Fredric Jameson and the No Wave Art Movement Essay

In postmodern art, history is self-consciously reappropriated and re-fashioned into new forms. Postmodern art, Jameson argues, was a logical outcome of late-capitalism, which in its late stage has allowed society to abolish the distinction between high culture and mass culture, producing a culture of degradation. This was first taken up as an aesthetic by Andy Warhol. In the text, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990, Adamson and Pavitt note that Jameson, â€Å"found Warhol’s glittering series Diamond Dust Shoes to be particularly unnerving because of its incorporation of ommodity culture† (70). Art, according to both Warhol and Jameson is above all, a commodity, something to be bought and sold. Warhol’s work illustrates Jameson’s contention that, â€Å"Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production† (4). This conflation of art and commodity creates a field of cultural production that is incapable of depth and v aluable social critique. According to Jameson, the abstract aesthetic of modernism was an expression of the new social forms of abstraction specif ic to capitalism. In modernism, the universalization of the money-form manifests as a range of social abstractions including, for example, society’s dominant â€Å"way of seeing† and representing the world aesthetically. In the age of global capitalism, the utopian sublime of modernism, to which Jameson referred, has disappeared, and has been replaced by the postmodern cultural logic of consumption. With the universalization of capitalism, the distinction between culture and economics has collapsed. In postmodernism everything, including art and culture, is subject to the logic of commodif ication. In the text, The Cultural Turn, Jameson submits that postmodernity â€Å"makes the cultural economic at the same time that it turns the economic into so many forms of culture† (81). This essay submits that the No Wave art movement that occurred between 1974 – 1984 in New York’s Lower East Side is indeed postmodern, by Jameson’s standards, and yet resists this conflation of art and commodity that Jameson maintains is characteristic of this paradigm. Jameson’s text, Postmodernism, suggests that with art’s entry into the commodity sphere art becomes propelled not by ideas but by money (Adamson et. al, 70). John N. Duvall is critical of Jameson’s linkage between culture and commodif ication in the postmodern context. Duvall writes in his text, Troping History, â€Å"It is precisely change that, for Jameson, can no longer be imagined in postmodernism, since aesthetic production has been subsumed by commodity production, thus emptying the modernist aesthetic of affect and hence of political effect† (4). Jameson’s characterization of postmodern art as enveloped in commodif ication overlooks art produced during this period that consciously existed outside the margins of the art market and acted as a resistance to the conditions of a commodif ied artistic arena. As alluded to by Duvall in the previous quotation, Jameson does not account for the possibility of political art production in postmoderism. As Perry Anderson notes, â€Å"by the positioning of the postmodern between aesthetics and economics,† Jameson omits, â€Å"a sense of culture as a battlefield, that divides protagonists. That is the plane of politics understood as a space in its own right† (18). As Marvin J. Taylor describes, â€Å"Downtown artists were profoundly aware of the failure of modernist revolutions, but were unwilling to abandon the possibility of a better world† (22) 1. It is precisely this urge for a better world that Jameson contends is an impossibility in the context of late-capitalism, and absent from postmodern art production. To classify the No Wave Art Movement as postmodern requires a working definition of this cultural epoch. The postmodern paradigm is commonly associated with a range of aesthetic practices, involving irony, parody, self-consciousness, fragmentation, playful selfreflexivity and parataxis (Waugh, 325). Characterized largely by the qualities of appropriation and simulation many postmodern artists addressed mass media and commodif ication in their 1 The terms â€Å"No Wave† and â€Å"Downtown scene† are used synonymously in essays that describe movement. So too are these terms used interchangeably in this essay. work, including those artists in the No Wave Movement, specif ically Barabara Kruger, who came out of this movement and whom we look to specif ically at the end of this paper. As Glen Ward notes in his description of the chronology of postmodernism, â€Å"More complex ideas about postmodernism quickly infiltrated the art world. Next to painting, photography and media-based work regained the limelight in the mid-1980s by seeming to provide a more obviously political postmodernism† (41). Rather than being incorporated into the late-capitalist system some theorists argue that postmodern art is a response to capitalist corruption, voicing an opposition to the world of commodities rather than becoming entrenched in it. There is no shortage of theorists and critics who have characterized the No Wave Art movement within the postmodern paradigm. As Carlo Mccormick describes in his essay, A Crack in Time, which appears in The Downtown Book, â€Å"†¦ etween 1974 and 1984 in Downtown Manhattan occurred the true postmodern moment: a time when modernism was most certainly