I have been reading this book, Aesthetics & Politics, a collection of writings and correspondences from Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno that focus on debates about realism, expressionism, and the overall politics of form. Reading this book has been very interesting; I’ve been reading it for research for a performance and film project I am working on that deals with these questions, in this time period. But it also has been fun to draw the debate into the present, because it actually is quite relevant, and unfortunately for us, it doesn’t seem like our understanding of aesthetics and politics has evolved all that much in the last 100 years. For instance, this Adorno quote feels incredibly applicable to the debates around identity politics and art that Dean’s Harpers’ essay amplified: Speaking unfavorably of Lukacs in the late 50s, Adorno writes: “he remains indifferent to the philosophical question of whether a work of art is in fact identical with the mere ‘reflection of objective reality.’”1 To me, this is the question that lies underneath false-flag debates about identity politics and the supposed Culture War. Beyond not being able to agree on the work of art’s autonomy from or total embeddedness within reality, the very question is obscured by dressing it up it as a political-ethical question–autonomy supposedly lending to a ‘reactionary’ stance and embeddedness toward a liberal-progressive one (and for the left. . . ??? lol). And in such discussions, the character, texture, or shape of this “objective reality,” or the question of whether there is such a thing goes left untouched by all involved. (Everyone’s happy to invoke postmodern fracture when convenient, and modern universal truths when that angle serves.)
Anyway, reading this book has me looking at contemporary art and commercial cultural production through the matrix of realism and expressionism. And I’m finding it useful, or at least fun. Of course, the first place to look for the legacy of expressionism is Neoexpressionist art, the largely hideous, vacuous, and market-friendly painting of the 1980s–artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, etc. We generally seem to consider that work safely in the rearview mirror, with a few “movements” sitting in between us and it in the timeline, but the logic of expressionism and neoexpressionism remains pervasive. In some ways, the tactics of this lineage are kind of the only game in town these days. Or, to invoke Hal Foster, perhaps a “reactionary postmodernism” and its “instrumental pastiche of pop- or pseudo- historical forms” has not only won out over the “resistant” thread (“critical deconstruction of tradition”), but has spread like black mold and rendered our field uninhabitable.2 In a more basique way, visual art and film are two arenas where undue emphasis is put on the “expression” of the artist or creator–an emphasis that is inexplicable to me in light of all of the work done to expand on the motives and methods of art-making throughout the 20th century–perhaps at the expense of other matrices such as intellectual rigor or political outlook. This is not quite “expressionism” proper, but expressionism and neoexpressionist principles lurk within such an outlook.
As a historical form, expressionism focused on the “fragmentary character of social experience,” as the authentic kernel of the real, to be actualized in art through “a search for essences pursued through stylization and abstraction.” (20). Or, as Bloch said, it operates from the idea that reality is discontinuity, with this posed against a Lukácsian view of reality as a capitalist totality. For Lukács, good art (always always realist art in his account) operates from a view of reality that accurately accounts for that fact. Lukács defines the core question of the debate as: “Does the ‘closed integration,’ the ‘totality’ of the capitalist system, of bourgeois society, with its unity of economics and ideology, really form an objective whole, independent of consciousness?”3 In his book Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Hal Foster summarizes the position of Lukacs and other like-minded critics of expressionism; for them, Expressionism “did not express subjective freedom so much as it figured social and artistic alienation. Indeed it is the claustrophobia of the monadic individual in a world remapped by monopoly capitalism and transnational ideologies and technologies that this art of sensuous distortion and subjective projection “expressed.”4
I suppose it is not the failure to express something other than a subjectivized “fragmentary social experience” that troubles me about the neoexpressionism (neo-neoexpressionism?) that crops up today. It is more the operations that this entails. In contemporary cinema, Neoexpressionistas naturalize this “fragmentary” and “alienated” subjective experience as the inescapable totality, making this subjective position its world. Hence the personification of neoexpressionism into Neoexpressionista. The neoexpressionista renders everything in his world–cinematic or otherwise–an image or an object, or at best a tool ready-at-hand. On screen, the result is a deadened and uninteresting reality, wherein the tensions that arise from conflicts large and small, internal and external, are smoothed over into a slippery conveyor belt of a cinematic experience. Or to quote Foster again, “the protopolitical protest of expressionism against subjection has become in neoexpressionism an ideological exhibition of “subjectivity.”5
And so, in the rather shitty movie Queer-one of these things I’ve been enjoying examining casually in terms of its (crappy) expressionism, along with other recent popular films from the last year–we watch something like that “reactionary postmodern” historical freezer-burn that Foster describes play out. Guadigino takes Burroughs’–who I am admittedly not the biggest fan of, but whose importance and the pleasure of reading I can vaguely understand–surely fragmentary, late-modernist novel and subjects it to the Neoexpressionist operation, engaging it “as an image through images.”6 This processing reduces what should be rather destabilizing or at least interesting drug trip imagery to a sort-of surreal mash up of “arty” moments that zip through references to various modernist aesthetics (rather noir-y expressionist-y shadows, to a Carrington-y amputee bust of a lady, which also just feels sort of David Lynch-y somehow?) and add up to nothing horrible, beautiful or exciting. The kind of thing you’d disparagingly call music video-y, but somehow is even more cursory than that sort of montage.
