Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics

Author: Hal Foster
Year: 1985 (Bay Press)
Source type: book (collected essays)
Raw file: raw/books/foster-1985-recodings.md

Summary

Recodings collects Foster's essays of the early 1980s on the "limits and myths of (post)modernism, the uses and abuses of historicism, [and] the connections of recent art and architecture with media spectacle and institutional power." Central essays include "Against Pluralism" (pluralism as a position and an alibi), "The Expressive Fallacy," "Contemporary Art and Spectacle" (the "becoming-spectacle" of art) and "(Post)Modern Polemics." Foster argues for a critical, resistant practice against the collusion of the avant-garde with the market and against pluralism's leveling conformism.

Key Claims

• Pluralism as alibi and conformism: "Art exists today in a state of pluralism ... Yet this state is also a position, and this position is also an alibi. As a general condition pluralism tends to absorb argument." "Posed as a freedom to choose, the pluralist position plays right into the ideology of the 'free market'. ... as pluralism is without criteria of its own, old values are revived ... such as the unique, the visionary, the genius, the masterpiece." "Style, that old bourgeois substitute for historical thought, is preeminent once again."
• The "becoming-spectacle" of art: addressed in "Contemporary Art and Spectacle" — "the becoming-spectacle of art" and the "pervasive irreality of contemporary culture"; art "is today the plaything of (corporate) patrons," "art as a sign of power, prestige, publicity"; art "regarded mostly as entertainment or spectacle."
• The expropriation of the avant-garde: the avant-garde has been reduced "to an agent of formal(ist) innovation"; "an arrière-avant garde" functions "in terms of returns and references rather than the utopian and anarchic transgressions of the avant garde." The dandy and the criminal become bourgeois heroes; "in a pluralist state such withdrawal is no transgression."
• Sign-value / political economy of the sign: via Barthes and Baudrillard ("fetishism of the signifier"), the differential structure of the sign is "one with that of the commodity"; late-modernist autonomy has been eroded by "the colonization of the life-world" and the "corporate public sphere."
• Critique and the commodity: "the commodity is its own ideology (Adorno), the market its own accreditation"; the committed critic must use their out-of-placeness "to speak precisely, impertinently out of place," and seek "new publics and construct counter representations."
• For resistance (not transgression): Foster calls for a redefinition of "the avant garde in terms of resistance rather than transgression," and a "historically redemptive, socially resistant cultural practice."

Connections

Concepts: Ideology · Spectacle · Critical Architecture · Consumerism
Authors: Hal Foster
Debates: Critical vs. Projective · Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: The Fate of Critical Architecture (synthesis) · Capitalist Realism (Fisher)

Direct Quotes

"[T]his state is also a position, and this position is also an alibi. As a general condition pluralism tends to absorb argument."

"[P]luralism in art signals a form of tolerance that does not threaten the status quo."

"[I]n a system mostly given over to a (manipulated) marketplace 'critique' is no longer needed: the commodity is its own ideology (Adorno), the market its own accreditation."

"Style, that old bourgeois substitute for historical thought, is preeminent once again."

Open Questions

• Does Foster's "resistance" (against both pluralism and spectacle) translate into architecture, or does the "becoming-spectacle" of the architectural icon make such resistance structurally impossible (cf. Brott, Dyckhoff)?