Nordic Summer University Summer Session, Majvik, Finland, July 24 – July 31, 2010
Study Circle 4: Process, Design and Aesthetics
bw fms bwre fmsbewe beweretä fmsbewetä
(Kurt Schwitters, Gedicht)
Bop bopa-a-lu a whop bam boo
(Little Richard, Tutti Frutti)
US senator Joseph Lieberman (D) once described Marilyn Manson as… “perhaps the sickest group ever promoted by a mainstream record company”. The interesting part is not so much that Marilyn Manson is called “the sickest group ever” – others have done that. The controversial part is, according to Lieberman, the fact that Marilyn Manson is promoted by a major record company. So, apparently being the sickest group ever would be okay, if only you are promoted by an obscure, underground record label.
Controversy, provocation and scandal have been a part of art for a long time. In modernism and avant-garde controversy even became a goal for many artists and art-movements. Quite often the provocations were aimed at the art institution itself and the bourgeoisie audience supporting and sustaining it. The most famous example is probably Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” – a urinal submitted for an art exhibition in 1917, but which was refused. The irony is, of course, that the controversial art, that deliberately wanted to subvert the art institution as such, subsequently has been canonized as major works of 20th Century art.
Whereas controversy, provocation and scandal more or less became an assimilated part of the art institution during the 20th Century, there was another controversy around popular culture. It is well known that Elvis Presley was only filmed from the waist up in his early TV appearances. Provocation has become an inherent part in marking in particular rock music as an underground- or subculture outside the establishment. Controversy was the sure sign of credibility. Rock has to a wide extent appropriated avant-garde strategies in pursuit of continued transgression of norms of taste and proper conduct. But even if controversy and provocation were tokens of credibility among the audience, there remained to a large extent a divide between art and pop-culture. Even if art has embraced the popular, and pop and rock has adapted to modernist and avant-garde aesthetics – and consequently we now live After the Great Divide (Andreas Huyssen) between high art and low culture – still, there appears to be an operational divide. This is the divide that Lieberman – probably unwillingly – points to when he laments that a mainstream record company is promoting Marilyn Manson.
On the one side, controversy and provocation have been canonized as part of the art institution, so controversial acts are acceptable in an underground or esoteric art movement. On the other hand, Marilyn Manson cannot be categorized as proper art, because Marilyn Manson is promoted by a mainstream record company. On the one hand, people like Lieberman lament that the forces of the free market, that we believe in and rely on as the guarantor of freedom, have been infected and contaminated by the sick and decadent that properly belong to the underground. On the other hand, artists and critics lament that controversy and provocation have been commodified and are now marketed by major, commercial companies, thus leaving no room for true, subversive art outside the market.
One artist showing yet another version in negotiating shock and commercialization is Andy Warhol. Parts of his work may be written into the art history of the avant garde. Simultaneously he employed motifs from popular culture – such as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe – and worked in ways unheard of within more “classically” trained artists, as when Xeroxing his images, thus pointing to art as one among other mass products.
Where Marilyn Manson and Marcel Duchamp definitely still are understood as existing on different sides of the “great divide”, Warhol arguably worked across it. Although statements like “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” today have become a kind of cliché, we should not underestimate the impact Warhol has had on art, popular culture and our understanding of social change at large.
Perhaps we should not as much talk of an after the great divide, but rather an across the great divide. Perhaps we should take a new look at how pop ventures into avant-garde and vice-versa. With this seminar we do not want to denigrate the canonization of the avant-garde or the commodification of the subversive in pop-culture, but rather opt for a new, critical look at aesthetic strategies and practices across the great divide – from the earliest dada happenings to the latest Lady Gaga video.
Please send your proposal to Claus Krogholm – clauskrogholm[at]mail.dk – no later than May 15, 2010
For further information on Nordic Summer University, the Summer Session and registration, please visit http://www.nsuweb.net/wb/
Tags: Andy Warhol, Lady Gaga, Marcel Duchamp, Marilyn Manson
