The Feminist Avant-garde

For reasons ultimately unknown, women artists have been second-rate artists, at best, in the history of art so far. In the 20th century, I think Georgia O´Keeffe was on the threshold of being a first-rate artist, but I also think that actually considering her a first-rate artist would go too far. However, you do not always need to be a first-rate phenomenon to make a first-rate impact. (Most of) the Dadaists, the Vienna Actionists or the Fluxus artists have not been first-rate artists, but they have been at the right place at the right time and had the right ideas (in the manner of a low-hanging fruit they were able to pick or so). And so, they deeply ingrained themselves in the history of art; they made sense in the universe. Feminism also makes sense in the universe. Following the social upheavals of the 1960s and the transition to a new type of democratic mass society with a more emancipated and vocal type of citizen, feminism gained considerable momentum in the 1970s. Feminism also found its expression in art at that time. Feminism is not identical to itself though. Generally, feminism fights for women´s rights and the elevation of the status of women. However, there are different strains in trying to define (or to sort out) what it actually is (or means) to be a (wo)man. On the one hand, there is a “biologist” or “essentialist” feminism that claims there is a true identity of the woman, neglected and disfigured by patriarchy however, trying to find out what this true identity is like and realign women with it. On the other hand, there is a “gender deconstructivist” feminism that sees feminity as a mere social construct without a true substance. (These are highly pointed extremes, with the golden path, alongside which you assumingly walk in highest accordance with reality, likely being somewhere in between those extremes.)

Feminist´s and feminist artist´s concern initially was mostly to make their own female voices heard. Carolee Schneemann hit hard with her performances already in the 1960s (she has been a pioneer within performance art and body art in general). Marina Abramovic or Gina Pane came up with transgressive, often dangerous, brutal or tormenting (performance) art as well, implicitely or explicitely expressing female vulnerability as well as triumph over female victimization by patriarchy. Lydia Benglis made parodies of “masculinely reductive” minimal artists like Donald Judd or Carl Andre. Cindy Sherman visualised gender stereotypes, most famously via her Untitled Film Stills. Ana Mendieta tried to investigate the human (and female) connection to the earth or to mythologies (therefore having a much broader agenda than just a feminist one). Francesca Woodman´s photographies are about appearing and disappearing as a woman under the “male gaze”. Ulrike Rosenbach expressed the dullness women have been subjected via their roles as housewifes and the like. Rebecca Horn tried to express how uncomfortable it is for women to navigate through a male-centered society. Valie Export gave Vienna Actionism a feminist turn. In her performances Orlan tried to expose the violence done to women. Though Louise Bourgeois came to success only late in life (and thanks to the feminist movement) and she has not been a distinctly feminist artist, her transgressive art has continued to serve as an inspiration for feminism and feminist art.

Alongside with essentialist feminism there has been the question about whether there was a true “female”/feminine art, of distinct qualities; respectively if there were true, essentially female qualities in women, that have been effectively silenced or distorted by patriarchy. This specific branch of feminism however has always been entangled with difficulties that, in a boomerang-like manner, created backlashes against itself. For instance, differences and binary opposites between “the male” and “the female” have been tried to be identified (and, either, mourned or be affirmed) about which one does not know how much they are grounded in reality or deliberately “constructed” (a term that feminism usually applies for anything “patriarchy” does); like “male” being rational, aggressive, bold, clear-cut though a bit simple-minded, etc.; and “female” being emotional/irrational, soft, diverse, attentive to facets, etc. Reality, by contrast, seems considerably more nuanced and, more often than not, at odds with such categorisations. In the arts for instance, “soft sculpture” had been pioneered by Claes Oldenburg; the grids of Agnes Martin could be seen as masculine; Sol LeWitt´s reductive art, by contrast, has explicitly been hailed by feminist art critics for bringing “variety and disorder”. Moreover, if essentialist feminism seeks to unearth a “genuine” voice of women, how could it be identified what such a genuine voice of women actually will be? Consequentially, there is a tendency in feminism to see numerous voices and expressions by or on behalf of women as “still alienated” (even though there may be truth in that). Following Simone de Beauvoir, feminists have tried to capture the feminine as “the other”. In a more depressed fashion they will imagine this otherness as something still vacant and deprived of positive qualities; in a more narcissistic and grandiose fashion (which might eventually be labelled as “femifascism” or “feminazism”) they may hope to discover some hidden superiority of the feminine that will eventually overpower the masculine. The problem is that “the other” never finally allows closure; although you can experiment with it and get to know it somehow better, the “other” will eventually remain alien and opaque, maybe even just ghost-like. The “other” is bound to remain an enigma. The problem is that feminism, in its desire to free women from “male domination” and “alienation” AND in seeing “male domination” and “alienation” practically anywhere effectively at work, eventually might decouple women from any meaningful social relationships and run into solipsism, i.e. a permanently unstable (and undesirable) condition.

