests that one person's "laudation" turned out to be another's "accusation." I take that not to be the case here. When it's Positive Vibes Only, we are left without the conventional epistemic safety net that Liberal Democracies have settled upon to deal with false public ascriptions of action and intent. Yes, it feels heavy-handed to say it that way. It feels (and is) heavy-handed to compare freewheeling art criticism to false accuasation of a crime. But the only actual difference is the severity and poignance of the matters at hand. Epistemically and dialogically there is no difference.
I'm sure this argument is underwhelming if you serially bake yourself into cakes or sew pillows shaped like buttocks, but I don't know how else to parse the assertion, e.g., that the artwork blessing the cover of the book "plays with the inconceivable unreality of a staged image, daring us to believe in the fantasy it projects." I thought it was a pretty weak dare, hardly bold enough to be worth taking. Similarly, I don't know how else to parse the assertion, mere pages later, that another artist's works inherently "are works of spectacle, made for consumption," that "to characterize this work as a critique . . . would be extremely difficult." Nothing seems to be stopping Drucker from "characterizing" artworks pretty much however she wants. Why not? I am suggesting that no one is going to feel litigious as long as these ascriptions enhance rather than harm their reputation. That explains why the book was able to be published but not why it was able to be written.
+=+=+
For Drucker, media imagery permeates life widely and deeply enough as to permit most any contemporary artwork to be read in light of it, and to ascribe meanings and intents on this basis.
"We are so inhabited by the images of media life and so complicit with their fascination that taking them apart would serve very little function. How does one undo the image according to which the very terms of self and culture are constructed? An impossible task, like perceiving oneself as whole from within the embodied mind. We are fully interpolated subjects."
In this respect she has indeed sold short those more skeptical, "oppositional" semioticians from the golden age of Word Salad, those who simply can't abide such notions as that
"the function of aesthetics is to understand the way thought appears and is preserved in sensible form,"
or that
"reading cultural artifacts for what they conceal and how, as well as for what they reveal, is a crucial analytic instrument in understanding the social production of meaning and symbolic value in cultural systems,"
or that in
"the realm of symbolic discourse...representation constructs our shared, imaginary sense of the real."
If "fully interpolated subjects" can neither "oppose" nor "undo" their self-consitutive image environs, then what possible basis is there for thinking that we can "read" these images for "concealed" or "revealed" content? How on earth are we to simply decode "sensible form" to reveal the "thought" which it "preserves?"
Drucker has no positive account of this; there is only a negative account of the conceits to "oppositional resistance" and "oppositional critique." But the proverbial fish who doesn't know about water is no more able to "read" the water he swims in than to "critique" it. There is nothing even in a VISA logo, e.g., which says any one thing unequivocally, just as there may be nothing in a broken book spine to indicate precisely how or why it was broken; nothing to record the amount of time the book has been open to that page; nothing to record the location of the "reader's" hands while looking at that page; and so on.
Dare I say, also, that with 8 billion people in the world, someone somewhere is not "sharing" in your "imaginary sense of the real." If you want to be sure to find them you can look on the other side of the globe, as McLuhan did, e.g., but nowadays you probably don't have to (just like he predicted). Maybe just start with the public library and work out from there.
+=+=+=+
For Drucker, the foremost problem with those ever-oppositional
"aesthetics of negativity"
is that such theories and theorists
"never had a language for form in which material properties and their aesthetic appeal could be appreciated,"
not unless the artwork in question
"served some other "critical" purpose."
But this privileging of some such "purposes" over others is undue. After all,
"moral, political, and critical issues are equally rooted in belief systems that operate on tenets of faith. We've just come to assume that "political" values somehow possess, by their secular quality, a different relation to symbolic formations"
as compared with those more overtly faith-based "beliefs."
Drucker's tack here
"isn't to engage in celebration of religious works but to defamiliarize a habit of thought accustomed to construe the symbolic engagement of art with "politics" as more real than that of its engagement with other belief systems."
In other words,
"modern secularization shifted the values that fine art's autonomy was supposed to serve, not the role it was to play."
Indeed, this "symbolic engagement" with "politics" or with any other "belief system" can only be as "real" as can symbolic life writ large; hence the "critical" repression of "material properties" and "aesthetic appeal" to save maximum space for oppositional politicking was never as virtuous or as rational as it purported to be.
This point hits its mark squarely enough that the text might have broken off right here, or at any number of other early junctures, and would be better for it. Instead there follows nearly two hundred pages of question-begging laudation, a professorial love letter to "symbolic engagement," signed, YOU'LL ALWAYS BE REAL TO ME. That is the whole problem.
The thesis of "fully interpolated subjects," somehow able to "read" but not to "oppose," is the thesis that guides Drucker's parsing of not just "millennial aestheticism" but also of seminal abstractionism. In her account,
"Material indices and thematic threads are as inherent in the language of abstraction as they were in realist and figurative modes of image making. ...
"Abstraction is dialogic, and the dialogue was with figurative reference, networked connections to the real context of meaning production."
