JB Why the German title, Die Mythologie des Kitsches?2
EB ‘Kitsch’ comes from Germany, and for my latest show in Italy I thought I’d use it in its linguistic context. I’ve stressed the kitsch aspect by including exotic wild animals like lions, tigers, and snakes, as well as tropical vegetation . . . It’s a kind of tribute to Douanier Rousseau, and the imagery is occasionally allegorical.
JB You call all that kitsch . . .
EB Since the turn of the century, we’ve seen extraordinary avant-garde movements: the anarchic expressionism of Die Brücke, Futurism, Dada, Geometric Abstraction. But no one single style ever managed to attract universal support. The end result was a mix, a blending of styles . . .
JB No specific style took the lead because there was no longer a coherent, collective perception of things. Instead, there was a sort of division and subdivision of the perceptual system. You can see this everywhere, be it in politics or aesthetics. It’s a kind of polymorphous dispersion of ideologies and opinions.
EB Kitsch crops up in all facets of life. But it’s possibly more conspicuous in art, because in art there’s perhaps a greater claim to stylistic coherence.
JB Yes, because art is visualisation. It’s a very strong reflex action, not at all like writing. Art is a sort of eye-opener. But I think the problems are the same all over. It has nothing to do with the avant-garde being finished. It’s the art cycle that’s come full circle. Anticipation is no longer a possibility. Did you ever get the impression you were part of the avant-garde?
EB I’ve definitely been part of it, yes. First, back in 1951, in the anti-nuclear movement. Then with Jorn in 1953, when we made a stand against the rationalisation of art and the invasion of geometry, the line, and the right angle.
We founded a movement that foreshadowed the Situationist International. My first contacts with the Lettrists were in 1952 and 1954. I used to get their bulletin Potlach. But I didn’t like the politicised language they used. They had a sort of Stalinist style crammed with accusations and self-criticism, with admissions of all sorts of treachery . . .
JB The avant-garde is like a secret police force.
EB People claim the avant-garde phenomenon lasted until Pop. But Pop soon lost its experimental innovative aspect.
JB I wouldn’t even take it as far as Pop. But Abstract Expressionism was still a kind of avant-garde. Avant-gardes are subversive, and Abstract Expressionism was still a form of gestural subversion of painting and representation. After that, we’re no longer talking about the avant-garde. It’s still possible to come up with something new, but this is merely ‘posthumous representation’. It’s beyond the destruction of representation. What’s more, this creates a very confused world, because all forms are possible. In this sense it may be true that beyond the avant-garde you simply have kitsch. Pop is kitsch. But so are new abstract painting, new representational painting, Bad Painting, and so on . . .
EB The kitsch of modern production, with monuments erected in its honour. In the early days of Pop there was still an ironical, critical dimension.
JB I don’t think there was any critical subversion in Pop. Nor any real irony, either. Pop is about something different. It’s more paradoxical.
EB You’ve used the term ‘subversion’. The avant-garde isn’t opposed to things only on a formal level: it confronts and isn’t opposed to things only on a formal level: it confronts and opposes officialdom. The Impressionists didn’t really produce an aggressive manifesto.
They didn’t take up any definite stand. But in the way they lived and in their works they were against officialdom. They were against contemporary taste and aesthetics. They opposed the turgid academic art that represented and celebrated power and authority. In my opinion, what you see nowadays in certain important museums is once again turgid conventional art. Usually it’s ‘installations’ which are bombastic monuments to contemporary taste. The new academicism is based broadly on a penchant for materials, which are exploited over and over again, in certain examples of arte povera, for instance, or in series of images like Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup and Coca-Cola.
JB The new conventionality isn’t religious, historical, allegorical, or ceremonial. It comes from somewhere lower down the scale, from banality and the humdrum. In a quantitative sense, there’s always been the same volume of academic art. But today it is masked by banality, by the cadavres exquis of banality. Conventional art was ostracised, and now it’s making its triumphant return, revived by the present-day mania for bringing back everything. Where present-day art is concerned, it has become extremely difficult to make judgements. There’s no aesthetic criterion any more.
