Crossing over.

To the Editor:

I just wanted to say how much in agreement I am with the opinions expressed in your editor's letter [October 2003]. Regarding those famous relations between fine art and so-called common culture: Something has got to give. Almost every class I've taught over the last five years has been based on a perceived correspondence between these two realms, and, as you've suggested, it's an interaction that's grown more intensive with time, not less. The terms "appropriation," "simulation," and "deconstruction" are only the latest to have "crossed over," finding a more comfy fit, perhaps, within the precincts of popular music, fashion, and architecture. Accordingly, TV becomes "postmodern," advertising becomes "conceptual," and design becomes either "minimal," "maximal," or outright "surreal."

My interest in these questions has taken shape in response to the study of the historical avant-gardes and, most notably, the theory of montage. A turn within modernism against modernism and, especially, against the concept of "autonomy" (autonomous institutions, artists, or objects), montage is under-written by a concern for the reception end of the art experience. Displacing a former emphasis on the specificity of material or medium, it's at the start of any workable strategy for reconciling the practice of art with the audience that either it has abandoned or that has abandoned it.

The question you raise--how to "make art matter" once more--takes shape, I suspect, in response to a sense of mounting irrelevance. Despite the fact that we see secondhand signs of its influence everywhere, in the general scheme of things art has probably never mattered less. Some would argue that if art can at least continue to matter a great deal to the audience it still has, that's fine. Others might suggest instead that it's precisely by way of its dissolution as a discrete cultural category that art will end up mattering most. If the concept of autonomy paved the way to art's isolation behind institutional walls, then the struggle against autonomy is waged on behalf of those outside.

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It's not as if the art world has failed to take account of these developments. Artforum, like every other publication of its kind, has given over more and more space to "extra-artistic" works. In effect, it sometimes seems as though art is treated as a "third wheel" while critics seek to reconnect with their first loves in the popular sphere. The current situation in the UK, where art as such has become wholly annexed to the mechanisms of pop consumption, should be taken as a cautionary tale. The attempt to somehow "popularize" the discourse of art does both art and "the public" a disservice because the best and most salient dimension of the art experience--the analytical, the reflexive, the self-critical--is sacrificed in the process. (What if, conversely, this dimension were added to the popular discourse?)

It is not a question of "outreach," therefore, nor of somehow coaxing back one's former public with more accessible objects or terminologies. To mold one side to the demands of the other and vice versa is unnecessary; they're already locked in state of mutual reflection. The gulf that once separated these two sides has narrowed to a faint line, but it is precisely at this point of greatest tension that a fundamental distinction appears: Art is never about "just looking" as much as it's about looking at oneself looking. (Paradoxically, this fundamental point is the one that art has the hardest time getting across.) The object itself is only a pretext; what counts is gauging one's relation to objects, to others, and, ultimately, to the world. Keep the faith.

--Jan Tumlir, Los Angeles