Round Table Discussion Transcript

This is the raw unedited transcript. Simply cut and pasted into the blog. I'll try and tidy it up at some point when I have time. Lots of spaces are in the wrong place etc. However. everyone has to go away and edit their contributions now and add footnotes, therefore except for the recording of the process there seems little need to attempt the tidy up. Will post the final edited transcript when it arrives.

The End of Art

Present: Garry Barker, Michael Belshaw, Joanna Geldard, Richard Miles, Tom Palin

MB Here we are at the Round Table discussion at the end of two reading groups that we conducted in the second semester. The link between the two books which were The Specters of Marx by Derrida and The End of Art by Eva Geulen was endism and that is the theme that we are going to discuss in the broadest possible way. The endism of The Specters of Marx was to do with the end of history and that theme pursued by Fukuyama and of course the endism in Geulen’s book is the end of art, so we’re going to combine themes from both sources and see where that takes us. So who wants to begin?

GB As a lot of this has been about Hegel, and Derrida himself was quoting Hegel quite a bit when we were reading through Derrida; it interesting for me the sense of going back into Hegel and starting to read other stuff of Hegels - going back into his work and reading stuff like The Phenomenology of Spirit and trying to get the sense of what was underlying all of this and it seems to me that there’s a real friction in Hegel’s thinking. On the one hand he’s one of the first philosophers to deal with history and materiality and yet at the same time he’s left over with this thing that philosophy must deal with the spirit and with the idea of something that transcends us; so we’ve really got this duality and I thought reading Derrida that we were constantly focused on this duality. You’ve also got Hegel’s master/slave dialectic which is again another duality; a duality that means as you think the master takes over, actually the voice of the slave opens that otherness – so the master can never take full control; there is always as the master evolves, the slave somewhere finds the strength to revolt and push back. That sort of conflict seemed to me to go right back to Hegel’s worry about… really I think he was an atheist and yet at the same time he’s trying to deal with the Christian leftovers or the Christian sort of ideals come through – that in itself has a deeper issue and the deeper issue is Hegel’s awareness of his own mortality; Hegel’s awareness of the sort of ‘death’ business. When I went
back to reading Hegel he actually has a lot to say about death and what it is as part of the human condition, so somewhere this awareness of death is something about that essential component of the human condition and for us to be aware of life, it is actually at its height and at its highest level of awareness when we know death faces us; when we know that death is the end of it. I had this sort of sense of going through this whole reading of death that why we keep coming back to it is because it gives us the most heightened experience of what it is not to die – in a way, to be alive – so the death of art has to be faced in order for us to be aware of what art actually means to us. If we lose it, through its extinction, in some way we become more aware of what it actually means to us.

MB That’s an interesting point. Would it be right to say that in Hegel, the idea even of the death of art is just a prelude to something moving on – to something further down the line as it were? I wonder whether or not we could find a contrast in the writers that we’ve been looking at in those that see this continuity and see this ‘rising to the absolute’ on the one hand, and other writers on the other hand like Nietzsche who see death in terms of finality, in the way I think that the Greeks were more accustomed to.

JG I think so – in the prologue of Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play, he actually talks about an awakening and dealing with that tragic in that particular sense he deals with the death of style of art and culture – he is echoing Hegel there but he then takes that as a repetitious nature that continues from Baroque to German Romanticism and he uses that jump and how that’s mirrored as the allegory for modernism, but the key word that he uses in the prologue is ‘awakening’; that actually by finalising and tying that off within a timeframe it actually allows the suspension of the idea as an awakened idea and I suppose, it’s not even a rebirth, it is just an aliveness to a new beginning.

GB But that tragedy, perhaps, is part of that other awareness that God, Christianity, the big ‘other’ doesn’t really exist – and that is the tragedy of the human condition; that for Hegel who is sort of mourning the fact that we perhaps don’t have it; that’s his problem with atheism. But as you move further on, writers like Benjamin accept it and say ‘this is what we’ve got to do, it’s accepted now’.

JG Well he actually ties off that idea of perfection, he calls that part of what Hegel had wanted and he calls for it as an end in that trauerspiel, in that German tragedy, his perfection is…

MB Can I just ask a question? What is Benjamin’s idea of the idea?

JG Yeah. It’s really hard actually. It’s one of those things that slips away from me and I occasionally get an idea of it. My interpretation is that he fixed down the connection between thought and thought becoming an idea; that as you thought, the structure of it became idea. The reason he’s labelled German romanticism as trauerspiel is because by labelling and fixing it, he pins down that as a thought idea; a political and cultural thought idea and in so doing, almost ends it – closes the curtains on his theatre, if you like, in order to allow for a free space stage for the idea of doing that to happen again. Does that make
sense?

GB It does when you include language.

JG I pinned it down to the use of language, yes.