EB It’s always been difficult to make judgements. ‘Conventional’ means something that’s nicely polished and varnished and shiny, something that doesn’t rock the boat. All those big Conceptual and Minimalist American things, they’re nicely polished and lacquered. Even raw and natural elements are glorified in installations by the use of clever lighting and spacing. These effects make an installation clean, hygienic, and dazzling.
JB Conventional art has to look clean. There’s such a demand from museums and from the public at large for sanctifying anything and everything. And it’s precisely this cultural demand that’s kitsch. There’s another kind of kitsch, too: the kitsch of traditional popular art that doesn’t really hang on aesthetics, so much as on craftsmanship. It is kitsch in relation to art, but it has an originality of its own. Kitsch is a pathological outgrowth of aesthetics. And today it’s produced by the institution of aesthetics, no less. You yourself have retained control over what you do. In your work there’s a form of exploration and invention that’s true to itself. You haven’t been caught up in the pathological circuit. I don’t know how artists ever find their way around it.
EB Carl Andre once said about Warhol that, for better or worse, we got the artist we deserved. To which I replied: ‘The artist you deserved, maybe.’ As far as I’m concerned, I won’t put up with any kind of identification with Warhol. And it must be said that there’s a whole range of verdicts, not just Carl Andre’s.
JB It used to be possible to work within the secrecy of tradition, outside the market. It was still possible to have a different way of looking at things. Nowadays this seems very difficult to do. Can a work be subversive toward the very market that has publicised that work? Is it possible to stand up to conformity, to the dictatorship of the market, to value systems, to the powers that be? For example, the demographic basis of your pictures raises a general, worldwide, human problem. Do you think that over and above their visual force they might help to change things? Nobody is in control of the world’s population; in a way it’s man’s inexorable fate. You can fight political powers quite openly, but the population problem is beyond our grasp. What are you criticising in your painting? Is your painting more than a dramatic illustration of a problem?
EB I intend to go on taking stances and giving my works meanings that go beyond aesthetic values. The problem of the population explosion, which is the subject of Seven Billion People by the Year 2000,3 conjures up another danger: the mass popularisation of art. From something inviting reflection and contemplation, art has become a mass phenomenon that has nothing to do with art. The horde quashes any chance of perceiving aesthetic phenomena. All the artist can do is live and work in the solitude of his studio, unless he decides to turn his studio into a factory. Painting is not some kind of theatre, as people would have it today. Art is nurtured by solitude and silence. The masses do not produce visions and thoughts and dreams. They turn things that weren’t into kitsch. Look at the Mona Lisa with her moustache and the caption L.H.O.O.Q. Here it’s Duchamp (and Picabia) interpreting the transformation of a masterpiece by the masses.
JB I’d say that the masses are the supreme kitsch product. At the same time the masses are a mirror of power that has itself become kitsch. So we’re no longer talking about subversion by the masses. We’re talking about a disqualification of power by its extension to the masses. When power ventures into the realm of statistics, it loses all specificity. This produces a sort of perverse contract between power and the masses, a mutually manipulative contract. Your painting dealing with demographic catastrophe and overpopulation is also addressing the problem of overcrowding in the art world. Over-information and over-communication are like cancerous proliferations. Can this trend be stopped? You are still trying to. But in the meantime things have become destabilised. You think you are at the hub of a system of subversion and radical criticism; but, in subtle ways, you no longer know where you are. When painting tries to put across an idea, it brings the present-day fate of ideologies upon itself.
EB We have entered a permanent crisis.
JB Right. But I know people who don’t relate this crisis to painting. For them, painting has become a kind of sanctuary, a refuge for traditional know-how.
