Anarchism, Punk, and the End of Institutional Art
"You might think that building quality furniture for yourself and others is a perfectly normal thing to do."
1. Anarchism
Today is the last day of an unprecedented sale at Lost Art Press on a number of its titles, including its top-shelf ones. The sale covers the Anarchist series by Lost Art proprietor Christopher Schwarz, The Anarchist's Tool Chest, The Anarchist's Design Book, and The Anarchist's Workbench. What is anarchism in this context? Schwarz answers your frequently asked question:
Since the early part of the 19th century, American anarchism has been best described as a “tendency” toward individual action. It is a reluctance to engage with large governments, corporations, churches or organizations. …for me it it is about disconnecting myself as much as possible from large organizations that seek to homogenize us, control us or – at the very least – trick us into buying a bunch of things.
Why bring anarchism into books on woodworking?
You might think that building quality furniture for yourself and others is a perfectly normal thing to do. I assure you it is not. Taking up tools and making something that lasts is one of the most subversive things you can do in this disposable society that encourages – nay, requires – rampant consumer spending.
2. Punk
I don’t often read something and wish that I had wrote it. “Punks vs. Posers” by B. Duncan Moench for Tablet is one of them:
Fifty years into our poser-filled age, we now live in a zeitgeist so devoid of genuine art and even earnest human engagement that the concept of seeking a life of meaning strikes us as an against-all-odds pursuit. Social media and posing took to each other like hand to glove. Silicon Valley and their smartphone dopamine addiction sticks created a world where nothing is real and no one can be trusted. Everything is a manipulation and, as evidenced by the recent news out of Google AI, soon no one will know completely if the avatar they’re conversing with online is human.
The answer to this corporate escape room, though, is not to “shun the world,” but to “shed it.”
Moench’s example for this is Dischord Records, founded by former Fugazi singer Ian MacKaye.
Rather than hope against hope that some benign major-label producer allowed him to create halfway meaningful work, MacKaye forged his own record label and distribution system. He took the venture many steps further, too. All his bands’ records and CDs would be sold directly—postage paid—through Dischord’s mail-order catalogs at prices often 25% cheaper than they were listed in record stores. Fugazi also famously refused to play any shows that charged more than the price of a local movie ticket. In response to the corporate strumpets demanding he pose for pennies and plaudits, MacKaye instead created his own world and welcomed the like-minded into it….
There is a model for change in America, but it isn’t posing for pictures while asking for permission from elites and their self-serious gatekeepers who pay your bills while thumbing their nose at the poor workaday suckers in whose name you supposedly operate, except, in reality, you don’t.
That model is punk, in contrast to the poser model.
Andy Warhol and Hannah Wilke were the maximalist personifications of the poser ethos. Unimaginative individuals who were masterful at manipulating wealthy donors and the art-going set into believing their pop culture obsessions represented edgy expressions of social transformation, they became icons and models for the next 50 years of boomer-influenced “edgy” self-expression as a business strategy that combined “progressive” poses with regressive policy. The administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama took the leftish poser philosophy and made it part and parcel with the state itself. Economically, they behaved almost exactly as Ronald Reagan and the Bushes did. But they listened to Fleetwood Mac and the Stones, and their wives weren’t just about “baking cookies.” So they were cool.
The crack against the boomers is salient. By the time Gen X was coming of age, the boomers had entrenched themselves and began wiping out any culture worth having.
The corporate takeover of the American music industry, not coincidentally, perfectly matched the timeline of the corporate heist of the American university system and the deracination of the working class from the Democratic Party. In all three industries, innovative yet accessible work was put forth at a staggering rate throughout the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. Then, like geese fleeing a charging mountain lion, all at once an entire flock of trends took flight in the opposite direction. Once the poser class gained traction inside these American institutions, by the early ’80s, all true creativity (and concern for the injuries of the working and middle classes) was pushed out. American art and expression returned to its Gilded Age form—malnourished, against the grain, and remunerative only for the very wealthy and well-connected.
He concludes:
It’s time Gen X and everyone younger realize that there’s no cavalry coming to save us. The Democratic Party and the GOP are effectively one monster with two heads, squabbling about how best to rule the nation on behalf of the Fortune 500. Our universities are now pyramid schemes (and professional sports teams) with social justice veneers. Holding out hope in any of it is a fool’s errand. If there is an American future, it won’t be built by participating in identitarian battles fought on handheld screens. Raising a placard and protesting institutions that don’t fear or care about the public is equally useless. Only by creating our own organizations and institutions—outside and separate from the unsalvageable ones now in power—can anything change.