GB These are people that started to come to terms with the sort of linguistic terms, so to speak; so they are becoming more aware of the fact that we are conditioned by language. That we are limited in terms of what we can say about that language and what we can use. And I think that we’re going through that period historically where that becomes central to
the debate about what can possibly be said, so that the drama, the theatre, is played out around language.

JG I also think by calling it thought as idea he opens up a space with that language to allow for interpretations that are more allegorical, in the sense that they are less fixed by the cultural and political norms of that period. It’s like he uses the language to both fix and liberate; by fixing it he liberates that space for allegory and idea. In fact he is talked about alongside Vidler in terms of that creating of that space; that spatial anxiety for an uncertainty and an instability as a result of… as a result of what? Tying off, cutting loose – it’s almost like he cuts loose and says; that’s fixed in that German romanticism and it failed and the whole allegory of that failure and the tragedy of it he re-pictures in modernism, he re-pictures elsewhere but the playout of it isn’t exactly the same. But by tying it off and cutting it loose as style and how it failed, these are pockets – they overlap but they’re not the same. I think that’s how he starts talking about simultaneity in that chapter as well.

MB So allegory there could almost be contrasted with Hegel’s idea in so far as allegory as a double story; as a twice told tale is a story in complete tension or continuing tension that

is not resolved. Would that be a legitimate contrast do you think, to make between Hegel’s
idea of resolution which moves things on, and someone like Benjamin who talks about allegory as a sustained tension?

GB I think there is a clear difference there but you have to remember that Hegel almost is aware of his own failure; he posits this viewpoint of ‘we move on’ to this idea of wholeness. We have this philosophy replacing art at a high level but then you get the sense that he doesn’t know where to go from there, because he’s heading towards some wholeness which is always brought back by his other direction which is the groundedness in history, the groundedness in materiality.

JG Does he almost epitomise then, that very allegory that Benjamin then… his whole actual structure and thought process as himself is almost Benjamin is seeing that within Hegel and actually almost pitting the allegory as Hegel.

GB You could almost say the hindsight of history; that what Benjamin is able to do is look back at Hegel and become aware of his dilemma. Perhaps a lot of these people are doing that – they’re seeing Hegel’s dilemma and from that dilemma opening out different ways of answering that dilemma. That’s why I think duality occurs so much in the centre of so many of these responses to thinking about the end of art.

MB We came across an interesting allegory in the Holderlin poem. The idea that the poem The Voice of the People was sort of a repetition or a restaging of one tragedy or one drama in a later one, a bit like the way that the New Testament is an allegory of the Old Testament. So allegory is sort of spread across time… not so much continuity but stages that are repeated. I think the difference between continuity and repetition is one that features in a lot of things that we’ve been looking at.

JG But is it the structure that is repeated? The style and form of it, the materiality clearly isn’t. Can we equate that to how Benjamin talks about the reproduction of the reproduction? That that whole allegorical thinking is reproduced, it is revisited, it is restaged, but in its form, its vision, its materiality; it does actually appear differently. Therefore it could be said that it’s the death of art in one sense because it’s repetitious but it’s not the death of art because its form is still unstable.

GB In the middle of that there’s always that sort of sense of the striving for the other, the striving for that wholeness or whatever it is. In Benjamin perhaps that starts to come out as the aura; that he starts to see that as a necessary part of the human condition that we want to place that type of value on something. At the centre perhaps of that whole thing of commodity exchange is a similar sort of problem that we have.

RM Well aura is the fetish isn’t it, that’s what Benjamin is talking about and that gets in the way of direct human experience, it replaces it. I’m interested just going back to something that you said Jo, because obviously wanting to think about this from an Adornian perspective and seeing as though we’re talking about aura now; the reproduction of the reproduction – obviously under Benjamin the classic from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction he would say that the aura with us. Adorno would view that, without wanting to use this word too lightly, tragic. Benjamin would view it as emancipatory – and is this what you mean by leading to a new beginning? The shrivelling of aura allows you to recontextualise the reproduction and bring it into different spheres.

JG Absolutely, it lifts it out and suspends it above that historicity and its original connections and that’s what he releases as a new beginning and he liberates and almost the reproduction of the reproduction actually recreates a new space.

RM Yes, and you see for Adorno it’s just one further alienated remove from direct human sensuous activity as such, and I think that’s why they had that famous disagreement. I’ve never quite decided which is the correct response actually.

GB It’s interesting in relation to that, because George Steiner was quite interested in this. He talked about this whole thing that there was a wonderful moment where all of us after going through that process of awareness where all these sort of movements towards something bigger or whatever… you have to come back to going there is a reality out there and you have to strip that away. There is something more grand about that material reality than there is actually about that thing that we all want; the big other. We have to overcome the sense of the big other in order to live the life of now. If we don’t live the life of now, we’re sort of avoiding reality.