EB As a rule I like painting to be connected with things and events that affect people. Ten years ago you saw my Milan show on the theme of the Apocalypse. Your own mind is often apocalyptic, if you’ll forgive the expression. Your intelligence enables you to penetrate pretence, semblances, and the mediatisation of art. This process of mediatisation has already, to a large degree, replaced both reality and life. In any event, as far as I’m concerned there’s no question of me turning in on myself. On the contrary, I want to be alive and kicking, the better to fight the fight and suggest solutions. This might seem ridiculous, but I’ve got lots of confidence in imagination, invention and dreams. I’m hopeful both on my own account, and for other people too. I think we’ll come through the current situation, which is flat, agnostic, indifferent, and unmotivated. This is something Freud didn’t reckon on – people without drive, people unable to change direction.
JB I can see both sides. Sometimes I think there’s an irreversible move toward non-desire – a withdrawal from desire. Warhol’s part of this, but he’s not the only one. You can see this happening in society, in the demise of political passions, in the history of events that are no longer events. You can see it in the whole gamut of things that it’s no longer possible for people to desire or imagine . . . You can describe this as a fatal, irreversible development. Yet at the same time, you can imagine that something different will come about. But what?
History teaches us that there’s a succession of civilisations and cultures, and that, in the end, something new invariably occurs. But some cultures have completely vanished. So catastrophe is a possibility – catastrophe in the apocalyptic sense of the term, which has nothing to do with crisis. I mean a catastrophe in the sense of a process of acceleration, an accelerated unravelling of forms. The whole theory of chaos charts a revolution of forms that is accidental rather than critical. Forms aren’t revived by nature. They’re revived by their movement through catastrophe, by extreme phenomena. You yourself trust in Good, in the indestructible vitality of nature, and in desire. I’m less confident than you. I tend to believe that catastrophe will bring the system to a point where it’ll explode. I have no illusions and no certainty about what might happen afterwards. But I make suppositions about going to extremes and in some ways precipitating the motions. When you yourself depict the apocalypse, or the population crisis, you’re imagining the worst.
EB I’m imagining a certain vitality that’s a sort of hope. I believe in the power of imagination. That doesn’t stop me from seeing the worst. But I don’t see the acceleration of the worst as a preferable solution. Even if we’re living in a situation of tedium and dull acceptance of things, how can you hope that we won’t get out of it? Are we meant simply to sit and wait for our final destruction?
JB There are various solutions, and I find Warhol’s position particularly interesting, when he holds up the mirror of a utopia based on sheer banality. It’s a bit like what I do when I push concepts to their limit in order to incite a violent abreaction. I’m not looking for progressive, positive action any more. I’m looking for negative or paradoxical abreaction, in extreme phenomena. From here on, it’s a strategy of provocation, not invocation. Invocation involves utopia and make-believe. Warhol interests me because he develops a media-oriented, mechanical strategy. It’s consistent with the strategy of the system, but faster than the system itself. It doesn’t dispute the system, but it pushes it to the point of absurdity, by overdoing its transparency.
EB It’s only scientists and people concerned with these problems who make catastrophic forecasts of an irreversible destruction that won’t lead to another form of socio-cultural reorganisation.
JB Right. It’s a bigger risk because it’s a poker game, a game of outbidding. Whereas the other is a more human, more rational prospect. It, too, leads to catastrophe, but in an underhanded way. And nothing will re-emerge from this slow-motion catastrophe.
EB We’re talking about art and people and anthropology. But let’s be frank: does our chum Warhol interest us more than nuclear weapons and pollution and worldwide desertification?
JB Do you hold out any hope for ecology?
EB I’m not exactly hopeful. But all the same, you can’t ignore the pollution that’s all around us – in the air, in economics, in politics, and even in art. This pollution is caused by distorting the meaning of things. You saw how terminological and aesthetic confusion won the day at the last Biennale. France exhibited architectural projects. The sculpture prize went to photos. The prize for artists under thirty-five was given to someone older, and so on and so forth. And what about Jenny Holzer’s ‘truisms’?