But this "dialogic" parsing of modernist abstraction as latent or unwitting reference is not quite the chess move she thinks it is. Really it just throws us back on the semantics problem: What exactly is happening with and to "meaning" as it is transacted, now in "dialogue?" What are "intentions" but a subset of "meanings," subject to the same sorts of signal degradation as the rest? And of course the real "political" question (the properly political question) is: How much of "meaning" is politically bankable, and what are we willing to bank on it?
Drucker seems to think that the understanding of all "symbolic engagement" as equally (un)real sounds the death knell for the founding abstractionist ideologies; that the understanding of all contemporary artifacts of "figurative reference" as being necessarily-and-always in "dialogue" with every other such artifact leads inexorably to the conclusion that "the search for universal languages of form" was a fool's errand. Without necessarily wishing to recapitulate those ideologies or that search exactly as they unfolded a century ago, I would ask: what sort of "symbolic engagement" can reasonably and responsibly be read into a Rothko or a Pollock today? We should be willing to stake everything on our answer! We probably never will have to stake anything on it, and we can all be thankful for that! But if we are chilled by the very thought of stakes, we probably have the wrong answer.
If college students taking a final exam were presented some Rothko or Pollock and were railroaded (as many undoubtedly have been, perhaps not in these words) into reasoning their way inductively to arrive at those other, more familiar, more widely-circulating "symbols" the painting in front of them is nowadays in "dialogue" with, to transcribe such bits of this "dialogue" as the voice of God can be made out to articulate during this brief undertaking, and to say as best they can what it is about the work's "form" that enables or necessitates precisely this "dialogue" to manifest itself, what are the boundaries of reason and responsibility within which this exercise ought to be carried out? As my art-school cohort used to say, channelling the "oppositional" true-believers in their midst only to mock them: "What's at stake?" How much should we be willing to bet that any given student's exam will evince precisely that "imaginary sense of the real" which is "shared" rather than some merely "unreal" epiphenomena of individual standpoint?
Drucker's avowed art-loves as portrayed here indeed expand greatly the boundaries of reason and responsibility under which the student might venture to eavesdrop on and attempt to transcribe the "dialogue" among art-images. If exemplifying this expansion of leeway was one of her objectives here, then she has succeeded at least in this.
+=+=+=+
Family Romance may be an anomaly, but it's not an outlier. Ostensibly if Drucker can offer this work as illustrative of a wider phenomenon called "complicity" then it enjoys full membership in her symbolic world and it is in "dialogue," latently if not manifestly, with such other members as she has experienced. If so, then this furnishes a certain kind of contemporary viewer (my kind, who is left utterly cold by the conceptual turn) with some highly bankable observations and assertions about the whole media-saturated mess.
Start here:
A very traditional musician I sometimes work with claims of John Coltrane's music:
"It won't make you laugh, and it won't make you cry."
The rejoinder of course comes from LeRoi Jones, who reports his cohort's response to the charge that you can't dance to bebop:
"No, YOU can't dance to it."
To find the limits of this kind of ecological relativism, we need to go further; we need consider inlier-anomalies on the order of Family Romance.
So . . .
Can a pedophile whack off to Rothko? Perhaps. But why would he?
He may surprise us:
"No, YOU can't whack off to it."
Or, unsarcastically:
"If you feel nothing for this music, you need a soul transplant. I'll perform it."
(Near paraphrase of something my college wind ensemble conductor actually said to us in rehearsal.)
As always, there's no accounting for taste, except when there is. I have seen people sit on drums and drum on chairs. Neither is routine but both are at least familiar and even expected in certain situations. Construing this as a matter of taste doesn't totally work. When faced with actions themselves, now, as opposed to mere symbolic residues of prior actions, the prospect of "reading" them as somehow in "dialogue" with each other suddenly is much less appealing. We have pretty good Bullshit Detectors for actions; less so for words and thoughts. And we are not even dealing with words and thoughts when we confront some canonical artifact of Drucker's "millennial aestheticism" but with something further yet down the proximate causal chain, hence something even less amenable to folk-psychological Bullshit Detection:
namely,
the "symbolic" aftermath of some action;
the action being the aftermath of some purported cognition;
the cognition being the aftermath of our purported "full interpolation" in and by media;
media being, now, one member larger in number, i.e. x+ 1 ;
and the circle of image-life being, finally, ripe for recapitulation, i.e. re-interpolation.
Of course x was so large to begin with that adding 1 to it is quantitatively negligible; but in the "dialogical" realm the humongousness of x means that we get a humongous dialogue payout, 2x + 1 , simply by entering one new art-image into dialogue with all those which preexist it. As easy as it is to create an image, to account for its entry-into-dialogue is pragmatically impossible. It jus' ain't gonna happen. So, the purported "fullness" of our own "interpolation" by media is not matched by a corresponding ability to parse the fullness of dialogue. We can hardly catch a glimpse at it at all, let alone harness it as an "analytic instrument." That's crazy talk!
Hence the latent pedophilic aspect of Family Romance
is just that: it remains dialogically latent, not manifest, even after it has in fact been manifested, now in deed rather than mere word, thought, or image, at least once, somewhere; and even after some third party has publicly noted the fact. Yet in this deed there is, somehow, no "complicity" of artist or author, even though their actions did, in a manner of speaking, make the later actions of the spine-breaker possible. How tf can that be?
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