JG Benjamin says something similar, he calls that history the historical shadows and he talks about that place of reproduction; a mirror world, and that there’s an infinity with mirrors; when you bounce them off each other there’s an infinity that evolves out of them and he talks about that reproduction of the reproduction as that mirror world and the history and our understanding of style and form and that place in a particular time period as that shadow. Which I think is quite an interesting jump across to Derrida and hauntology, that history itself is a spectre and a shadow and it casts a certain shadow; a stylised shadow; a characterised shadow that is written by politics, bourgeois, cultural aspects… by pulling the curtain down and putting that on a stage, he then allows this mirror world for us to explore in a new dimension. I’m not sure that any of us really grasp that, I certainly don’t! Once you start thinking of it like that it becomes very exciting.

MB Well commodity fetish is a good example of the spectre in that it is both alive and dead
at the same time.

GB There’s also that thing of whether the way that we interpret life is something that we can resolve through rational thinking, or whether it’s an emotional dilemma. I think this is a crux here because images like the shadow presuppose that we are attuned to an emotional understanding of a rational response, and again that becomes another duality.

JG But then some of Benjamin’s work does actually rest on the cognitive processes that Freud did use to do with dreamscape and that use of the phantasm – he did allegorise all of that and he did ground himself in some of Freud’s cognitive processes. That rationalising of the conscious and unconscious he did use, and he goes on to use throughout his work. I was saying earlier; it’s like The Origin of the German Mourning Play and trauerspiel is the beginning of his vision of this stage and this theatre, whereas the arcades project at the end of his life latterly really visualises his struggle of processes and ideas as allegory and he brings in that spatial anxiety of architecture, that spatial anxiety of time, that idea of monument and ruin and all those aspects. When I think of it like that, it’s no wonder it took so long to write and that it was never finished! Because actually it encompasses many of the things that we’re talking about in all of that, including even, I don’t think Benjamin ever
gets to where Holderlin is with poetry but there is a sense of a poetic language in the visual stimuli that Benjamin uses as allegory and it’s like he never quite got to what Holderlin arrived at, which is perhaps what you’re saying about this resolution of the emotional as well…

GB What I would say to that is that Freud’s response is a rational response to an emotional dilemma, while Holderlin’s is actually an emotional response to the rational dilemma.

JG But then doesn’t he resolve Hegel’s failure?

GB I think what we do is we play out in tragedy, each time, Hegel’s failure.

MB I think one of the interesting things about what’s coming out in the way that you’re discussing this, is that for Hegel of course, art is left behind in favour of philosophy, and philosophy has to be rational. But for Benjamin, as you’re describing his work, and for Nietzsche it’s more of a philosophical continuation of art, rather than art into philosophy. I think that makes room for a discussion of tragedy as well; of course there is in a sense a philosophy of tragedy and I think Holderlin is a deeply philosophical poet, and that’s certainly Hegel’s perspective on it. I just thought I would throw in at this particular juncture
an interesting remark from Geulen’s book where she says, “tragedy is afterall that genre in which death is meaningful and meaningless and the same time” and I think that seems to be a very telling thing to say. It’s obviously paradoxical but it highlights the fact that for the Greeks, death was sheer finality; it had no other side to it as it were. But at the same we can’t accept that so we’re caught in a kind of double bind of believing in something, and believing that it’s not the case at the same time. That again comes across as like the allegorical in the sense that it is a thing in tension rather than a thing in resolution.

RM That’s interesting; that’s quite relevant to Adorno’s notion of autonomy, just going back a bit obviously the standard, orthodox Marxist perspective is that with the rise of capitalism, the rise of the market, art is lost; art ends there and gets more and more degraded as capitalism gets more and more sophisticated. Adorno in his notion of autonomy knows this to be the case; knows almost that autonomy is, as a materialist, that autonomy is impossible. It’s impossible to step outside of the market, to step outside of the social system you’re born into, but you must strive for that anyway in order to have any truth content to what you produce but there is always that dialectical tension.

MB Is it a continuing tension rather than a resolution?

RM It’s a continuing tension that’s central to all of the negative dialectics that that is never resolved. It’s exactly the opposite of Hegel actually that some synthesis is achieved. Actually you’re in an impasse with these two things constantly negating each other and held, in almost like a co-dependence, and co-dependence with its negative connotations, rather than a synthesis.

MB Is that a kind of idea, or an understanding which then puts the receiver of that idea in a position of action? That one has to act, in the face of that?

RM That’s interesting, because throughout all of Adorno’s work actually – he was criticised
in ’68 for not actually having what those ‘soixante-huiters’ would call a praxis – he wasn’t on
the barricades as it were. But he said that his praxis was remaining as uncorrupted by the
social system as possible through thought; his writing was his kind of praxis. But it’s not a
philosophy of action as is inscribed on Marx’s tomb; it’s not that the point is to change it. It’s
almost a strange deadlock until you’re waiting for the revolution to come; emancipation only
comes with a revolutionary change in the social base but it doesn’t give you a direct route to

achieve it. Which again is this peculiar tension that exists.