JB It’s really macabre. But you’re quite right. Pollution is not just in our air and water. It’s also present in the promiscuity and confusion of genres and styles. It is caused by the proliferation, in the guise of art, of anything and everything. But putting any old thing on display is taking people for a ride. It’s blackmail based on insecurity (of judgement and pleasure), and that’s not acceptable. The art scene is a spectacle, a show. This means things are degenerating. It’s pretty obvious that there’s no real space left for painting.
What’s left is a sort of happening.
Times have changed. This is a very ephemeral period. It’s not a period of painting. It has much more to do with other forms of expression: photography, cinema, audio-visual media, electronics. From now on, this is what art’s about. The museum and the happening at one and the same time – things that are utterly contradictory and yet in cahoots.
EB And what about those exhibition catalogues? So heavy . . .
JB The catalogue is a performance. An exhaustive performance that can often substitute for the exhibition.
EB The catalogue for a great exhibition also has another function: that of offering options, like the catalogues of optional extras that you get with cars. In painting you have the option of choosing between Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons; the architects of the Pavillon français or painting, because the torch of painting has been passed to the architects. You can also choose between Olivier Mosset and Ellsworth Kelly. The option, the accessory, is a good producer of kitsch. A car is kitsch enough as it is. If you added all those optional extras you’d get something quite monstrous; you’ve probably seen the air bags that Mercedes Benz has developed. In the event of a collision, the bag inflates and prevents you from getting impaled on the steering wheel. Clearly it has to inflate before impact.
JB You can very easily imagine it inflating afterwards and suffocating the driver.
EB We’ve talked about kitsch, of the masses that thrive on it the way they thrive on dictators and rock stars, but art auctions are part of the same phenomenon. Selling Van Gogh to the Japanese is a kind of financial kitsch. There’s also mystical and minimal kitsch. I met a collector who had a whole corridor given over to an installation of Philips neon lights by Dan Flavin. When the neon fired, the collector saw divine transcendence in the purity of the cold light. I saw the reflection of God in his eyes. The age of purity started with Malevich.
His experiments prompted a protracted discourse: is it better to have a white square on a white background, a white square on a black background, or a black square on a black background? Here already one achieves a sublimation of kitsch. Malevich did the black on white in 1915. It took him another three years to get to the white on white; this leisurely pace is what is needed to transform purity into something operational. In such a case, purity becomes spectacle.
JB That work contains a sort of metaphysics of the void, a compulsion to vanish. There are various ways of vanishing: by forms tapering off, by conceptualisation, by see-through geometry. Or else by excess, proliferation, and redundancy. As I see it, art has followed both paths. Is it still possible to talk in terms of aesthetics? If art has ever had a definition, that definition has had to do with mastering a craft, in order to provide an objective illusion of the world. Since Dada, I have not been able to see most art as art. I see it as something symptomatic of a kind of neurosis. All of a sudden, aesthetic judgement becomes secondary, because it’s no longer really relevant. Added to which, I can no longer ask myself whether something’s beautiful or not. As Thierry de Duve has emphasised, up to a certain point it was possible to say: ‘This is beautiful, that isn’t.’ An aesthetic judgement. Then, at some given moment, we’re no longer thinking in terms of beauty, and we say: ‘This is art and that isn’t.’ This is an important change. But there may be a stage beyond all this where art doesn’t even enter the picture. As a specific practice, art has more or less vanished. Things are already at a very advanced stage of degeneration.
EB There’s much talk about the disappearance of art. People used to talk about the death of art. In Italy you published a text about the disappearance of art – the disappearance of art in a society that hasn’t yet disappeared . . .
JB But I’m saying that the disappearance of art is offset by the art of disappearance. In other words, this isn’t the end of art, because the actual disappearance is a whole art unto itself.