“Gender deconstructivist” feminism, on the other hand, carries the potential of being devoid of any positive, affirmative ideas concerning what a sexual or gendered identity could be, since an essential, biological sex is ontogically absent in its paradigm (in the extreme case; in the usual case the existence of a biological sex is not denied, only deemed irrelevant). Several feminists starkly oppose the “gender deconstructivist” branch of feminism, because they think it will make feminism actually obsolete (as it is deemed to make the female sex obsolete). In the case of Cindy Sherman, there actually is an exploration of gender stereotypes, but not of any positive role models for women. The (vulgarised) poststructural intellectual approach that everything that appears in social reality is just “constructed” and the tendency among feminists to consider everything they do not like as “patriarchal constructs” empties reality out of its density, its meaning and its substance. It is a fetishised view upon reality and upon human interactions. In the case of feminism, much of what is considered (and condemned) as “patriarchy” by feminists to a more moderate viewer might rather appear as stuff that naturally happens in reality, and among humans. Much of the art of the feminist avant-garde for instance revolved around the subjugation of the woman under the “male gaze”, or the reduction of the woman to a “muse” and “inspiration” (and not as a creator in her own right), or to the imposition of “patriarchal beauty standards” upon women. However, one simply cannot help seeing a robust narcissistic exhibitionism at work in the art of Hannah Wilke, Francesca Woodman or Valie Export, in which they permanently present their (beautiful) female bodies, i.e. there sems to be quite a collusion at play between a “male” gaze and a “female” desire to be seen (in the case of Hannah Wilke at least, her permanent, somehow flirtatious presentation of her beautiful naked female body in her feminist art has met staunch criticism from feminist art critics like Lucy Lippard – Valie Export´s art has been considered “pornographic” at least by more conservative viewers at that time). And in the end, it is irritating how the artists of the feminist avant-garde time and again make themselves the center of their art, in their nude or other portraits. The feminist avantgarde wanted to attack the self-saturated egomania of the male artist, however male artists are not known to have done anything similar.

The so-called feminist avant-garde has been something (or has accompanied something) that is socially very relevant. Therein might lie the gravity of the feminist avant-garde. Its currency is social relevance, and relevance for the individual emancipation of (wo)men. It seems a thing that needed to be done, it relates to things that needed to be sorted out, so as to be able to ascend to the next level. Unfortunately, intellectually and artistically the “male” (-dominated) avant-garde half a century before deems much more substantial than the feminist avant-garde. One is sorry to say that the feminist avant-garde (which does NOT mean: art done by female artists in general) seems to lack brilliant ideas as well as executions. It is not particularly brainy. Maybe a “feminist avant-garde” is even a bit of an oxymoron. In order to be (intellectually) avant-garde, you need to think at a very high level of abstraction and you need to transcend society in many ways. That is what happened within modern art, and among the eminent modern artists. Feminism does not operate at such a level of abstraction and it does not desire to transcend the social realm – its battles are within the social realm. Likely, the kind of visceral, bold kind of art of the feminist avant-garde was appropriate to its cause. It is difficult to think how the feminist rage could have been expressed in aesthetically pleasing paintings or so. Some Dadaism likely had to be applied. Nevertheless I am somehow disappointed by the feminist avant-garde. I would have expected more from it. Contemporarily there is of course a tendency to praise anything feminist or anything done by a woman in highest terms. Therefore some also praise the feminist avant-garde as kind of the most important movement in art ever since, with “immense” and “profound” impact on the arts in general ever since. Well, but I don´t know. First of all, the feminist avant-garde has not been a true avant-garde, and it has not truly been revolutionary (and after all, it is a term labelled in retrospect – to make propaganda for an exhibition about the feminist art of the 1970s). Feminism and feminist art, and the impact it has made on society since the 1970s, rather deem evolutionary within our kind of society; the broadening understandings concerning “gender and diversity” a natural process within open societies and within modernity – as modernity means a broadening of understandings, and of understandings and concepts becoming more complex and differentiated. Such societies also become more “democratic”, and allergic to any “elitism”. This does not necessarily produce awesome results. For instance, look at the arts. For reasons ultimately unknown, women artists have been second-rate artists, at best, in the history of art so far (there have been first-rate female writers/poets nevertheless). Yet today, among the internationally renowned artists there are considerably more women than in the past. Unfortunately, this is a mixed success at best, because there practically are no more first-rate artists around, be they male, female or diverse. Women are now more present in art, but art has ceased to be a first-rate phenomenon. Maybe the impact of the feminist avant-garde (and its desire to dismantle the “male” artistic genius) on the arts was that it helped to lower the standards and to allow things that are not very inspired to enter the domain of art.