GB That’s a very old dialectic; the difference between acceptance or struggle goes right
back. The interesting thing that I was looking at in terms of Hegel was that he was very
interested in Luther… Through Luther you get this struggle obviously in the way that you
position yourself in relation to the Catholic Church – you develop a struggle within that. But
the two strands of Christian debate: one is to struggle to sort out, get rid of all the crap, let’s
use rationality to get there, to define a purpose; but you’ve got another strand, that Meister
Eckhart type of strand, which is actually their acceptance, that acceptance of duality. You
could say it’s more the Buddhist strand of the Christian tradition. So you’ve got these two
strands; one which you could say ends up in dialectical materialism and the idea of action,
and another one that says actually we can overcome all this stuff in the world as long as we
just, in the acceptance of it, somewhere understand it. And that understanding transcends
the need for action.

RM Yes, that’s interesting Garry. Definitely in Adorno, as I mentioned in the sort of
preamble, for Adorno what the radical thinker is left with is; his task, is to merely cut
through the veil of reification to expose fetishism where it exists and waiting for that to turn
into action.

GB But what’s interesting in relation to that is how many Buddhists light the centre of radical
change. If we look at some of the changes in South-East Asia, it’s often been Buddhist priests
that are at the centre of revolt in terms of the powers that be; making very dramatic stances
like burning themselves in public.

RM It’s the classic contrast in terms of protest between non-participation and direct action
that you still find today.

TP I don’t think that the Geulen text ever deals with some of the issues that you’re
discussing; I think it exists within a layer of theory – it exists as theoretically possible and I
think that duality that you’re talking about; it’s the maintenance of those two opposites that
keeps the system in place. I think the end of art as idea needs to be maintained. The later
sections of the Geulen text deal with the perpetuation of the end of art as idea, they don’t
deal with the coupling of the end of art with an event; they deal with the separation of the
end of art from the possibility of an event – that’s what gives it life.

JG I think that links with Benjamin as well because he restages things as drama and he
almost creates a staging for action to take place. In fact I think he’s almost pre-empting
the need for encounter to engage with, not necessarily this acceptance or struggle but
something in between to encounter what is; to encounter what is of the now in that space,
in that stage, in that time free from both the historicity of what’s gone before and liberating
from a context in order to create that beginning.

MB It’s a very peculiar beginning isn’t it, because the word that we’ve not yet touched on is
rumour. Geulen’s book is called ‘Readings in a rumour after Hegel’. A rumour, like a myth,
is something that has no particular beginning. It’s somehow an accepted thing en route as it
were– permanently on en route like a river in a sense.

JG But doesn’t that support what Tom was saying about that mainstream – about it having
to be sustained within, well say, the river; the stream of cultural dialect.
RM You see this is really interesting going back to Adorno because the one reading that

Geulen introduces of Adorno’s text which I suppose as an orthodox Marxist I never picked
up on; she introduces the idea that actually Adorno’s writing is in some way a parody of
the end. Its apocalyptic tone is an invention, in some way performative. Which leads me
to another point I wanted to raise here; going back to what I said before about Adorno
maybe not suggesting any kind of praxis, any kind of concrete programme out of this – it’s
just bleak, it is just the apocalypse. I think in assigning an apocalypse, in assigning the end
of human culture, Adorno needs to assign an origin and this brings me back to Derrida and
to make that origin seem more authentic and that origin is pure human use value, pure un-
alienated, pre-capitalist society, maybe he has to make the apocalypse – the end – seem
more dramatic to make that origin seem more authentic. That’s not in Geulen but that’s
something that I’m starting to think about from Geulen.

TP That’s quite like what Garry was talking about earlier about death defining life, but I think
in Geulen, in the last chapters she talks about the river in Holderlin and she uses the end –
it’s an attempt to establish the meaning of the present which does draw from the end so it
draws from the apocalypse or death or whatever Richard and Garry were talking about but
it also draws from the source of the river. So an understanding of the present has to draw
from two directions; the present exists between something – it doesn’t exist in relation to an
end, it exists in relation to both end and beginning.

RM This is close to Derrida’s notion of hauntology I think… it seems throughout every single
bit of Marxist aesthetic theory; they all want to assign an end. It seems to be necessary
to assign that end to imagine a fictitious utopian origin and this is something Derrida
deconstructs immaculately in the end of Specters of Marx – that notion that there once was
a pure society, a pure idea of human use value without exchange outside of the market is
itself phantasmagorical – it is an invention, it is fictive.