3. The End of Institutional Art
I always considered storied critic Saul Ostrow to be too big of a deal to write for my publication Delicious Line, but he did and I’ve remained a thankful reader. (He is also a boomer, so let’s acknowledge the great breadth of the brush that Moench is wielding.) For Art Spiel, “Some last words on the Whitney Biennial as a cultural labyrinth,” he writes:
What the Biennial lacks is any sense of an intense intelligence throbbing beneath its surface. What we are given instead is a summation of contemporary art that consists of little more than cookie-cutter derivations of a limited number of forms and subjects, which indifferently accommodate one another. Gone are the debates meant to challenge existent core values and aesthetics positions—instead making art now takes precedence over questioning its practices and means. This is reflected in the exhibition design for the Biennial, which consists of skeletal display structures, seatless cubby-hole black box theaters, theatrical lighting, gossamer scrims, et.al, whose effect has all the charm of an art fair, a swap-meet and high-end boutiques all combined. Ironically given the lack of a way of finding a system to help viewers navigate the resulting maze, more suspense and anxiety are generated by the installation than the works presented.
Saul’s politics and mine are quite far apart, but his progressivism hails from a time before its adherents had stopped valuing freedom of expression as necessary to creation. The thinking behind the new efforts of accessibility and inclusivity does not.
[C]ommodity fetishism has come to be the dominant aesthetic and as a result the realm of contemporary culture is no longer a truly contested territory, but instead has become merely another realm of production driven by market forces. Not only might we fault the abandonment of experimentation, intervention, and self-criticality on the institutions and NFPs that nurture post-Modernist culture in the name of accessibility and inclusivity, but also on an educational system with its professional practices programs that advance the idea of having a lucrative career over that of being a critical success. Gone are the days of the historical, and institutional biases and philistine tastes that provoked producers to envision themselves as revolutionaries, resistance fighters, or at least visionaries engaged in a polemical battle that was a matter of life and death. This Biennial truly confirms that even the dream of being vanguard is dead.
Anecdotally, I can attest that artists newly graduated from school don’t know beans about professional practices, so I question how baleful is the influence of such programs. The benefits don’t seem to take. One would hope that the downsides wouldn’t either. But the rest of it acknowledges the same problems that Moench sees in the institutions and Schwarz in the organizations more generally. God as my witness, as I’m typing this out I just received an email from the MFA Boston. They have redesigned their logo. It is awkward and undistinguished. Boomer MFA director Matthew Teitelbaum introduces it like so:
Our new identity is more than a change in the way we look. It signals our ongoing commitment to make MFA Boston a space where people of all backgrounds feel welcome. We embrace diverse perspectives, challenge conventional narratives, and celebrate both difference and connection. This is true of the artwork and the people who come to see it. The MFA is a place for everyone, so we’ve paired our new identity with a new promise: Here all belong.
“Here all belong” is an active commitment from us to you. We understand inclusion doesn’t happen by accident. From eliminating unpaid internships to offering opportunities to see our presentation of “The Obama Portraits Tour” for free, and displaying artworks submitted by our community in the accompanying “Portraits of Leadership” project, we will live up to this promise through intentional action.
I invite you to join us in celebrating the many worlds that converge at the MFA. Whoever you are and wherever you come from, “here all belong” means here you belong.
“Here all belong” means, among other things, an opportunity even for those without pocket money to venerate Saint Obama and his consort and their associated theology of boomer coolness, in the form of paintings that look worse every time I see them. This is not a political point. Even if you think that Obama was a good president, this thralldom to institutional values, framed as progressive but reactionary in their own weird way, has enervated creativity on a large scale. The vanguard is dead because the people who think themselves revolutionaries and resistance fighters are in fact upper-middle-to-lower-upper-class institutional drones, or artists who strive for their favor. Poor Saul, a true progressive, is driven to doubt progress:
None of the faults I’ve identified are intentional or by design. The scary part is that they are the culmination of an on-going process in which one petty accommodation leads to another until there is nothing left to concede and to everyone’s surprise all that is left is a less than mesmerizing combo of augmented genres, decorative flourishes, and repetitive social commentary. That is because the sensibility and forces at work include a tremendously effective sense of alienation whose growth inevitably will, in the name of progress, lead to the denigration of any, and all criteria, which may be based on analysis, self-reflectivity and judgement.
Saul attributes this sorry state to the “reification and entropy of corporate capital’s instrumentality and its mythology.” You may be surprised that I, as a libertarian, agree with that in large measure. The economy is optimized for the comfort of the Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) and its subsidiaries. Congress has extended its copyrights over and over again, which hints at how free is our so-called free market. Every Fed chair since Paul Volcker kept the Federal Funds Rate as low as he or she could get away with because low interest rates mean high stock market numbers, high stock market numbers re-elect presidents, and presidents appoint Fed chairs. (It’s Jerome Powell’s bad luck that he caught the hot potato. It turns out that the Always-Wrong Club, as Paul Krugman called them in 2013, was right after all.)
The institutions that operate in that fake economy are optimized for the posers. Institutional art is dead. Individual action lives on. It is time to take up tools and make something that lasts.