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by Niels Betori Diehl
Still image of video footage of pro-Palestinian demonstration in Berlin, October 11, 2023. Image by the author.
The still perceivable, albeit somewhat dusty sublimity of a certain conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s stems from its abstention from any political symbolism. Whoever comes across the sculptural work Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) by Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), who coined the term “conceptual art,” is confronted with a logically systematized sequence of 122 open cubes, which, by avoiding identical repetitions, consistently takes into account and plays through all configurations. In this consistency also lies the key to the work’s interpretation. An unambiguous reading, as is expected in today’s attention economy, is not provided. “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically,” states one of LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” from 1969, a fundamental art-theoretical text. In her essay “LeWitt in Progress” (1978), art historian Rosalind Krauss has identified the subversive element in LeWitt’s relentless commitment to an idea, reading his work through Samuel Beckett. It is precisely this consistency that turns against the “purposelessness of purpose,” according to Krauss, while the act of thinking things through to the end reveals itself as a joyful farce. Conceptual art as a humoresque. Land art pioneer Robert Smithson, as the thoroughly humorless nature boy that he was, once described LeWitt’s works as “prisons devoid of reason,” a comment that should be taken as a compliment. Chuckling while contemplating his open cubes means understanding them.
Like the disappearance of the fireflies, which Pier Paolo Pasolini used as a metaphor for the transition from agrarian values to the “hedonistic fascism” of modern-day Italy in a 1975 article for the Corriere della Sera newspaper, the dying down of this blissful enjoyment is the measure of the dreadfulness of our time. It is a time of aversion to the imaginative and the ambiguous, an aversion that we find sublimated in the queer movement’s normalized ideas of otherness: to each penchant its own flag. In their 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality, based on Erich Fromm’s research work, Theodor W. Adorno and his co-authors described this reflex as “anti-intraception” and included it as a variable in the “fascism scale” they developed. As Marxist Jewish intellectuals who had emigrated from Germany to the United States during the Nazi era and were trying to apply social scientific methods to the task of identifying the causes of the turn toward authoritarianism and antisemitism, they located the authoritarian character on the right—and on the right only. The limits of a critique of ideology that set out from ideology—Marxism—to uncover ideological motives in society are easy to recognize, especially in view of Adorno’s earlier strategic silence on Stalin’s suppression of the Left Opposition and on the Moscow Trials of the late 1930s. To this day, this significant structural flaw makes recourse to the authoritarian character a useful club with which to beat down on any conservative impulse, although for instance Else Frenkel-Brunswik’s concept of intolerance of ambiguity, that is, the inability to tolerate uncertainties and contradictions, lends itself perfectly to clearly identifying the woke, identitarian left, with its moralizing, discourse-averse, and discrediting posture, as authoritarian and inevitably antisemitic.
Reading Adorno, one can almost forget that he happened to be a Marxist, albeit one who, with the drying up of revolutionary labor movements and the fading of any hope for the possibility of a “true” socialism in the Soviet Union, gradually rejected the notion of class analysis. Had he not insisted on going hiking in Zermatt in the summer of 1969, he might have avoided death by exhaustion, and the conservatism immanent in his incomparably sharp descriptions of experiences of loss might have emerged more clearly in his work in the following decades—let us just imagine Adorno’s writings of the 1980s! “From a distance, the differences between the Viennese workshops and the Bauhaus are no longer so considerable,” writes Adorno in Minima Moralia: “In the meantime, the curves of the pure purposive form have become independent of their function and pass over into ornaments, just like the basic shapes of Cubism.” Compare this with the critique of consumerism by the modernist traditionalist and pioneer of architectural postmodernism Adolf Loos, from his 1908 manifesto “Ornament and Crime”: “The turnover of ornaments leads to a premature devaluation of the product of labor. . . . A woman’s ball gown, meant only for one night, will change its form more quickly than a writing desk. But woe betide if a desk has to be changed as quickly as a ball gown, because the old forms have become unbearable.”
If only one could edit out the Marxist trappings, which, like a compulsory exercise in Adorno’s work, make his reflections appear shallow and, at times, prosaic! Adorno’s greatness lies precisely in the fact that one can reflect with him on the damaged life even without necessarily confining the cause of the damage to capital and consumption.
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