A few days ago, while browsing my feed on academia.edu, I stumbled on a 2008 paper by Sean Lowry of the University of Newcastle, Australia, titled "Monuments to Heroic Failure". The paper, by now somewhat dated yet exceedingly relevant in its analysis, is a theoretical discussion of a, I would argue, still-current trend within the contemporary arts: the embrace of failure, fragility and un-monumentality as antidote to the apparent inescapability of postmodern irony, and as tools for resisting commodification within the monumental structures of contemporary capitalism. As I read more and more of the paper, both the strengths and the ambiguities of Lowry's arguments got me thinking about two apparently quite different, yet I believe somewhat entwined questions: does escaping monumentality really mean escaping spectacle, or is there also within the capitalist cultural machine a turn toward un-monumentality, fragility and 'straightforwardness' as an alternative to the growing unmarketability of irony? and then, how has the museum responded to the possible receding of monumentality and spectacle, and how does it negotiate the cultural shift, both within capital and resistances to it, away from 'scale, duration, sometime political sanctimony and immersive theatricality' (Lowry, 2008, p.199)? These two questions are not entirely unrelated: as the museum becomes more and more a tout-court cultural agent that operates at all levels, the matter of how it interacts with, and reacts to, wider ideological shift becomes not only interesting and explorable, but also politically pressing.
Lowry makes a compelling argument for the emergence, in the latter half of the 2000s' first decade, of a new tendency in contemporary art (chiefly sculpture, installation and performance art) that ruptures with postmodernity's tradition of ironic detachment by resorting to abject, fragile un-monumentality, both formally and discursively, as a new discursive strategy. Citing mostly Sydney-based artists, Lowry argues that for many contemporary practitioners, the automatic defaulting of cultural production into the postmodern theatrical categories of 'allegory, metaphor and irony' has become a 'cul-de-sac' (Lowry, 2008, 199), a prison that needs to be renegotiated and, ultimately, escaped if one is to generate a culture that stands not in antithesis, but as alternative to the global spectacle of capitalism. The return to humble assemblages of detritus, lesser and amorphous forms, willing to speak to the viewer at face value (or as close as possible to it) is the preferred strategy of these artists: after all, as the word 'spectacle' itself suggests, it is the shiny monumentality of its theatrical apparatus that makes the spectacle of global capital so enticing and deceptive, and this also comes to be the smooth surface that a possible alternative to the spectacle has to pierce in order to generate a sustainable alternative discourse. Lowry does not specifically address the economic motivations that might underpin this ' un-monumental turn' in artistic practice: yet, from the advantageous position of 2014, we can see that the global economic downturn - and its, ableit temporary, exposè of global capital's bankrupcy - shows the far sightedness of artists that turned to the abject, the fragile, and the unomnumental in order to antagonise the spectacular.
Biljana Jancic, I'll Be Your Mirror, 2012. The Lock-Up Cultural Centre
Lowry also does not explicitly come out and tell us if we are to interpret this new 'abject' turn as successful in escaping commodification within the spectacle, even though this seems to be the logical conclusion we are to draw from the essay: if, as Lowry suggests, this art manages to rupture the spectacle of art itself, it stands as logical that its performance should be all the more successful in its intent to 'present the fragmented detritus of late capitalism with a flaccid middle finger' (Lowry, 2008, 200).
Yet, moving beyond the artistic examples presented by Lowry and the art world proper, can we be sure that the capitalist spectacle cannot accomodate and deploy the same kind of fragility, un.monumentality and humble abjection that should, in theory, destabilise it? in fact, hasn't the pointed end of capitalism already moved beyond the slippery silicon faces of Hollywood starlets, arming itself instead with the 'radical honesty' that seems to be the hallmark of post-postmodernity, altermodernity etc.?
In Italy, Cielo TV has been airing for a few weeks an ad for the upcoming 2014 season of talent show X-Factor. In the ad an homely and unassuming girl, working a shift in a bar by the seaside, listens through ear buds while singing a cappella pop idol P!nk's hit single Try. Unaware of colleagues and passers-by eavesdropping, she sings her way to X-Factor's stage, where she performs the remainder of the song together with winners from past editions.