dead and, unmoored from its schematics, creativity was based on flux, uncertainty, and searching† (71). The No Wave Art movement can be characterized by several recurrent postmodern themes including notions of authenticity; the Downto wn scene questioned the function of terms like authorship, originality, appropriation and tied them to the transgressive practices of theft, piracy and plagiarism. The second recurrent theme explored in the No Wave scene included performativity; challenging notions of representation in an environment of fragmented and multiple identities. Thirdly, the No Wave art scene is inextricably linked to its politics. As Taylor describes, Downtown art was activist and aggressive. Work was informed by the feminist movement, queer activism, AIDs, and poverty in postwar United States. As an expression of these politics, the No Wave Movement sought to criticize notions of institutional accreditation. This included an exploration of power structures, including the role of education, technical skills and technique. In her description of the Downtown Scene Gumpbert writes, â€Å"What so many Downtown artists of this era did share is that they conceived their work as alternative, if not outright subversive, vis-a-vis traditional curatorial and exhibition practices. Incorrigibly and resolutely defiant, Downtown artists interrogated systems of accreditation, broke down generic disciplines, and directly engaged with political issues† (14). Artists of the No Wave Art scene engaged with the political issues that plagued New York City at the time. This signif ies a potent antithesis to Jameson’s notion of postmodern art as vacuous and incapable of politicization. Taylor writes, â€Å"Suspicious of easy assimilation into the traditional Uptown art scene, Downtown artists mounted a full-scale assault on the structures of society that had led to grinding poverty, homelessness, the Vietnam War, nuclear power, misogyny, racism homophobia and a host of other social problems† (22). As an aesthetic movement the No Wave Art scene stood as a highly politicized rejection of the evolution of art as commodity. It was also a domain of extreme artistic production, â€Å"â€Å"From graffiti art to appropriation to Neo-Geo, virtually every major development in American art during that period seems to have originated in one or more of the mostly small, mostly storefront spaces that sprang up in the contested urban zones that characterized a neighbourhood in the early stages of transition from slum to middle-class playground† (Gumpert, 84). The scene existed actively outside the art market, residing largely in â€Å"informal alternative spaces† (Gumpert, 13). As an expression of an alternative antiestablishment attitude much of the work produced at this time took the form of graffiti art or performance art. According to Gumpert, â€Å"Artists, took to the streets in the late 1970s† (11). Notable artists of this time include, the graffiti works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Herrings works in the city’s subway platforms and on sidewalks and Richard Hambleton, whose work appeared in poorly lit downtown alleys and construction sites (11). The No Wave movement was also composed of a subcultural punk scene, a host of postmodern writers and experimental filmmakers and video artists. Most famously perhaps was the Times Square Show, that took place in 1980 in an empty massage parlour, with works from more than a hundred artists. These examples demonstrate the desire of many of the artists in the No Wave art movement to â€Å"breakout of the framework of the established art world† (11). The work that is categorized as No Wave was characterized by a certain ephemerality, which allowed the artists and their works to resist the constraints of the commercial market. This offers a critique of Jameson’s assumption that art produced in the postmodern paradigm is inextricably linked with an economic motivation. As Gumpert explains in the forward for the text, The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974 – 1984, A majority of the works [shown in these spaces] were process oriented and situationally specif ic, involving a relationship between materials, concepts, actions and locations. They were sometimes spontaneous, improvisational, open-ended, and often collaborative. The works existed within a given time and then ceased to exist. As a result much of this work was labeled ephemeral, the intent being to create an experience rather than a product, and new terms were devised to describe it, such as installation and performance†¦ During this period†¦ artists out of necessity created and took control of their own contexts (10) In order to preserve much of the ephemeral work produced between 1974 – 1984 in New York, it was archived and documented in photographs, notes, and films. Irving Sandler accounts for the motives behind documentation in the No Wave art scene, â€Å"[they’re] sympathies were countercultural, they believed that the documentation of a work was not art and thus not salable. They had turned to process art†¦ installation art, body art, and conceptual art because they did not want to create art commodities. Many also believed†¦ that their refusal to produce salable objects would subvert the art market† (24). This demonstrates a anti-market sentiment in the production of postmodern No Wave art. Jameson does not account for this type of art production in the theories