The film wants us to be in Burroughs’ head, I guess. But if we’re aware of Burroughs at all, we know Burroughs’ head to be drug-addled, scrambled by post-industrial culture, a hot place overall (Borrowing Peter Halley’s characterization of Burroughs and the Beats as “emotionally hot.”7). But it’s interesting that we find ourselves on a cheesy pastel backlot miniature set of Mexico. And it’s all rather “cool,” in all senses of the word. Perhaps it’s meant to be an arch and loving critique of Burroughs–a sort of half-baked woke resuturing of him to his Whiteness, to his bourgeois-ness, and to contemporary frustrations with the gentrification of places like Mexico? If so, leveling such a critique by formally and narratively suspending the entire film in the very perspective it hopes to work through is strange and, again, just not very good filmmaking. If this is the film’s outlook, it’s not-very-goodness is then highlighted by Lee and Eugene being catapulted into the Real of the jungle on their search for Ayahuasca, again re-rehearsing the stupid delineations of civilization and wildness that the film seems to have a passing interest in. Though, it’s almost fun how the far-too-long last act in the jungle feels a little like a a flat-footed and naive early Hollywood Jungle adventure movie.
It seems like Queer wants us to think about early Hollywood while watching it, or so that last act and the use of miniatures throughout the rest of the film certainly imply. I am not sure why, exactly. And this seems like even more evidence of the Neoexpressionista mode, returning to history for no purpose other than to use it as adornment (or, like identity art, to produce value via the sheer invocation of the historical, as a link in a long chain of references). But here, Guadagnino uses the technical limitations of early cinema, in the form of the miniature, as a form of kitsch. These limitations, combined with perfectly adequate digital compositing techniques, are used to produce an airtight totality of cinematic vision. The sort of techniques we love for the seams that they leave out in the open because they can’t figure out how not to do so are rehearsed here, no seams visible. I guess what I am saying is that here, the conventions of expressionism and neoexpressionism are employed to image a fragmentary subjectivity as unitary whole. The psyche and its external world are rendered co-extensive.
Nosferatu also wants us to think about early cinema, in an even more Duh way, rebooting Murnau’s German Expressionist classic (and its Herzog remake from the late 70s, which I haven’t seen, but maybe will), and doing so with an underlying logic similar to Queer’s, also engaging its source material “as an image through an image.” (And just as a note here–Foster talks about this in terms of engaging modernism, specifically, as an image, but I think we can probably also talk about things as engaging postmodernism as an image through images as well, since we’re sort of now temporally somewhere beyond postmodernism though no one can really figure out where/when we are. But with Nosferatu, we are discussing modernism-proper in the form of early modernism via German Expressionism). Nosferatu’s remediated rebooting is far more depersonalized, desubjectivized than Queer–i.e. Nosferatu does not want us to be in somebody’s head, but it does take German Expressionism and a 19th century Gothic landscape, reduce them to palette rather than treat them as material, and poop out another little snowglobe world of a movie. Albeit, this one is moody and shadowy…ultimately kind of just Tim Burton-y in a way that I felt confused about. Surely Robert Eggers has seen Sweeney Todd.