EB You add that art is not in fact obligatory. It isn’t a phenomenon that must absolutely exist. So if art disappeared, this wouldn’t cause irreversible harm . . .
JB We know that some cultures have existed quite happily on a non-aesthetic basis. But I don’t think we’ve had any examples, to date, of a culture where art existed and then vanished, and that culture moved on to another mode. I find the idea quite fascinating. What is a society where an aesthetic base provides a system of powerful values, a system that has taken up where sacrificial systems left off? What becomes of a society like this if it loses its symbolic points of reference? Do things revert to the status quo ante, or are subsequent forms developed? I don’t really have the answer. It’s really an anthropological problem. Maybe we are this future type of society. Roger Caillois identifies four kinds of game: the mimetic game, the sporting/competitive game, the game of vertigo, and the game of chance.4 Western aesthetics is a mimetic game of expression, a game of representation. It’s also a game of challenge: challenge to the real world and to the expression of the real world. But it’s possible to make up random, or vertiginous, games – different forms of games that depend on different sensibilities, and on different types of action. Maybe we’re in the process of moving from a culture of expression and competition to vertiginous or random societies.
EB We’ve talked about the disappearance of art, or rather, the art of disappearance. We’ve talked about the non-necessity of art, and the possible shift from an aesthetic society to a non-aesthetic or ‘transaesthetic’ one. The fact is, the mass of people I portray in my pictures could also be the mass of painting and painters. There is an incredible number of painters out there.
JB A galloping demography, a spontaneous multiplication like that of germs. In the face of such a fabulous expansion in the supply, it is not clear where the demand might be. It is always the same problem: aspiration is as problematic as inspiration. People consume art, they devour it. But we will never know whether they really needed it or whether they wanted it. In any event they are not given the choice.
In the extreme, everyone will become creators and then everyone will be on the supply-side. Will there still be consumers?
EB After the war, at the time of Cobra and the last avant-garde movement in Italy, very little was sold, and artists often swapped canvases among themselves. We could therefore reach a point of constant exchange which could lead to an obligatory transaesthetic circulation.
JB This would no longer be a question of market-based circulation, it would be a kind of ‘potlatch’, and that would effectively be the transaesthetic realisation of things. Unfortunately it could also end up with a massive bottleneck.
EB But there would always be galleries that could act as traffic lights . . . over and above policing the traffic, the galleries could always provide paintings to those who had been excluded from the ‘potlatch’ but wanted, nonetheless . . . to take part. Potlach was, incidentally, the name of the very first bulletin used by the Situationists.
JB Speaking in terms of supply and demand means that the laws of the market have already been accepted. The cultural postulate is that the demand is constantly increasing, that more and more art is needed. That is not proven. In any event, there is nothing in art that resembles a democratic exercise. It is not true that everyone should have some, nor that man has any cultural rights. For aesthetic enjoyment and aesthetic judgement to endure, there has to be a secret complicity, a closeted dimension. Now we see clearly that the supply is constantly increasing, that the creators are becoming legion, and they feed the circuits that are becoming ever-more voracious. But where is the demand, what does it become? Everyone goes to see everything. There is a statistical drain: 300,000 people went to see a Warhol show. That’s wonderful, but we will never know what they came to see, nor if they actually saw anything . . . That remains a mystery. If art has a function today, it remains indecipherable. What are people looking for? The destruction of culture or its absorption? In absorbing it, they destroy it. They come to gobble up the Beaubourg, eating up the building and what is in it at the same time. A type of extraordinary cultural cannibalism. No one can get the better of it but no one is asking questions any more, since we start from the principle that the stronger the demand, the better the thing is working. It is clear that this increases values, and creates a phenomenon of a sort of ‘cultural dumping’. What has been unleashed is a kind of cultural demand that has nothing to do with aesthetics.