MB And also a kind of rumour, because I keep thinking these questions keep coming back
to the idea of perpetual repetition. We’re always talking about a simulacrum of an idea and
I think the end of art – I can see now why Geulen used that word. When we began talking
about this topic, we inevitably thought of the end of art as something that could be posited
at a certain date because we think in terms of dates going from one year to another to
another – and if there is something called the end of art it must have happened some time.
What we seem to be gravitating towards is the idea that the end of art, as a rumour or as a
simulacrum, is something that cannot occur at any one time. I suppose if we think of it this
way, one of the ideas that we come up against in Geulen’s writing is that the moment of
the end of art, let’s say for the sake of argument that it was Hegel’s own moment in history
where he sees art displayed in museums – therefore inauthentic in itself – that moment also
coincides with the moment that art is studied. When it becomes studied it becomes created
retrospectively, that those things that were called art previously…

RM What Adorno would call the administration as opposed… the direct opposition to
culture…

GB There’s also another side of rumour which also in normal layman’s parlance is called
gossip; tickle-tackle as it would be in the Midlands. The thing about that is that is leads very
quickly to a false consciousness; it leads very, very quickly to ‘we think this is going on’ –
it’s spread by gossip and yet it’s not founded in anything. That type of false consciousness;
therefore you could mirror that with certain aspects of theory that are tickle-tackle, that are
actually almost like theory as gossip. So many of these issues develop by people conversing
around the point and you get further and further away from reality; you get further and

further away from material practice.

TP I saw the use of rumour as some kind of acknowledgement of a dislocation between an
event and the language of an event that follows it. So in a sense the imprecision of language
or the failure of language is an inability to replicate or document an event, and the further
from that event, the more space exists between the language that describes it and the thing
that happened. So rumour for me, in my reading of Geulen, was that acknowledgment of a
space, or an inaccuracy of language.

JG I think she was hinting at that through Nietzsche as well, because of the tragedy of
the tragedy and she arrives at the end of that chapter calling that parody almost the attic
comedy – the comic tragedy. So that the tragedy of the tragedy isn’t just the initial mourning
of a tragedy, the tragedy becomes through rumour sort of comical and continues to be
parodied and inaccurate and then suspended and out of joint?

TP It attains a life of its own doesn’t it? Irrespective of any link with history. It attains a life
within discourse which is unsatisfactory to some but I think that’s what the Geulen text is
pointing towards especially through Holderlin in the last chapter.

JG I think Nietzsche being so tragic and final in that sense is the funniest out of this chapter
because it arrives at the most comical; he does almost have the last laugh with it.

GB It’s interesting as you move through that that we move towards poetry and that poetry
then becomes a model for an ability to actually reconcile these different elements. It can
accept allegory as part of its form, but its own form itself is always a duality. So as a way
of understanding, through language, the dilemma it perhaps sort of puts forward the
limitations of philosophical discourse. Going back to Derrida, he often in order to answer
his points goes back to Shakespeare. It’s the poetry of Shakespeare that allows him to
understand the nature of tragedy and through that particular poetic language, in its own
structures allows for duality. The problem with prose is it has a linear construction which
is always looking for an end while poetry itself is able to cope with the perplexity of both
emotion and logic.

JG Does that also link back then to Tom’s description of the present in terms of it being
a space that uses the past and links to the future; it can’t be just the present in isolation.
Perhaps poetry allows to take in the language of the now but also to recapture and use the
allegories of the past, the narrative of the past…

GB I think that links very closely to Yates. Yates’s issue of when asked about how he read
that poem; “I made it out of a mouthful of air”. I made it out of its becoming, which is now,
but actually it’s also history because my moment of now is my memories of all the other
poetry I’ve read that goes behind my mouth as I open it.

TP I think that the end of art as a statement or an idea is a poetic one; I don’t think it’s ever
expected to chart a series of events. In the same way as the river – the meaning of the river
– has to draw from its source and its destination I was thinking that the end of art as thesis
draws from Hegel as its source and draws from the fabled end of art as a destination, and
in so doing acquires the meaning that it has. But that perpetual meaning doesn’t lead to an
event, it doesn’t chart an event; it doesn’t document a thing in a sense.

MB It’s very interesting isn’t it, because it’s almost as though we are participating in Hegel’s

rumour by discussing this, that we are somehow allegorising what he’s already started
off or what he has not necessarily started off himself but somehow put his finger on, in a
way. We’re not talking about Hegel or anyone else in the past, that we are actually sort of
participating in re-describing that past in the actual act of discussing it.

TP Maybe we could also separate Hegel from the people who followed Hegel because
they’re interpreters of Hegel; they have Hegel as a starting point.