But Nosferatu’s relationship to Expressionism is–while warranted, as Eggers did choose an Expressionist classic– “neo” insofar as it is a pastiche of an Expressionist film and its environs. In the same way that Foster criticizes, say, Sandro Chia, for using bronze to signal “Eternal Art” or others for using elements of fascist and Nazi art to provoke an air of scandal, Eggers just recycles the visual tactics of expressionism and allows the reference to do the heavy lifting in terms of producing meaning and associations in the viewer. The kind of provocation is possibly the difference between 80s neoexpressionism and whatever is happening today. Then, artists very much in the mainstream art-world lifted these visual languages to serve up to an audience who expected to be scandalized by the avant garde. Art and film audiences today largely seem to want to be soothed by artists not needled by them, so you don’t see this sort of transgressive imagery so much–outside of downtown circles that still live in the 80s simulacra-bohemia that Foster and Owens already intellectually decimated in its first iteration.8
Eggers’ attempts are to a somewhat interesting effect, mostly because of a strange video-gamey feel to much of the camera-work. Laszlo pointed out that there were all these moments where the actors were framed identically to one another shot-to-shot, making the whole thing feel like the story sections between missions in a video game. Like in the moment when LRD and the Upset Guy are talking to one another. Where it would make sense to ground ourselves in some sort of shot-reverse-shot cinematic logic, we instead shuttle between identically framed busts of each actor, addressing the camera sort of directly.
I rewatched the original Nosferatu on YouTube when I was thinking about this, because I wanted to remind myself of what actual German Expressionist cinema feels like, albeit viewed low res. Which is, for the record, kind of boresville. Though, I do really always love The Student of Prague. But that’s somewhat earlier. Anyway, in rewatching the original Nosferatu, I found that a lot of the framing is very similar to the Eggers one, like as in shot-for-shot they are the same in some sections. Even some of these head-on moments I noted in the previous paragraph are blocking lifted from the 1922 version. I don’t know what to make of this. It kind of made me want to detonate my vest, as they say, due to how stupid and lazy Robert Eggers apparently is. But the more measured response is that this is interesting, because we actually find Eggers doing something not dissimilar from LG, for some reason trying to harness early cinema’s mechanical capacities, limitations, or tendencies to bolster his cinematic vision. And in both cases, taking what could be hot hot hot and cooling it way down. Which is just to say, maybe it’s impossible to make things that are so mired in justifying choices through references and history, feel at all honest, sexy, or intelligent. It’s almost like watching 2.5 hours of someone saying “In this paper I will. . .” over and over again. Or like reposting a pic with a really really long reblog chain on tumblr. Tumblr-Expressionista.
A final thought on this, though I still don’t want this to be a “these are bad and this is good sort of post,” but I will say this is partially why I am so into The Brutalist. Rather than unthinkingly and idiotically adopting a staid relationship to history and art–this staid relationship to history being that if we pay homage to it our art is good and meaningful, but also that it is ours to appropriate (if we stay in our lanes), and a staid relationship to art being that we should be expressing ourselves or our vision through it–The Brutalist seems to me to basically be working through those very questions. There is certainly a unity of vision in Corbet’s filmmaking, but it is pragmatic, even though it is lush. I sent one of my group chats an excerpt from a review of the film that was criticizing it for trying to do a Paul Thomas Anderson thing in terms of its relationship to history, which I simply didn’t understand as a comparison. Filmmaker and Group Chat Member Alex Huggins (Hi, Alex!) responded that it was the Pynchonian streak in PTA that this guy was talking about. I still didn’t get it, but I’ve been ruminating on it and I think I do now. Or at least based on the way I think about Pynchon from an admittedly limited first-hand set of experiences and larger body of second hand experiences (aka reading not that much Pynchon, but reading a lot about Pynchon), which is that Pynchon’s approach to world, to story, to putting a character in a world, is not about trying to resolve the character’s relationship to external reality, or even really to himself, but about the unrelenting interpolation of the two (subject-and-world) and the problem of scaling that as time marches on. Here, I have to admit that this formulation is a sloppily-shaken cocktail of David Allworth’s Site Reading: Fiction, Art, and Social Form and Anna Kornbluh’s writing on political formalism. So anyway, I now get the Corbet and PTA thing if some version of that approach to subject/world/history is the binding agent. And, what I meant to say here more concisely, was that this is what I like about The Brutalist. The film assesses the problems of modernism, from the vantage point of the present with a real dedication to the idea that we cannot approach the past as history-concrete or name or understand the present as we muck our way through it. I’m not sure the film is categorically postmodern/ist, but it certainly aligns with Foster’s notion of “critically deconstructing tradition.”