I would not like to miss the feminist avant-garde, however. I do not like all too male dominated gatherings of humans. Likely, they are, in such an exclusiveness, actually dysfunctional, as the feminists claim. As everyone knows, I champion intellectualism, universalism, and the avant-garde. I desire to understand the world in the most universal way possible, and I suspect particuliarian and partisan ideologies to be an expression of (finally anti-intellectual and unethical) egocentricities, however justified they may appear or be in their original intent. Because of my unusual personality and my anti-egocentric attitude I can stretch out into the universal quite successfully. However I have come to notice that universality is impossible. It is a common feature – among universalists and partisan people alike – to think stuff out there and humans out there are more or less like themselves. I have become more sensible recently – to the fact that they are not. Therefore I welcome the surfacing of particularian ideologies, because they give me a better understanding of the world and a sense of how stuff in this world and people in this world are truly different from each other. This is, finally, something sad. But it is the way it is, or how it seems to be. The feminist avant-garde has been the expression of a particuliarian sentiment and ideology. With a universal appeal, of course, with the desire to broaden the understanding of the universal. This is so because women, i.e. half of the world´s population, are universal. Feminism, by contrast, still has not come to be a universal narrative that is applied by the majority of women. To a considerable degree, it is even rejected by many women (and, granted, there is some mystery to that). Some of the fallacies of feminism have been mentioned in this text, and one might think of others as well.

Roberto Matta and Surrealism

Roberto Matta was not a preeminent figure in the arts, but he was an important exponent of American Surrealism and a champion for the definition and the self-understanding of a genuine (US-) American type of art. Roberto Matta brings shattered shapes, biomorphic or, more often than that, tool-like or machine-like forms to canvas. Functional, either by themselves or in their arrangements, they do seem not. An interesting importunity and intrusiveness of forms, of materiality, coming packed and in a crowd, you seem to have, prefigurative, preverbal. Hallucinations that may stem out from the depths of the mind, before they can make sense, before they can form a syntax, before they become relatable forms and objects. Matta was convinced of the richness of the inner life, and, as a Surrealist, wanted to depict a very inner life, or epiphanies of the so-called unconscious. The Surrealists, with their dogmatism, however became too narrow for Matta, who wanted to establish a true American art in the middle of the 20th century. Due to his charismatic personality and sharp intellect he exercised great influence on the American artists who struggled for the same cause initially, but alienated them after a while with his own dogmatism and the narrowness of his concepts. Therefore he joined the Surrealists again (the other artists would then become the Abstract Expressionists). In general, there was a representational Surrealism, depicting irrational, dream-like associations between people or objects or showing them from unusual perspectives, as you had it in the works of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst or Rene Magritte. And there was a non-representational Surrealism where you did not even have true objects but imaginary forms. Such was the Surrealism of Jean Miro, or Roberto Matta. In the exhibition at the Vienna Kunstforum I found some of Matta´s paintings striking, even extraordinary, others have not been of that quality. That´s how it is the usual case in an exhibition, yet in general, I find Matta´s symbols and his imagery, though interesting, not strictly convincing or spellbinding. It is too weak and internally diffuse to create an iconography or universal signifiers, his non-representational Surrealism does not have the same originality and freshness as Miro´s. Matta´s use of colours is often extraordinary, but the blurred and washy character of his paintings, in a way, reduces their effectiveness. There are people who consider Salvador Dali´s art as stupid or trivial. But especially when I see other Surrealists in comparison I think Dali´s leading position in Surrealism does not come as a surprise or as unjustified. Dali managed to create an (in a way) concise, noticeable, memorable imagery that became iconic. Matta´s art rather gives me an impression about how paintings could look like if the more apparent possibilities already have been sorted out; American Surrealism was not as important as the European Surrealism; Matta´s art serves as a footnote. Although Matta strived for an objective stylistic intervention and innovation (Automatism), although he was a theorist and intellectual, I think his style finally did not transcend a personal style. Nevertheless, I think these flashy, boundless colours on canvas in this exhibition I will remember forever.

