The Brooklyn Rail

In an age increasingly defined by the automation of imagination and the erosion of life’s sustaining rituals, subversive art may be one of the last defenses of the human spirit. The idea is not new. In the late 1970s, amid the fragments of a disillusioned left, Herbert Marcuse published The Aesthetic Dimension. Though the world was still far from the technologically dominated sphere it has since become, his claim—that art’s truth resides in its capacity to generate a fictive reality which, by re-presenting established orders, reveals them as false—rings with ever greater urgency today. Even more reason, then, to return to this passage in particular:

If the subversion of experience proper to art and the rebellion against the established reality principle contained in this subversion cannot be translated into political praxis, and if the radial potential of art lies precisely in this non-identity, then the question arises: how can this potential find valid representation in a work of art and how can it become a factor in the transformation of consciousness?

Marcuse’s interrogative turns on two poles: the form an artist bestows upon a work of art, and the audience’s capacity to apprehend and respond to it. In my view, art sharpened on the caustic sword of wit cuts deepest in its subversive force. Yet, such art can reach its revolutionary potential only when it enters the public arena. Those convictions led me to curate two exhibitions, both realized in 2003: Paul Klee: 1933, which opened at the Lenbachhaus in Munich before traveling to three additional museums, and Grotesk! 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit, presented at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Let’s begin with Klee, who had long made it a principle not to mix art with politics—a position that became untenable in 1933, with the National Socialists’ rise to power. First, they labelled him a “degenerate” artist, then dismissed him from his post at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, and finally ensured that no platform in German-speaking Europe remained open to his work. Klee’s response was to stage a quiet revolution in the form of more than two hundred, mostly small, pencil drawings. At once witty and childlike, through them he critiqued National Socialist ideology by means of terse, comical quotation. Klee proved remarkably deft at abstracting contemporary events: his protagonists remained anonymous, his settings spare, and his references to the slogans of the day oblique at best. The representational tactic he deployed—to let form become content and content form—was not just profoundly subversive, but precisely of the kind Marcuse had exhorted.

Grotesk! exposed the subversive force of laughter: irreverent, liberating, and illuminating. Unlike caricature, whose departure point is physiognomic detail, grotesque humor dismantles entrenched hierarchies through hyperbole. Both Arnold Böcklin’s post-1871 paintings and Karl Valentin’s grotesque-comic performances embodied that impulse in distinct ways, long before Dada would turn its subversive charge into a radical aesthetic program. After the horrors of the Second World War, the grotesque-comic only resurfaced slowly—in the consciousness-altering works of the Vienna Actionists and soon in the provocative art of the young Sigmar Polke. By the mid-1980s, American artists such as Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, and later Rita Ackermann had begun to develop their own anti-utopian, value-defying aesthetics. With their art they recontextualized and destabilized the familiar, prompting viewers to confront their own habits of perception and judgement.

And then the millennium arrived. In short order, the internet became mainstream, the digital displaced the analog, and a new sense of time and speed began to afflict humanity. Over the next decade, as online platforms multiplied and social media began to condition daily life, a distinct mode of communication emerged—one that advocated total transparency. Under the guise of openness, experience was gradually leveled into affirmation, corroding almost completely any remaining capacity for negativity and critical consciousness. Since then, the autonomy essential to the subversive power of the visual arts has steadily run into the sand.

Deeply attuned to these shifts, Jean Luc Godard responded in 2014 with Goodbye to Language. The film not only explores the breakdown of communication between humans, but is suffused with a pessimism utterly at odds with the “yes-we-can” optimism of internet culture. In Farewell to Language, Godard critiques the ascendant visual regime—the interlocking technologies of instant image production and circulation that not only redefine vision but imperil the visual arts themselves—while suggesting how inseparable those forces have become from the mechanisms that sustain and extend the possibilities of cinema. Equally striking are the arsenal of literary quotations and film excerpts Godard assembled to expose technology’s infiltration into everyday life—its quiet colonization of gesture, thought, and exchange. This condition, the director reminds us, did not arise overnight: he signals as much when a smartphone is raised toward the viewer, its screen displaying the cover of Jean-Luc Porquet’s 2003 book Jacques Ellul: l’homme qui avait (presque) tout prévu.

At the time of this writing, nearly all of Jacques Ellul’s predictions in The Technological Society (1954) have come to pass. What he foresaw—the absorption of every sphere of human activity into systems of efficiency and control—has long since become the cultural ground we inhabit. Censorship, too, has returned in full force: blatant in America, subtler in Europe, where it hides behind the mask of “freedom of expression.” Paradoxically, the art most celebrated today often flaunts its political stance. What parades as subversive is frequently little more than market-savvy provocation—bait for clicks, a cult of followers, and, in the end, a trophy for collectors. That is a far cry from art capable of overturning how the world is seen. In fact, the texts submitted for this Critic’s Page diverge sharply on whether such art can still alter consciousness at all: one even argues that the term “subversive” has been co-opted to serve immediate political gestures. Still, taken together, these essays suggest that subversion in the arts endures—if only for now.