A final, final thought. I feel like this is a weird, annoying book report of a post (sorry!). I suppose I’m just preoccupied with the directives people are consciously or unconsciously operating through in producing art and cinema right now (always). In summation, both Queer and Nosferatu take up the neoexpressionist, reactionary postmodern approach of engaging history or the loosely-formulated-past as an image to be engaged through images. In addition to these film’s processing their source material this way, they also process subjectivity this way. Again, neoexpressionism becomes Neoexpressionista. This is a harder point to parse, and I am still working through it–but the way that character, setting and filmic point of view intersect produces a sort of heightened phenomenological effect, as in almost parodically approaching the world as a present-at-hand (Heidegger-y) whole. Like maybe another simpler way to say it is that it just ignores the concept and processes of interpolation, or things and people acting upon one another, etc. Presenting the world and the other people in it as simply an image as well?
More on this at a later date. Maybe it would be useful to try to think through how and where realism sits these days.
In other news:
It’s been so cold (ed: today it is now warmer, but rainy). But I’ve figured it all out. The Norma Kamali sleeping bag coat that I bought over a year (two?) ago, but only wore once last winter because an art collector lady told me that I looked fat in it and shouldn’t do that to myself. Well guess what, it’s very very warm and very very long. I’ve been wearing it, and no one has said I look fat in it, or silly in any other regard. I was getting so tired of showing up places and feeling like a soccer mom in a long Uniqlo J+ puffer. Which isn’t even that bad as puffers go. Anyway, the Kamali has totally solved the how-to-feel-cool-and/or-chic-and-also-be-warm problem. Anyway, here is a picture of it. I’m not saying it’s not puffy…
I also got the new Comme Si Ski socks. They are expensive but so far my feet have been very warm, and in shoes that I usually worry about freezing in. It took me this long to realize that you can just wear knee socks under pants instead of long johns if you have a long enough coat, and that way you can wear pants you want to wear and not just somehow loose and warm enough and cute enough pants? (The only pants I have that fit that criteria are the Celine cords I mentioned in my first post.)
It’s halfway through January, but yesterday I was like what if I do a No Shopping January. Maybe I will do it in February. In the meantime, I am trying to do one of those Shop Your Own Closet detoxes. I’m only allowed to buy things that I really need, such as more innerwear or yoga pants (bloomers lol) or maybe but really shouldn’t … secondhand (if you’re crazier and richer than I…this) and vintage things that I am afraid won’t be there when I am done being a smart shopper.
Uh, final thing. I received this Kiko Kostadinov x Fox Labs jacket in the mail (Thank you Fox x Kiko). It is very cool. I love it. It sounds so truly stupid but I have really stayed away from shorter jackets for a long time. Not even intentionally; but recently I’ve bought a few short coats and jackets and remembered that I have long legs and this is cool for me. Maybe sometimes they just feel basic? Basic-baiting? Anyway, I love this jacket and its zip-off sleeves. I wore it under my fat-ass Kamali coat the other day and I was super warm and looked cool when I was outside AND when I was inside.
Also, in trying to take a pic of this it finally occurred to me that when people do a fit pic when a brand sends them something they don’t have to do it in the outfit they are going outside in (like this jacket is not quite in season, though I did figure out that the sleeves zip off and so it is not a bad medium layer for really cold weather.) So, this is all just what I wore the other day to go to a meeting in Chelsea with plans to go to the library afterward, but then the meeting was long so I just went home. I probably should be posting a pic of it styled in a flashier way. But I am happy to have learned this lesson, because now I can post in a way that will encourage more free items. Greed is gasoline. Knowledge is power.
Theodor Adorno, “Adorno on Lukács,” Aesthetics and Politics, Verso Books, 155
Foster explores these two threads of postmodernism in “Postmodernism: A Preface,” in The Anti-Aesthetic (1984): “A postmodernism of resistance, then, arises as a counter-practice not only to the official culture of modernism but also to the “false normativity” of a reactionary postmodernism. In opposition (but not only in opposition), a resistant postmodernism is concerned with a critical deconstruction of tradition, not instrumental pastiche of pop- or pseudo- historical forms, with a critique of origins, not a return to them. In short, it seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations” (Foster, xii). Foster continues to make reference to this split, more recently putting forth that there may be a third, unexplored postmodernism, an “accelerationist postmodernism,” which he references in our 2021 November Magazine interview.
Georg Lukács, “Lukács Against Bloch,” Aesthetics and Politics, Verso Books, p. 31
Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, p. 45
Ibid., p. 46
Ibid., p. 35
Peter Halley, “Beat, Minimalism, New Wave,” in Peter Halley: Selected Essays 1981-2001, p. 48
See Recodings as well as Craig Owens’ "The Problem With Puerilism” (1984)
Thank you for your casual-critical reads and the references! So insightful