While the first part of the video is rather standard reality TV fare, it is the first segment that is, formally, most interesting. This section is striking for its unassuming nature, understated aesthetics, lack of monumentality and simple, metaphorically 'fragile' characters. Most of the shots are taken from awkward angles and possess the kind of 'shaky' quality one would associate with handheld cameras; the visual tones are muted and approach grayscale; the singing is low- key, lacks in virtuosity (as well as English fluency) and possesses the everyday, unspectacular quality of humming under the shower, or while working.
The fact that, by the end, the video's narrative resolves into monumentality and full-blown spectacle of the most pernicious kind (the collective delusion of stardom and subsequent acceptance) should not distract us from acknowledging that the instruments that got the singer (and us) there are eminently un-monumental. This is not a capitulation of the global spectacle, but merely its ingenuous restyling: the lesson of Web 2.0's grass roots, collectively participatory model has been thoroughly digested, and once again capitalist spectacle finds a way to turn anti-capital's weapons to its own favour. There is a literal and a metaphorical narrative throughout the video: just as the girl goes from humming amateurishly to singing in front of a crowd among big names, the un-monumentality and the 'fragility' of everyday experience, the same kind of non star-laden abjection that 'normal people' share becomes not an antithesis to spectacle, but one way by which we can find our place within spectacle itself. In this sense, the unabashedly un-theatricality of a YouTube amateur video, akin to the bricoleur-like means of the artists mentioned by Lowry, morphs into one more of the virtually infinite avenues that capital and spectacle can exercise in order to usurp agency and enforce normative biopower from above.
In the end, the kind of aesthetics, practices and paradigms that Lowry's examples succesfully deploy within the confines of the art market seems to lose most of their efficacy were they to be adopted by culture at large: the aesthetics of Occupy and Anonymous' visual paraphernalia, Youtube blogs and the 'new sincerity' (Pallasvuo, 2011) can be, and often are exploited by spectacle for its own replication.
In many ways, I also work within what could be considered, from the perspective laid above, a theatrical and spectacular 'monument'. As the many contemporary 'grand tours' of Europe and beyond's museum capitals testify, not to mention the architectural aspect, the museum has built much of its modern history upon spectacle, theatricality (physical and metaphorical), and a sense of imposing monumentality, of the historical and cultural kind. This seems to be true both in the case of the grandiose public museum of the 18th - 19th centuries, and its various Wunderkammern predecessors.
This is, of course, an image of itself that the museum has worked hard to shed in recent decades. Spurred by New Museology, the emergence of science centres, and the constructivist museum (Hein, 1995), the contemporary museum seems to embrace more and more a sense of small scale, localised agency; an un-monumentality that is both material (smaller buildings housing collections as specific as hammers) and intellectual (exhibits of crowdsourced artifacts of lost love, for example), shifiting importance from the self assertive, authoritative and metaphorically 'smooth' front toward its inner workings (and inclusion of visitors in it), its contingent agency and its own limitations as an institution. In other words, it seems to me that the contemporary museum, at least in some cases, has followed somewhat the path that Lowry has laid out for the arts: a move away from monumentality, grandiosity and theatrical spectacle, toward a homely kind of resistance to the previous. And, just as in the case of art, it remains to be seen if the 'un-monumental museum' will be strategically successful in fending off the danger of museum as capitalist spectacle.
I have not yet addressed irony, which is a whole another problem with regard to the museum, traditionally the most un-ironic of places. This has, of course, changed recently, but I reserve the topic for a soon-to-be-coming post...
Hein, George E. "The constructivist museum." The educational role of the museum (1999): 73-79.
Lowry, Sean. "Monuments to Heroic Failure Broadsheet." Contemporary Visual Art+ Culture (The Contemporary Art Center of South Australia) 37.3 (2008).
Pallasvuo, Jakko. "New Sincerity." http://www.jaakkopallasvuo.com/newsincerity/
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