While the aesthetic dimension seems so obvious to you, to me, to us, in our worlds, for 90 per cent of people, aesthetics does not exist, the need for an aesthetic criterion is lacking.
EB It exists at the level of cars though. In this case aesthetics shifts to things that really represent the symbols of everyday life.
JB Take the generation I knew for example. Everything was so kitsch, so cheap, so petit bourgeois. That was fifty years ago, or even 100 years ago. In the last century there has been such a massive aesthetic penetration, such a schooling on forms, that many things should have changed as a result. And yet, when you enter the universe of the vast majority of people, you find that absolutely nothing has changed in terms of taste, or discrimination. Everything is just as awful as it always was. There is no collective teaching in terms of aesthetics. There is no negative feeling about it though because conformity is a defence strategy.
EB I have to say that design is even worse than the popular kitsch of the past. These days you often find the most absurd pretentions, such as aerodynamic shapes where they serve no purpose or, for example, the redundancy of some sofas and armchairs.
JB Yes indeed, design is an intolerable presumption in most instances. In any event it is an added dimension, a theatrical supplement. Kitsch often springs directly from design, or design is the expression of kitsch, which is the same thing. The forced intrusion of aesthetics represents the decline of original forms. We need professionals everywhere to calculate the form of an object, its curvature, its volume. Nothing is left to intuition or to everyday use.
EB What is success? What is the system, because the success is often organised . . .?
JB They say that the publicity machine is omnipotent. Everyone maintains this comfortable illusion, either to denounce it or to take advantage of it. But there is an unplanned element. While 90 per cent of the traffic is assured by the programmes, perhaps 5 per cent is still accidental.
EB We spoke just now about the contribution of chance to success and of the public reception reserved for works of art. But it is also possible to employ the accidental when creating a painting. Do you think that in my combinatorial picture, chance has had a role to play?
JB There too, there are some surprises which surprise even you. As your career has developed, there have been some changes of direction, invention of forms, in terms which we can correctly describe as accidental or catastrophic. The same thing sometimes happens in a conversation. A complete change takes place, and you realise that things went differently. And this cannot be known in advance.
EB I think that, fundamentally, all my heads, and all my characters, look alike, but it is the accidental combination, the coincidence of the meetings that is able to determine the variation.
JB In your later works, there is a sort of swarming, a kind of promiscuity, there is undoubtedly an element of horror. But I find that, compared with the Generals,5 and the other things you were doing at that time, the form is more reconciled with itself. There is something happier about them. It could be the Day of Judgement but at the same time it is the earthly paradise. It is no longer exactly the caustic denunciation of a cynical world. I don’t know if I am wrong, but there has been an evolution . . . Now there are bodies, and faces while, with the Generals, there were only masks.
NOTES
1. A longer version of this conversation was first published in French as ‘Die Mythologie des Kitsches’, in J. Baudrillard and E. Baj (1990), Transparence du kitsch, Paris: Éditions de la Différence, pp. 7–23. A shorter French version was reprinted as ‘Entretien sur le kitsch’, Jardin des modes, 146, February 1991, p. 26. Some emendations have been made to the original English-language translation of this interview where the translator’s loose style has obscured the intended meaning. [Editors]
2. The title of Baj’s show in 1990 at the City Museum of Varese.
3. A reference to the French translation of Ehrlich, P. (1968), The Population Bomb, New York: Ballatine Books; in French translation: Ehrlich, P. (1972), La Bombe P. Sept milliards d’hommes en l’an 2000, Paris: Fayard. [Editors]
4. Caillois, R. (2001), Man, Play and Games, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. [Editors]
5. Generals is one of Baj’s best-known series of paintings, which he began in 1959. [Editors]
© Original publication: ‘The transparency of kitsch: a conversation between Jean Baudrillard and Enrico Baj’, in E. Baj (1991), The Garden of Delights, ed. M. del Re and G. Marconi, Milan: Fabbri Editori, pp. 25–35.