GB But then Hegel himself is an interpreter of other people. When he talks about
relationships between Goethe and Kant, both signifying for him two different Germanic
traditions in terms of a way of understanding the world. You get the sense that what Hegel’s
trying to do is reconcile them! How do I understand Kant, but at the same time how do I
understand Goethe? They both threaten him and yet they both at the same they support
where he is. At the same time in the middle of that there is Luther. All of which are writing
in the German language, all of which are contributing to the idea of how German thought
is constructing a view of the world, and we’ve got to remember going back to nationalist
politics at the time, the way the German nation itself was forming itself into a shape and
that continuation politically, eventually would become Hitler and the Third Reich.

JG I remember an artist describing to me how one of his rules for making art was to take the
chance occurrence that it occurred in his previous piece of work on into his next piece and
I think there is an element with all of these that there is a sense of a series of inter-collated
circles. They’re overlapping and interlocking at various points and they’re not linear, they’re
not necessarily linear time-based. They are linked and inter-collating at the point of idea,
at the point of concept. I think that is very interesting about what Geulen does with this
book because the order that she has put those authors in is not even to do with that linear
sense of time. It is to do with a series of turning points, or seems to be to do with a series of
turning points of understanding the materiality in history, the visual form, the visual culture.
It’s a series of turning points in our understanding of endism.

MB That’s actually really interesting. The Nietzsche chapter is called ‘Nietzsche’s retrograde
motion’ and there is a sense that Nietzsche and Holderlin do make this point of turning back,
wherein Holderlin in the Voice of the People poem he talks about the failure of the town
by the Xanthos that saw itself as somehow repeating the past as an event. But then the
remedy to that for Holderlin is the position of poet that interprets that event or interprets
that allegory so that interpretation is a way not of passing on to a moment of the future but
a way of looking back. Roughly speaking that’s exactly what Nietzsche does… the retrograde
movement in Nietzsche is a way of understanding tragedy as a tragedy of a tragedy in a
sense that it’s an interpretation of the death of tragedy rather than a repetition of it in
terms of an event. It was Holderlin who cautioned against the forming German nation of
the Volk at the time of seeing itself as Greek, seeing themselves as latter-day Greeks and
he cautioned that in his decline of the fatherland essay. For me that makes an interesting
way of summing up almost the end of art as a rumour; that it’s not going to happen, or has
happened, but is always continually in a gap between those two things, a little bit like the
river I suppose in a sense.

GB So it is always repeated isn’t it? For somebody the dawn tomorrow is going to be their
first dawn they will ever experience, for many other people they will have seen that dawn
many times before and for some people it will be the last one they will see. That cyclic
tradition is actually at the core of so many of our religions, so many of our ways of thinking.
Our own awareness of a start and an end is similar to nature where we grow plants and they

come to an end, winter comes and we replant the seeds… all of those cyclical moments are
a part of some sort of phenomenologically understood, embodied experience as well as it
being an intellectual one.

JG I think that word experience is crucial in what you’ve just said because I do relate that to
how Benjamin uses theatre. Theatre as experience – it’s not theatre about just what’s on
the stage – it is about whether those people in the audience are objective or subjective in
order of their own cultural experience and he does question whether we can actually step
outside of that subjectivity in our own time. I think your reference to experience there is
quite interesting because if we label it as experience and we label it as a possible repetition
of, there is a closing and understanding of it, closing and beginning, closing and beginning;
and understanding that it is cyclical.

GB Which is very interesting in relation to Benjamin’s final monument. Have you ever been
to Benjamin’s final monument which is right on the coast? You have this experience of a
tunnel that you go in that then extends itself over the cliff top. You go through that and it
really is quite spectacular. You come to the end and you look out to this moment of the cliff
top over the sea which is sheer experience, it’s sheer phenomenal experience.

MB I wonder if I could just chip in at that point. Shouldn’t we critique that idea of sheer
experience? If, as you were saying before, someone has a first dawn. Well, they don’t have a
first dawn until they’ve had a second one and experience is out of joint, it’s time out of joint.
It’s not something that you grasp in the immediate present. I think that is why the end of art
as a topic is so interesting because it is also out of joint.

JG Unless you grasp it as an experience at the very end of something else, and where you’d
be able to recognise it as a dawning of a new experience.

RM That’s right – under the classic Marxist reading of alienated art supposing that there was
once art; that relies on retrospective labelling of what they were doing as pure art. Which
is not actually quite what Marx says in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts but
for man under primitive communism everything was aesthetic; every single aspect of life –
walking through the woods, picking up a stick… the idea to try and find art seems to be to
apply retrospectively the principles of classification to something that was never there. This
pure origin that Derrida is attacking in the Specters of Marx.

GB But that’s the mourning isn’t it – you’re actually mourning that experience in some way
because of that linguistic term we never really had any unmediated experience outside of
language and its structures, and there is a mourning of that.

RM But that’s not necessarily art is it?

GB No…

TP I think Mike’s tragedy of tragedy is interesting because I think that is way of dislocating
language from event – it is language of language of event. There’s a stage removed from
event that can then be seen as tragedy, or as tragic. That in a sense is a way of freeing the
end of art thesis itself and having it become endless and having it become possibly a rumour
of itself.