Maybe the Kunstforum made an exhibition on Roberto Matta because he was a friend and intellectual companion of Robert Motherwell, whom they had so graciously featured before. It is also imminent to focus on Surrealism, as the Surrealist Manifesto by Andre Breton from 1924 makes Surrealism turn 100 years old in 2024. And featuring a less prominent figure among the Surrealists strikes as a good idea. Surrealism emerged out of Dadaism and was anti-bourgeois. With the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton, who both had a concise intellect but also a somehow doctrinarian personality, broke with Dadaism and tried to emancipate new artistic directions from the Dadaist intellectual straightjacket. Inspired by psychoanalysis, Surrealism aimed at a psychological revolution. Breton defined Surrealism as pure psychic automatism by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by other method, the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation. True artists and intellectuals (and other people) will have a desire to reach some state of purity of mind. They want to do something “true” and “authentic”. Respectively, when you work with the expression of content, of thoughts, of forms, you will then try to realign yourself with the originator of thoughts and forms – with the mind – in a primordial manner. Surrealism tried to reach such purity of mind by applying free association, the bizarre logic of dreams, of (unconscious) desire, of the culturally suppressed, and the like. It was, as is true art, an enterprise in introspection. Roberto Matta, more than anyone else, championed the element of “psychological automatism”, i.e. a direct expression of images that emerge out of the unconscious. (At least since the times of Arthur Rimbaud) in their desire to reach purity of mind, there is desire in artists to break up with ordinary syntax – or, as they envision, to break “through” syntax to achieve a vision of a different, transcendent or more primordial reality. Reality, as they think, is something “magical”, whose magic, nevertheless, is only able to shine through occasional cracks and gaps within ordinary, culturally conditioned experience. So they want to reach a total, or at least a different experience. I know this quite well because in my Book of Strange and Unproductive Thinking I strived for such a kind of “infra-writing” or “micro-writing” myself; trying to express dreams, hallucinations before falling asleep, phantasmas or the states of mind and the cognition of little children or of animals (which, naturally, failed (so far)), to get at some kind of “core” of the cognitive process or the syntax, or to transcend it in order to get a fuller perspective on everything or reach some kind of meta level. Most prominently, Getrude Stein struggled for a pure unconscious automatism in writing. After years of trying to achieve it, she noticed that in the final consequence it is a vain attempt. Regardless of how hard you try, you do not seem to be able to break through preconditions or through the syntax. Maybe this should not come as a surprise, since there supposedly is no actual reality and no actual thought process beyond the syntax. The syntax mirrors the way things happen in the world. Therefore, one also should not be frustrated with the art of Dali or even Miro (since one might think it is not as radical and completely otherworldy as Surrealism seems to initially promise). Also their art is bound to be “conventional” – and that is the way in which it successfully works. Upon reflection, Matta was actually more radical and went further down the abyss. His forms, achieved by Automatism, are actually more primordial, pre-logical and pre-syntactic than those of most of his fellow Surrealists. Therefore, Matta´s work has actually achieved something objective and serves as giving an illustration of how expression of a specific content (the “unconscious” and the most primordial, pre-syntactic depths of the mind) might actually look like (and it is not just a “personal style” as mentioned above). Yet it also seems to illustrate that the primordial, pre-syntactic depths of the mind are not necessarily a higher state of consciousness or that you operate at a higher plane of reality when you operate on such a level. Likely, it is a less competent level of cognition – and of phantasy and imagination. I think I can tell you: breaking through the syntax is not an end in itself. The goal of the purification of the mind is that the mind finally encounters itself. The destruction of forms should finally enable you to erect new and fresh forms. Surrealism should likely lead to some “Super Realism”, which means a more total and lucid grasp on reality, on the “infra level” of individualities and aberrations as well as on the level of abstraction and intellectual integration.

