Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Schjeldahl is art critic for the Village Voice and contributing editor for Art in America. MaLin Wilson is an art critic, editor, and independent curator working in New Mexico. Robert Storr, an artist and writer, is currently a curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978-1990

University of California Press

The present widespread disarray and morbidity of the arts in Western civilization represent, it occurs to me, a long-term toxic effect of the atom-bomb terror of the last three decades. This terror, drilled into the world's consciousness, has had the positive result of making the possibility of actual nuclear war remote. But it has also contributed to a progressive devastation of the higher expressions and finer sensibilities of Western cultures.

Most insidious of the terror's by-products is what I'll call the no-future effect. Conditioned to living on the eve of doomsday, we have lost the ability to conceive of a future stretching farther than our own most distant personal goals or responsibilities-our children's educations, say, as the outside limit. The idea of a continuity of civilized existence, let alone of present cultural forms, runs up against the terror and goes to pieces. Only dullards believe in it.

The no-future effect has in its turn another damaging upshot: no past. What possible authority can the preterror past have for us? The past is a place we visit, in books and museums, with a sense of crossing an intervening chasm. It was not always this way. The past once communicated directly with the present in the forms of tradition and stable institutions, such as church and family. Now even the very recent past seems to cold-shoulder us, for reasons I'll get into.

It is hard on artists, on the morale of the creative spirit, to do without the idea of a relevant past. Without the kind of credible tradition that T.S. Eliot rather wishfully celebrated—such tradition being already in decay when in 1919 he wrote "Tradition and the Individual Talent"—the lone artist has nothing but fashion and hunch by which to gauge the value of his or her work. Nor can a usable tradition be reposited or reconstructed. Whatever he said in his criticism, Eliot's poetry—"These fragments I have shored against my

ruin"—sounded the proper elegiac note for all such attempts. The more common effort to proceed as if a tradition were still alive for one's work leads to the deadliest kind of academicism—art for the cloistered soul.

But the loss of traditional measures of value is the least of the no-past effect's depredations. The prestige of Western cultural tradition took a mortal beating from World War I, but the response of many artists and writers to that disaster was wonderfully rigorous and included buoyant assertions of new, modern values, as if a bigger and better past could be built overnight in place of the old one. Nothing like the lively revulsion, iconoclasm, and new beginnings of artists post-World War I occurred after World War II. The spectacle of civilization gone insane was, in the latter case, at once too familiar and too stupendous, renewed periodically by the atom-bomb terror. The shiny new values, particularly of technological progress, had become unfunny jokes and were cast aside—to be playfully revived in the Sixties and cast aside again in the seventies, very badly worn out. Art turned inward after World War II. Its public aspect became the gesture—the kinesthetic expression of an inviolable personal energy and integrity, a last-ditch stand against chaos on the frontier of the self. Every generation of artists and writers since then has been in some sense, often quite consciously, the last, the summing-up or extinguishing, the end-of-the-line generation.

End-of-the-line thinking can give macabre pleasure, lending a satisfying melodramatic air to work and to existence itself. But such thinking doesn't seem supportable anymore. What makes the seventies so eerie is the sneaking conviction we have that this decade wasn't supposed to happen. In a civilization living as if there were no tomorrow, we are the tomorrow. We are inhabiting, in effect, the no-future of the fifties and sixties; and what did those no-past decades leave us with? Rituals of the instantaneous flashing present and protocols of The End. We are doubly, triply bereft—no idea of the past to push off against, no vision of the future to reject, no sense of the present as a moment unique in history. "What history?"

The personality type of our time is the narcissist.

Obsessively self-regarding, self-referential, self-consuming, the narcissistic personality finds authenticity only in the moment-to-moment convincingness of bodily sensations and mental events. The narcissistic artist or poet offers to a shadowy public evidence or dra-

matizations of these sensations, inviting that public to join in the self-contemplation. Anger, at world or self, alternates with a husky or antic seductiveness, a siren song of love and death or sexy fun, and with abject complaining, the cries of the abandoned baby within. The narcissistic personality is driven by loneliness and braked by fear. Sexually it is fantasy dominated, with a possible tendency to sadomasochism; socially it is anxious, calculating, competitive, aiming to arouse response in others without itself being aroused. Need is its law, outside authority its nemesis.

Of course no one except the autistic child or the out-and-out adult psychotic can be purely narcissistic. Personal survival, not to mention the most rudimentary feelings of personal worth, depend on relations with other people, the formation of friendships, liaisons, deals. We might expect, however, that the social relations favored by the narcissist will be radically different from traditional relations. The exemplary contemporary social unit is the "support group." Hierarchical authority is out; the narcissist won't stand for it. A support group, be it a therapy group or an "alternative" gallery, comes together expressly to advance the individual interests of its members and to get for them what they want, be it health, fame, whatever. The contemporary art world is rife with the phenomenon. It sometimes calls to mind a nest crowded with open-mouthed little birds, all straining for whatever worms chance or machination may bring their way. To speak, in such a context, of the value or meaning or quality of work being done is an indiscretion.