JG I agree and I think it’s why Geulen also put Benjamin between Nietzsche and Heidegger

there because she does align Benjamin with Nietzsche on that aspect that it’s a use of
language that defines that endism, but it’s the encounter that Benjamin touches upon in
the staging that links so nicely in to Heidegger that she then goes on to in the next chapter
and that circulatory thinking that we were talking about that before appears so frequently in
Heidegger.

TP Isn’t it an attempting to free language of its historicism in some way?

JG Yes – so it becomes just idea, but Benjamin sees idea as a structure; as a map; a
constellation, if you like, that is suspended above that historicity. It can link into it but it is
not its literal counterpart.

TP Language isn’t a tracing of events; it doesn’t document it in that sense. It sits above it but
it’s free flowing – it can move above events.

GB But if art is going to renew itself, it sometimes has to free itself of its trap within
language because all it will to do is repeat itself endlessly through the structures of the
language that it uses to articulate itself.

JG Which maybe makes a case for that reproduction of the reproduction and out of context
that we often criticise that lack of context so much but sometimes if you have established
that context, to then remove it from context there is a sense of liberation that is occurring
there rather than the entrapment of that language.

GB And as people that deal with art and design pedagogy…

JG This is really interesting!

RM I was wondering if we could bring this back to pedagogy maybe now to almost
summarise…

GB We need, as pedagogy practitioners, to recognise that. Our job perhaps is therefore
to question those languages and the acceptance of the way that practice is understood
so that when students are developing a practice they have levers for change, they have
levers for ways of trying to articulate their experience of the world that are not coloured
by acceptance of the dominant practitioners of the time, which are often of course led by
capitalist philosophy.

RM Well you’re talking about ideology there Garry aren’t you… the task for us as educators
is to smash ideology; not just unpick and interpret it but to find ways in which students can
change that.

TP But it also problematises the whole linkage of theory and practice in some sense… in the
assumption that theory arises out of practice, or impinges upon practice, or that practice is a
justification of theory. If we think of practice as event, and think of theory as language of an
event and the relationship that I described earlier could be seen to exist between the two…

RM Of course for a Marxist, praxis is what we’re aiming for which is the unity of thought and
action.

GB And between the two the one big issue is just awareness and that is what you are trying

to grow within, I would have thought, our student body. A sense of awareness of possibility.
Without that awareness of possibility what you get is poor, fake and repetition which I think
is what Benjamin somewhere was talking about.

RM Of course we are in a situation now where there is no government funding for art
education. Students will be paying £9000 – art education has been commodified and the
relationship between student and teacher has fundamentally shifted, possibly forever. I
don’t know if that means the end of art education, in tandem with the end of art?

MB That’s an interesting problem isn’t it? For a number of decades now we’ve lived in the
period of institutional critique and I think it’s long been understood since Bill Reading’s
famous book that universities are kind of like transnational companies so we’ve all been in…

RM Education factories!

MB We’ve all been in that commodity – there never was any use value, sort of purity…

RM Again that brings us back to Derrida doesn’t it? It’s doubtful whether any pure, utopian,
art academy ever existed! We like to think of maybe the ‘60s as these kind of free spaces but
of course they weren’t.

MB I wonder whether the implications of some of the things we’ve been saying can be
brought to bear on what we might call the teaching studio, at least in terms of art, not
necessarily in terms of design but in terms of art. I have a pet theory that what goes on in
the art studio today, or always has, is a kind of double-bind in the sense that art as we’ve
sometimes been told by people like James Elkins is unteachable – cannot be taught – but at
the same time must be taught. It almost makes an allegory of the quote that I mentioned
before “tragedy is after all that genre in which death is meaningful and meaningless at the
same time”, could be that genre in which art teaching is meaningful and meaningless at the
same time!

TP We could move it right back to Jo’s point at the beginning of the discussion with idea
– that we could have an idea of art as idea and we could have art as thing. In some sense
those things are irresolvable.

GB Which is interesting in terms of that way that some institutions put formative practice
at the centre of their understanding of what goes on. So in some ways one could say that
an understanding of one’s role within a tragedy and of how you actually play it out is more
essential than actually a logical understanding of where you are, or even a philosophical
understanding of where you are – it is all in fact just something we play out.

JG I think it is being prepared to take the encounter and be the actor on a stage and actually
going through a series of endings. No practitioner actually goes through a process without
coming to endings within their own practice. It’s almost their awareness of those endings
– we’re saying there’s a problem with theory and practice – but actually they can only
become aware of those endings within their practice if they have the language with which
to begin to define that as repetitious, that as parody… So it’s almost maybe there’s a sense
where that counter play in the practitioners studio is there; that actually as much as they
are trying to become, or make, or create something new that they are in at the same time
ending, and that they have to go through that process of ending in order to open up the
possibility and there is no chance of finding that possibility unless they place themselves in

the performative, risk taking, unstable, uncertain, exposure of that practice.

