In her book, Venus in Exile: the Rejection of Beauty in 20th Century Art, Wendy Steiner, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, attempts to correct what she sees as a systematic degradation of the female body through the iconoclastic aversion of aesthetic beauty that typifies art associated with "Modernism," which she very loosely associates with a 20th century notion of the avant-garde. Steiner begins by mapping out a lineage of Modernism that finds its roots in Kant's Critique of Judgment, in which passionate engagement and search for beauty, whose archetype she notes can be found in the myth of Psyche, is eschewed in favor of disinterested objectification. For Steiner this cold objectification obscures and often, in its preference for mental faculties, does harm to the shape of and use of bodies (particularly female bodies) and physical engagements with the world. Employing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or Prometheus Bound as a prescient allegorical critique of Kantian aesthetics, Steiner then goes about tracing the influence of Kant's philosophy from Impressionism, in which the image of the body is obscured through method, on through DADA and Surrealism, which subject the body to the domination of the mind, Cubism, which scientifically dissects the body through primitive juxtaposition and collage, and eventually culminating in Abstract Expressionism and Conceptual Art, where the body itself is presented as a construct or apparition. In the end, Steiner attempts to articulate how strains within versions of Post Modernism, seem to be returning to the importance of bodies, domesticity, and pleasure.
On one hand, I find myself hesitantly agreeing with the critique at the heart of Steiner's Frankenstein allegory, that Kantian disinterest lessons the stakes of critical engagement and could allow us to unwittingly become advocates of monstrosity. But that critique is nothing new. Steiner herself, notes that the concern was raised a century and a half ago by Mary Shelly. And Shelly was not alone. By the mid-to-late 19th century, the same concern was being raised anew by Friedrich Nietzsche, who warned against this flip side of modernity in his essay, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" in which he argued that the object of study should always be in service of shaping physical, relational, and economic conditions in the present and not the subjugation of the artifacts of the past to some unquestioned ideal, or "real" past.
My issue with Steiner's argument has more to do with her reason for reading Kant's aesthetics onto a history of the avant-garde, given that, like Nietzsche, many of the artists associated with such movements outright rejected Platonic divisions of mind and body that serve as a basis for Kant's philosophical and aesthetic system. Not that Steiner is wrong to suggest that such a lineage existed, or that figures like Breton were misogynists, but it seems ambiguous as to what one is supposed to do with such knowledge. Part of this stems from a question of audience. Exactly to whom this critique is addressed – to art historians? to philosophers? to English departments? to artists? In other words, whose value system does she hope to shape or change?
To be honest, I don't have an answer to that. In the most positive sense, I could read this as addressed to art historians like Clement Greenberg, who have effectively repressed practices that allow for the embrace of pleasure, yet her critique seems to rely strictly on her interpretations of the works of art themselves, never questioning the speciousness of many of her readings. Take, for example, her critique of Duchamp on page 53, where she posits that his painting Nude Descending a Staircase "translates the nude into a system of lines and planes in motion, suggesting the fetish of the machine." As she does throughout the book, here Steiner seems to mistake the body in the painting with the body being represented, the implication being that a violation of any strict representation of a body is a violation of the model body. Again, this is not to say that Duchamp was not after a certain mechanization of body (though it has more to do with the mechanization of the painter's hand than the nude model), but to beg the question of why Steiner wants to reinstate some Platonic binary division in which humanity is the antithesis of machine and vice versa, especially given her initial critique of Kantian Idealism (and the ending of Shelley's novel).
And this brings me around then, to another book I've been reading as of late – Nicholas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. In this collection of essays from the late 1990s, Bourriaud does the opposite of Steiner in that he begins his work with questions regarding certain noticeable trends within the art scene of the 1990's, with an emphasis not on the meaning of the artwork but on what an audience does with it and can do with it. Bouriaud looks at how, particularly since Fluxus, the focus of art has shifted from representations of objects and ideals for a mostly passive audience toward an engagement of the economic and social relationships between an artist and an audience. For Bourriaud, this creates many challenges for those writing about and critiquing art, as well as those in charge of curating such pieces in museums and galleries, particularly since many of the pieces like Gonzales-Torres' Stacks, in which stacks of paper or candies are placed in the gallery with the invitation for the audience to take a piece, threaten to disappear in correlation with their effectiveness. For Bourriaud, this loss of aura is not really a new phenomenon. He maps out a brief treatment of art since the Enlightenment in which, at each point, one can see how art was always relational; the only difference in contemporary art is that subjectivity is not taken as an ideal to represent, but in light of the theoretical writing of Felix Guattari, subjectivity is produced through artistic praxis. As such, Bourriaud does not spend much time bemoaning wrong turns or correcting our historical lenses. Instead he opts to focus on tangible relationships in the present art world, particularly how this somewhat new turn in art raises interesting questions about the functions of current institutions such as the museum, the gallery, and art schools that until now have been trapped in aesthetic systems that value representations over relationships.
And that's a good starting point for talking about what we can do with aesthetics. As critics and scholars, do we see ourselves as gatekeepers, the ultimate mediators of legitimate practice? Often, by focusing on, as Steiner does, on delineating legitimate versus illegitimate practice, we limit and prohibit access to the production of subjectivity. However, Bourriaud, by addressing the problems rather as deriving from the institutional distribution of art and culture, suggests another option -- we could instead extend autonomy to the objects of our study, and spend our energy opening up the institutional barriers to those works' engagement with a wider public.
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