that he forwards in his text, Postmodernism. Writing about the No Wave literature, Robert Siegle identif ies a central insurgency against established structures of culture that existed in New York at that time. He wrote, â€Å"It is, then, an insurgency, but not one that expects to break free of some kind of specif ic corrupt institution. It is an insurgency against the silence of institutions, the muteness of the ideology of form, the unspoken violence of normalization† (4). Siegle describes No Wave writing as quintessentially postmodern in its approach to the â€Å"silence of institutions† and to the â€Å"position of the speaking subject†. Rather than attempting to overthrow institutions, No Wave literature, according to Siegle, is premised on the attempt to understand how the discourse of institutions constructs who we are, thereby using that knowledge to problematize cultural discourse. Although in his text, Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency, Siegle speaks specif ically of writing, this assessment applies equally to all artists in the No Wave scene. Through the deployment of the postmodern techniques that Jameson describes, artwork in the No Wave context, was far from the depthless commodity that Jameson imagined. It was rather highly political, productive and subversive. In his text, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, Jameson furthers his claims that in postmodernism expressive depth is replaced by an aesthetic superficiality in a phenomenon that he describes as â€Å"the waning of affect†. This â€Å"waning† is directly associated to a diminished political imagination. Jameson uses a comparison of the work of painter Edvard Munch and Andy Warhol to evidence this modern to postmodern shift. He contends that in postmodernism historical depth is replaced by nostalgia. Simultaneously, parody is replaced by pastiche, and an art of surface and loss is substituted for a history which â€Å"remains forever out of reach† (198). Jameson feels, â€Å"it is no longer clear what artists and writers of the present period are supposed to be doing† (196). This invoking of nostalgia and pastiche creates a condition in which artists can only comment upon or reproduce past art. This is articulated with Jameson’s description of postmodern art practice as being characterized by â€Å"the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past† (196). In, The Postmodern Turn, Kellner and Best describe Jameson’s theory noting, â€Å"Coolness, blankness, and apathy become new moods for the decelerating, recessionary postmodern condition in an age of downsizing and diminishing expectations† (134). Jameson seems to articulate his own failings in his description of postmodern art. He admits that he is confounded by the postmodern and political work of Hans Haacke who questioned the institution and capitalism through his postmodern art installations. Of Hacke, Jameson writes, â€Å"The case of Haacke poses, however, a†¦ problem, for his is a kind of cultural production which is clearly postmodern and equally clearly political and oppositional – something that does not compute within the paradigm and does not seem to have been theoretically foreseen by it† (159). The No Wave art movement equally confounds Jameson’s theory towards a postmodern art that is bound by a sense of complicity. Much critique has been garnered by Jameson’s position on the art of the postmodern. Theorist Linda Hutcheon is critical of Jameson’s positioning of pastiche as a baseless technique, But the looking to both the aesthetic and the historical past in postmodernist architecture is anything but what Jameson describes as pastiche, that is â€Å"the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion. † There is absolutely nothing random or â€Å"without principle† in the parodic recall and re-examination of the past†¦ To include irony and play is never necessarily to exclude seriousness of purpose in post-modernist art. To misunderstand this is to misunderstand the nature of much contemporary aesthetic production – even if it does make for neater theorizing. (26 -27) Downtown artists actively sought to address this issue of art production within a capitalist system. Their work is characterized by a postmodern multiplicity. In his essay on the Downtown scene, Siegle notes, Far from being defeated by contradictions, these postmoderns take form it the cue for an alternative logic. Far from being rendered hopeless by the seemingly inevitable drift of (inter)national politics, they borrow form disinformation the ironic habitation of familiar forms for cross-purposes. Far from being paralyzed by the anxiety of past masters’ influence, they appropriate them for commentary on classic motifs (such as mastery, originality, autonomy, representation) and art-world structures (such as publishing houses, galleries, museums, and criticism). Far from feeling compromised by the investment economics of art, they turn the art market into a microcosm of consumer capitalism and subvert its operations. 