The spectacle of the narcissistic society is horribly sad if not, in the growing respectability of sadomasochistic behavior, horrible period. Deprived of the anchor of a past and the rudder of a future, the new personality is as helpless as a paper boat on the ocean. Narcissism is clinically a natural state in infancy, an arrested state thereafter. It follows that Western societies have lost the ability to help individuals over the hump of infantile narcissism into the state of self-controlled, work-directed, socially adapted adulthood that was formerly the ideal. A lot was wrong with that ideal—the denial of pleasure, for instance—and modern thinkers have subjected it to a withering critique, but without fully reckoning what would replace it, a mode of existence that for many has the overtones of a nightmare.

It would be grotesque to equate psychic suffering in the affluent West with physical suffering in a place like Bangladesh, but in certain

areas of our society the comparison carries a hyperbolic truth. A similar dynamic of ever-growing need and ever-diminishing resources is at work. The suffering of the narcissist is no joke, the endlessly craving, endlessly tender self brought daily into contact with an ungiving, wounding world—a world, it sometimes seems, of razor blades and broken glass. (Making matters worse for the narcissist may be the utter indignity of the condition, which seemingly can be described only in pejoratives.) Whence the typical narcissistic defiance, the refusal to grow up. But it's no good. That way lies alcoholism, chronic depression, psychosomatic illness, perhaps violent death. The need for others erodes the defiance. The narcissist with any concern to survive inevitably straggles back into the social sphere.

A complicating factor here is the saturation of the social sphere itself with narcissistic tones and values. I have in mind the peculiarly intense pleasures of the narcissist, pleasures that are polymorphous and continuous and even confused with pain (hence sadomasochism). These pleasures are celebrated everywhere among us, in poems and art and popular music, in the ideology of "lifestyles" (which regards pleasure as a "right" with some amazing political implications—for instance the "right" of the childless to deny housing to those with children, who are the future), in the whole fabric of our culture. That such pleasures are ultimately unfulfilling, are not enough to compensate the inchoate suffering, the loss of meaning, is indisputable, though I'm sure it will be disputed—out of perhaps the deadliest of narcissistic delusions, that I , though a million others fail, am going to succeed, am going to beat the game.

So it's no use confronting narcissists with moral exhortation. They are usually hipper about the condition, and better acquainted with its costs in suffering, than the wisest observer. (It's no accident that psychiatry has a lot of trouble with narcissism. Being not a "disease" but an arrested natural state, narcissism can scarcely be "cured." It can only be overcome in the moment of a successful commitment of primary life energies to someone and/or something in the world at large.) And where is the moral authority for any such exhortation to come from? Is there any profession or institution or myth—including religion, state, family, science, and, yes, art—that has not joined in the general debasement, the no-future, no-past debacle?

It does seem that art has suffered less debasement, if only barely less, by its faithful reflection of the debacle itself, its willingness to

confront the disagreeable facts, to make do among the ruins. What individual artists and writers have done with the facts is another, case-by-case, matter. In general, the pressures of fragmentation and decline have proved overpowering to even the strongest creative minds, defeating the best individual attempts to do more than synopsize or comment on the situation. The last really prepossessing art movements, pop and minimalism, were essentially synoptic, I believe: pop of the no-past effect, the sensation of everything being simultaneously available and equally meaningful/meaningless, and minimalism of the no-future, the final revelation of the art object's effectiveness, its return to equivalence with all other objects—in entropy, as Robert Smithson poeticized it.

Every subsequent movement, starting with conceptualism (though it might be more accurate to say starting with Duchamp/Warhol), has embodied rather than figured forth an aspect of the worsening situation. This triumph of an embedded "process" orientation is in keeping with the rise of narcissism, which can no more allow an objective view of anything than one can objectively view one's own eyes in a mirror. Narcissism floods the world with the projected self. Observation, conception, and execution become a closed circuit, charged by their resonance with the narcissist's own moment-to-moment inner workings. The first and last audience for narcissistically created art is the narcissist who creates it. Only the narcissist's nonart needs—worldly ambition and dread of isolation—carry the work out to others, on whom extraordinary demands for tolerance and complicity are made. And here may be understood the sterility of art discourse in our day. The true creative excitement, the juice, of much contemporary art is hermetically sealed away in the artist. There's nothing essential, of the essence , present to talk about, unless the sympathetic narcissism of the talker can generate something on its own.

Which is not to say that narcissistically created art is without impact. Even the mildest of it, with its uncanny, ritual enactments of hidden dramas, can be compulsively fascinating, or even, as in William Wegman's videotapes, very funny. Subject to a classical control, it can even be great, as witness the astounding poetry of John Ashbery. Narcissistically created art is entirely uncompelling only when accompanied by intellectual justifications; these are always and without exception rubbish.

Still, precisely in its present morbid, wasted state, art preserves the

creative spark, the seed of a future. If the West avoids a final payoff of terror, if it labors on ten or twenty years under whatever difficulty short of catastrophe, thereby affording the nurturing fiction of a new continuity, a new past, the present era may come to be regarded as a tormented and bizarre time, a historical and cultural low that was nonetheless a turning point, a hinge, a prelude to rejuvenation.