TP I was just thinking about Heidegger’s notion of clearing – he has this idea of a clearing
and it’s a space in which being is allowed to show up in its being, or as being. In a sense that
parallels my conception of the studio as that place in which things are allowed to exist as the
things that they exist as, or in the form that they exist.

GB Except the studio itself is just so occluded by myths of what the studio…

JG It is, yes, it comes back to an institutional…

RM It’s a space of ideology…

MB There wouldn’t be a notion of studio as studio within Heidegger

JG They release that uncoupling of language again, yes

MB I think you said earlier on, or in your notes, that the clearing for Heidegger was like the
river; the source and the destination and the moment and the flux. Could you enlarge on
that?

TP I’ll try to…

MB I mean, is there a sense in which… because I think it would be really interesting to see
the teaching studio in terms of Holderlin’s river.

TP This was going back to Holderlin’s river, and it was Geulen’s analysis of the river. I said
that it could be seen to parallel history in the sense that to Holderlin, events seem held
between and defined by origin and destination. I used Heidegger’s clearing; I used that
double projection as something that was close to Heidegger’s clearing that allowed for
a space. It was an infinitesimally thin space but it was a space or a butting of source and
destination that in Heideggerian terms could be called a clearing. It actually wasn’t a space
at all, it wasn’t a space in a location; it was a meeting of two other things.

MB Sort of an overlap, an imbrication of two things.

RM In a peculiar way for me the art institution, the art academy, the studio is almost like for
Hegel when the museum signifies the death of art in the same way. This institutionalisation
of art within the academy becomes the death of art in its own way. Paradoxically though I’m
an art educator, and I go on being that.

MB A double-bind.

GB Going back to the master/slave dialectic, which I think this is very much about what that
is. We switch roles, and what we do is become aware that as one form of ideology takes
over it leaves a space underneath it for its attack, for its reversal. In some ways what we
remind the students of is that although we are part of the master in terms of that dialectic
we are also as our own masters we have our frailties, we have our oppositions. Though we
are seen in one way as teachers we are also very aware that we stand for something that is
the opposite of what we are.

RM That’s very interesting Garry.

MB We’ve talked about the teaching studio but we haven’t talked about the idea of teaching
the history of art or the history of design, certainly the history of art.

JG I was just going to come to that.

RM The stuff of rust and filing cabinets…

JG You alluded to it when you responded to my synopsis about… we’ve got Benjamin’s
trauerspiel here at the beginning when he was first attempting to be a professor; that was
his professorship work; that was him entering into the academy. By the time he gets into the
arcades project he’s already firmly established this idea of the phantasm and of this shadow
play and he uses all that materiality of 19th to 20th century to illuminate that but he uses
what is within our own time to illuminate the structure of what is really going on. I think
there’s an element where we as art educators have to almost take on a bit of that approach.
We use those allegories and that understanding and that labelling and that visual language
in order to identify these myths and phantasms that do end up as ruins – and monumental
ruins.

GB So therefore, shouldn’t we start our first lecture with the fact that art is dead?!

JG Very good point because then you allow the practitioner to walk amongst the ruins as
ruins, to appreciate them monumentally; to appreciate them as myth, as phantasms, as a
structure but also to encounter the space between. To actually look at the spaces between
language and materiality, to look at the spaces between institution and their sense of being
in the studio.

RM But that’s not how art history works though is it?

JG No…!

RM Art history is dominated largely by a particular kind of right-wing thought. It’s about the
assignation of fictive origins as I’ve said before… phantasmagorical ends, just like all history
is played out to the tunes of the ruling class. Eventually these fictive origins and ends achieve
a consensus and then become fact and then become history.

TP In a sense art history is just history; it’s not history of art, it’s just adding to what history
is.

MB It’s history with pictures.

JG That’s why I like the use of the word phantasm because phantasm in itself is illusory, it is
illusion. It’s not real, it’s not fact; it is interpreted, it is part of a narrative.

RM So the primary task of us as educators is to make students realise that – to pick through
reification and ideology.

TP Or we could consider teaching a rumour of art history, or a rumour of art. If we declare
art dead at the beginning of a lecture series we can then talk about the rumours of it.

GB And in fact perhaps we end up doing is writing within in the margins a type of annotated
practice.

TP But do we acknowledge that there’s something outside of the history that we can’t
teach?

JG Yes and that’s their place to be in it and to and explore it – that’s their possibility and by
presenting it in that way as possibility, how much more exciting for them?

TP It’s like Wittgenstein’s unsayable – it’s beyond the pale!

JG That was bloody brilliant!