Steven Shaviro on Warhol's Failure to Make Space

Someone recently compared me to Steven Shaviro, the American philosopher and cultural critic. Whether this comparison flatters, insults, or stands up to scrutiny, I'm not entirely sure; as a Professor of English at Wayne State University and a highly respected author, he's arguably smarter and more successful than me, but, on the other hand, I'm younger and better looking ...

Still, I'm happy to take it as a compliment; for whilst I don't know the gentleman in question, I am familiar with Doom Patrols (1997), Shaviro's theoretical fiction(s) about postmodernism in which he says many things - not necessarily true or accurate, but often witty and stylish - with which I sympathise and might wish to have said myself (You will, Oscar, you will).

I particularly love Shaviro's reading of Andy Warhol and his swish aesthetic. He is absolutely spot on to acknowledge the importance of Warhol and his pimples; an artist who not only understood how to be Greek in the Nietzschean manner (superficial out of profundity), but how to have done with judgement (I approve of what everybody does) - including the judgement of God, but in a far less aggressive, less hysterical fashion than others:

"For Warhol has none of the anxieties that plagued his great Modernist forebears, none of their transgressive urges or buried ressentiment."

Andy simply didn't care if nothing was true and everything permitted. Nor did he worry about substantial things disappearing behind their own shadows and losing their solidity, their palpability, their presence. For as Shaviro says, an artist is somebody who ultimately wants to turn the whole world into a simulacrum:

"It all comes down to images and nothing but images. [...] The critical spirit finds the world to be radically deficient. Images never satisfy it; it always wants something more. But Warhol just shrugs his shoulders, and suggests that enough is enough. The world, for him, is not deficient, but, if anything, overly full."

It's unfortunate, therefore, that even Warhol - by his own admission - simply produced more art junk, thus cluttering up the world still further. To make a little space, it seems, is the most difficult thing of all ...


See: Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols, (Serpent's Tail, 1997), ch. 16: Andy Warhol. 

Note: The complete text is available to read free on Shaviro's website: click here.  

Portrait of the Führer as a Young Artist (Or How Hitler Helps Us Counter Aesthetic Idealism)

 Adolf Hitler, Self-Portrait (detail), 1910

Hitler had a long and passionate relationship with painting; one that swung from the love and devotion of his early years as a would-be art student in Vienna where he produced hundreds of sketches and water colours, to his notorious rejection as Führer of almost all modern work as degenerate.

In Mein Kampf (1925), he confesses how his youthful ambition was not to become a great statesman, but, rather, a great artist. Indeed, even in the dark days of 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, Hitler told a somewhat bemused UK Ambassador: 'I'm an artist, not a politician. Once the Polish question is settled, I want to end my days as a painter.'      

Unfortunately, however, most of Hitler's pictures - whilst technically competent and not lacking in a certain charm - displayed only a mediocre and all-too-conventional talent; one that failed to convince the examiners of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, who twice rejected his application to enrol as a student (first in 1907 and again a year later).     
  
But some - particularly the faceless self-portrait above in which a 21-year-old Adolf sits on a stone bridge and dangles his feet over a colourful stream (possibly contemplating his own failure and growing sense of alienation and anonymity) - really have something intriguing and challenging about them.     

At any rate - and as Peter Beech, a freelance journalist and subeditor on the Culture and Review section of The Guardian (a paper not known for its Nazi sympathies) concedes - Hitler's work, whether we like it or not, isn't that bad. It's certainly superior to most of the outsider art produced by the criminal and/or criminally insane. Beech writes:

"I'm no expert, but I sense that the putdowns of the art world are overstated. Hitler's paintings are amateurish, but they certainly aren't an abomination - that came later. In fact, they're quite sweet. The man who dreamed up the death of the Jews proves to be a surprisingly dab hand at sunlight on stone walls. They show him nearly getting it right, or at least not getting it very wrong. This is much, much worse. Looking at these pictures, it's not enough to say they are something Hitler tossed off during his brief, early masquerade as a human being. The artist quite clearly has a grasp of a very nuanced and very human proposition: what is beautiful."
   
This, as Beech points out, is problematic - not least of all for those beautiful souls who think art has something important to teach us; that it's morally instructive and uplifting:

"What is the link now - if any - between aesthetics and morality? We all accept that our creatives needn't lead impeccable lives, but it's something else to admit that true monsters are capable of taste. ... Hitler's paintings, if we look at them, hard, should help us dismiss any lingering belief that we can learn in a moral sense from something that demonstrates technical accomplishment. They confirm, if we needed confirmation, that there has never been any relation between form and content, between what is pretty and what is right. ... If Hitler can do loveliness, then it has nothing to teach us. Beauty is simply beauty - and that's the truth."

Many have come to accept the banality of evil. But it's only a few as yet who admit also the superficiality of art. 


See: Peter Beech, 'Face it, Hitler's art isn't that bad', The Guardian, 29 April, 2009.