As it is, American culture on practically every level these days is demoralized, degraded, stagnant, its most compelling activity being that of "support structures" far more robust than anything they are supporting. There is no shortage of talent—there is probably as much talent as there ever is—and creative energy. Energy abounds, but like St. Elmo's fire it is a heatless glow, unable to alter what it clings to. I would not suggest that things can't get worse. Things can always get worse. But it seems inconceivable that the present morass will not produce, is not already producing, a spirit of radical dissatisfaction with complacencies, illusions, and tyrannies small and large, a reassertion of the creative individual, a search for meaning beyond the confines of the self, the group, the social game. This will be a movement, if it comes, signaled early on in acts of art.

Admittedly there are only a few positive signs and tendencies in the culture right now. One is the remarkable amount of autobiographical and biographical writing, in both poetry and prose, at its best a public coming-to-grips with the elusive stuff of individual experience. Another is the revival of craft study, plus tough realist and baldly "decorative" painting—developments in rudimentary concerns of mediums following the collapse of modernist pieties (and antipieties) of the art object. Then there is the current saturnalia in popular music. I may be kidding myself, but it strikes me that the hate songs of punk, even with their inverted romanticism of narcissism and violence, signal an impatience with lies, a spasmodic movement toward truth telling. Certainly they are a powerful cleanser of the residual goo of sixties peace-and-love, which incidentally killed more people than punk is likely to do.

I do not include as a positive tendency the rise of "alternative" institutions and media, for although their practical value is multifold and undeniable—one of them provides a forum for this essay, to cite a humble instance—they are entirely too cozy with a multitude of contemporary evils. As responses to the alienation of the creative individual, they are sugar pills for broken legs at best. At worst, they

pamper (gently terrorize, really) the artist out of his or her individuality, burying creative development in group process. They flatter the narcissistic delusion that the world owes everybody a living and hearing. They reinforce parochialism, fragmentation, no-fault careerism. Many are extensions of the university cocoon, the intellectual haunted house in which nothing is real except the dread of walking out. The job of running these supposedly democratic entities, since somebody has to, increasingly falls to a new class of professional den-mother types (male and female) whose main qualification is a willingness to dandle the sweet little egos in their charge. One of these types recently promulgated this credo: "Place the artist, not the art." Meaning down with art, up with adult day care. To hell with it.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the budding "alternative" establishment is the sense of inevitability it projects. Despite its ideological commitment to impermanence—comical in journals that painstakingly document last week's phenomena on newsprint that will start to disintegrate next week—the new institutionalism is everywhere glossing up its quarters, enlarging its staffs, gobbling more of the funding pie, and, in general, giving every impression of taking up the reins of art culture where museums and commercial interests are supposed to have dropped them. (Actually, the commercial gallery seems to me still the most sensible, flexible, nontyrannical art-world institution. It is only as good as the character of its dealers, of course, but there have been and continue to be a remarkable lot of very good ones, whose profit motivation is tempered by farsightedness and a zeal for the best as they see it. As for the museums, it should be kept in mind how brief—maybe a dozen years, straddling the sixties—was their affair with advanced contemporary art. It ended with artists proving ungrateful, as artists will, and museums simply returning to form.)

The young "alternative" giant will doubtless soon boast a national association that will greatly magnify its ability to command public and corporate patronage. It will also start becoming so oppressive to the independent minded that a counter-alternative criticism will gradually emerge.

Free human creativity in our time is being bought off—with government and corporate money, with enticements to emotional security. The success of the buy-off, the absence of widespread disgust with it, is a consequence of the no-future effect, the atom-bomb terror steadily seeping into every kind and level of civilized endeavor, paralyzing

nerve and imagination. This seems a plausible metaphor, in any case; maybe another would do just as well. The fact of general demoralization does not seem arguable. The agency of regeneration, if there is to be one, will be old/new: individual commitment, courage, audacity.

GENERAL NOTE: This essay includes many no doubt received and in-the-air ideas, which I haven't tried to think back to their sources. The thoughts about narcissism are grounded in long personal interest in the subject, given form particularly by recent writing by Christopher Lasch. My sour view of art support structures owes a lot to a three-year hitch on the Visual Arts Services panel of the New York State Council on the Arts. I am indebted for my understanding of the current avant-garde to the work of Edit deAk and Walter Robinson, those wonderfully astringent proponents. This passage in the June–July issue of the LAICA Journal , which they edited, really triggered my essay:

But artists do not want to exclude anyone, especially themselves, from anything, so to have non-competitive cross-pluralism everybody now makes "projects." When you have your project you have finally given a structure, a transient goal, to your gooey perpetual art making.

This is proponency, remember. I ought to include deAk and Robinson in my list of positive signs in the culture.

October–November 1978

Excerpted from The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978-1990by Peter Schjeldahl Copyright © 1991 by Peter Schjeldahl. Excerpted by permission.
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