The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art (Asthetics Today)

Rating:
Summary: Don't Diddle Declares Kuspit
Review: It can be read in several hours. It can be studied for several more. And it can be thought about for days on end. Donald Kuspit's The Dialectic of Decadence (129 pp.) is actually a republished essay. "Essay" comes from the French word "to try," and Kuspit does try to lay out the problems of contemporary art. We get to try to figure it out with him, since the book provides plenty of information besides the long essay: wonderful notes (themselves a concise education in art and esthetics), photos of the art mentioned in the book, and two Afterwords, one recently written by the author as an update.

Kuspit's theory is suggested in the subtitle of the book: Between Advance and Decline in Art. To quote a sentence from the Afterword: "In decadence, creativity ends neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with ideology, intimidation, and megalomania." Against the jingoism of much of the contemporary debate, with its Puritanism and ego-tripping, Donald Kuspit comes out strongly against narrowness, and for wholeness in creativity.

Such a wish is not exactly a new idea. What makes his wish so potent is the discerning way he sets it up. Calling on Freud, Semiotics, art critics, artists, knowledge of art history, and photographs of art, Kuspit lays out the historic development of the contemporary battle between (dialectic of) control and desire, between intellectualization and expressiveness. "In modernity, art remains fundamentally divided against itself, separating into semioticizing superegoistic and desiring expressive parts..."

Well, that takes care of Freudian and postmodern biases in one swoop! Usually however, Kuspit writes in a style that, while learned, is much more readable than much art writing. Although some of the ground he covers is not easy, he writes with clarity and without the dense prose of, say, ARTFORUM. Readers will have to bring their brains, but not dictionaries nor tolerance for a self-consciously erudite writer.

Kuspit clarifies the "dialectic of decadence" of the title by using examples. Donald Judd is the representative of high abstraction, with Sandro Chia and Baselitz Judd's main whipping boys. Judd becomes the bad guy, a prime example of dogmatic ideology. Kuspit quotes Judd (as he "enhances his own work") by linking Chia, Baselitz, and other artists to the dreaded "decadence." Here's Judd: "The public doesn't know, for example, that after Kirchner and Nolde, whom probably they don't know by name, there have been hundreds of painters flailing Expressionism, so that when they see Baselitz whipping a dead horse they expect it to stand up, or at least roll over." Kuspit also points out that the other side, figurative and/or expressive art, enters the dialectic by flinging at ideological art the barb "advanced abstraction is socio-communicatively inadequate." The book would have a pox on both their houses, although it is mostly upset with Judd. The author claims that each sect in art today is acting like a child, arrogating all goodness to itself, projecting all badness on the other, "decadent," side. The lack of wholeness, of real creativity, in this dialectic between the overly conceptual and the overly expressive is a bane of the contemporary scene.

Since the dialectic is not simple, Kuspit goes to some depth about decadence, about our human fear of it, about Freud's take on it, and the twisted way we need to see it in others to avoid our fears. He reveals the complexity of desire and its repression, and the dialectic of this in art and modern people. It all gets complex, but this IS an essay, and he and we are "trying" to understand, not being entertained.

On second thought, there are two problems with the book. The first is that terms are sometimes used confusingly. The terms "abstract art," "modern art," and "modernity" are over extended. With some art history background, the reader can set up his own dialectic with Kuspit about these terms. Still, they are never entirely clear.

There is a more important weakness. Kuspit quotes Nietzsche's view that "there is always anarchy among the atoms, disintegration of the will...Everywhere paralysis, distress and numbness, or hostility and chaos...The Whole no longer lives at all: it so composed, reckoned up, artificial, a fictitious thing." The book then agrees, "Such disintegration and artificial wholeness - the sum of decadence - is the only way of being modern..." Although in his Afterword Kuspit conditions this pessimism by saying there's no hope of being whole as a modern artist until the pursuit of novelty as novelty ceases, there is still an important point missed here. Are there really no models of de-fragmenting in contemporary existence? Doesn't the very atomistic state of science and nature also include an aspect of design and order in chaos, of wholeness? The scientist Edward O. Wilson uses the term "consilience," suggesting that apparent fragmentation might well have wholeness. And artists, looking closely at the world of nature from which they spring, likewise might find a sense of wholeness.

Overall though, The Dialectic of Decadence shines a bright light on the fragmented state of art. Kuspit is especially passionate and learned in lamenting how artists and critics use "decadence" to widen the divisions between what should be a harmony of heart and mind: art.