10) No Wave artists, though they invoked themes of capitalism, were in fact openly critical of it. They did not create art with the intention of financial gain. Taylor presents Bourdieu’s theory on cultural capital to elucidate the artistic practices of those in the No Wave art scene and their pursuit for symbolic capital rather than economic. He writes, â€Å"If th e whole field of cultural production could be thought of as all those artists, poets, musicians, editors, publishers, critics, performers†¦ hen there could be subsets of this group who did not all conform to the desire for economic capital, but rather, and mostly because their work was experimental, sought â€Å"symbolic capital† from their peers† (31). Jameson argued that postmodernism marks the final and complete incorporation of culture into the commodity system. This integration The No Wave art scene, in fact, actively critiqued this condition. Though the No Wave Art movement occurred under the conditions of late-capitalism, the work produced during this period does not embody this notion of depthless commodity Jameson maintains is the primary characteristic of postmodern art. Barbara Kruger is an example of a No Wave artist whose work engages with themes of the media and the market while being simultaneously postmodern, anti-capitalist, and political. Kruger’s work, particularly her piece, Untitled, (When I hear the word culture I take out my cheque-book), serves as a response to the commodity culture postmodernism is so entrenched in. This work directly addresses Jameson’s concern that postmodern art is incapable of an authentic engagement with politicization. Kruger evokes many postmodern themes in her work yet avoids the non-criticality of commodif ied art practice that Jameson forwards. Kruger invokes the postmodern technique of pastiche recombining previously articulated styles while actively producing new meanings through this act re-appropriation. For Jameson, â€Å"Pastiche is a recycling of the past without the critical edge of satire or the subversive role of parody; it is a gesture to the past in a mediasaturated culture that lives in a perpetual present† (Murphie, Potts, Macmillan, 58). Where Jameson forwarded the notion that pastiche was merely â€Å"blank parody† (184) Kruger enacts pastiche as a meaningful technique. As noted in Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 – 1990, â€Å"She managed to break the conceptual barrier between art and mass media by selecting images from magazines from the 40s and 50s. Choosing them based on their poses and presenting phrases over them†¦ Stereotypes were thus turned into the vehicle for delivery of a totally different message† (368). Some of the postmodern themes deployed by Kruger include, the questioning of meta-narrative tructures, highlighting the decentred nature of contemporary culture, and the divorcing of sign and signif ier. In her work Kruger operates within the language and iconic system of consumer culture while offering a critique of those very conditions. As outlined in this essay Jameson’s theory of the cultural logic of late-capitalism fails to identify the critical aspect th at characterized much of the work produced under the conditions of postmodernism. This is specif ically demonstrated through the work of No Wave artists operating out of New york in the 1970s and 80s. While invoking the aesthetic themes common to postmodernism the work produced in the No Wave scene was highly political and did not act as a static representation of commodif ied art culture. The work of Barbara Kruger specif ically dealt with the concern of art as existing in a commodif ied global economy rather than simply falling victim to it. It was in fact the movement’s shift towards commodity that marked the No Wave’s scene’s decline. The year 1984 is signif icant to this movement’s trajectory. In his essay entitled, Playing the Field: The Downtown Scene and Cultural Production, An Introduction Marvin J. Taylor writes, â€Å"By 1984 the larger art world had encroached on the scene. That same year Mary Boone displayed and began to sell Basquiat’s paintings for up to $20, 000†¦ The major art journals, galleries, and auction houses had co-opted the restricted field of Downtown art, creating superstars and an influx of economic capital that would eventually overtake the symbolic capital† (36). It was exactly this move into the realm of the market that ended the production of postmodern art within the Downtown scene. Postmodern artists active in the No Wave art movement Jameson’s proposition that art made under postmodern conditions is incapable of exacting a political message. Works Cited: Adamson, Glenn, Jane Pavitt, and Paola Antonelli. Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990. London: V&A Pub. , 2011. Bertens, Hans. The Idea of Postmodernism: A History. London: Routledge, 1995. Cameron, Dan. East Village USA. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004. Duvall, John N. Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies. Albany: State University of New York, 2002. Hager, Steven. Art after Midnight: The East Village Scene. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. London: Verso, 1998. Kellner, Douglas, and Sean Homer. Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts. Culture and Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Perry Anderson. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998. Sandler, Irving. Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s. New York: Icon Editions, 1996 Siegle, Robert. Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Taylor, Marvin J. The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006. Ward, Glenn. Postmodernism. Chicago: Contemporary, 2003. Print. Wheale, Nigel. The Postmodern Arts: An Introductory Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.