Surrealism, as Breton also acknowledged, should not serve merely as offering you a glimpse on an alternative reality. By merging “dream” and reality, it should give you a total view on reality. I think this is true because a more comprehensive view on reality should also include the imaginary and the possibility of alternative realities (in a more mundane as well as in a more lofty sense). Actually, the imaginary and chance and possibility are integral part of reality. To grasp that character of reality, your mind should be equipped with some kind of Möglichkeitssinn, a sense for possibilities. Surrealism champions for such a Möglichkeitssinn, therefore it is actually mind-expanding as well as liberating. The surrealist imagination is more liberating and superior to the ordinary imagination, as it imaginatively tries to realign possible realities with impossible realities (that run against natural laws, logic, syntax etc.). Therefore, you should both become a heightened sense for what is possible, but also a sense for what is impossible, and what finally serves as a limitation. Therein, Surrealism will equip you with a sense of irony. And irony is a supreme sensibility; it makes it possible to take things more lightly – while actually taking them more seriously than you pretend to do. Irony, as opposed to cynicism or sarcasm, is a sympathetic attitude towards things. It helps you to escape from prison-like viewpoints and give you a more floating experience of reality to which you nevertheless sympathetically hold on to. I like heavy metal because it serves me as a “surrealist exaggeration”, therein expanding my competence in dealing with reality. Metal people usually are funny people with a sense of irony. Irony even seems a basic attitude, a Grundhaltung, to them. I seem to like that. Surrealism was profoundly inspired by the writings of the obscure Comte de Lautréamont. As I suggested, I consider myself as a revenant of Lautréamont. Lautréamont, Rimbaud or Büchner expressed reality in such a dense way that it seems to come as a hallucinative epiphany of reality. I consider such a kind of consciousness as the Einheits-Bewusstsein, as the unitary consciousness. All my work revolves around outlining the unitary consciousness, is about the unitary consciousness being at work. Therein, I am a Surrealist as well; yet rather than that, a Super Realist.

When I was writing and investigating about the Abstract Expressionists last autumn I also wanted to investigate about Arshile Gorky. Arshile Gorky is not very popular in Europe, but he was considered a true giant artist by the American artists, on equal footing with Jackson Pollock. Unfortunately, like Jackson Pollock he was an immensely troubled person who died young (he killed himself at the age of 44). Yet Arshile Gorky´s role in art was not that of a staunch innovator, like Pollock, rather he was the one who gave a finish to stylistic developments and brought them to a logical end. The art he developed in his final years could be considered a Surrealism that merged with the upcoming Abstract Expressionism. Arshile Gorky was a non-representational Surrealist as well, with his painting depicting biomorphic forms and the like. I could not come to a conclusion about his art; on some occasions it struck me and impressed me, on other it didn´t. So I think I need to wait until I have the possibility to experience the originals, until there is an exhibition about Gorky. At the end of his life, when Gorky struggled with cancer, Roberto Matta started an affair with Gorky´s wife. Finding out that he was too weak to kill Matta in revenge, due to his illness, served to plunge Gorky further into depression, which finally resulted in his suicide. According (not only) to Gorky, the American Surrealists were obnoxious people with low morals; cheating and fucking around with each other´s wives, whom, in a male chauvinist manner, they considered merely as “muses”, serving the pleasures of the male artist. Taking this into consideration, it seems almost astonishing that an exhibition about Matta could take place and not get cancelled, because stuff like this seems to provoke panic reactions among most contemporary intellectuals and in the art world. But maybe the notion that there was an omnipresent so called cancel culture is a panic reaction and an exaggeration.

Roy Lichtenstein and Pop Art

Roy Lichtenstein achieved his artistic breakthrough relatively late in life, at a time when he was almost 40. His breakthrough consisted of painting motives from comics. How could a motive from a comic be art? Lichtenstein had experimented with various styles before, but once he painted his comic motives it became immediately clear to him that he had discovered something real, that he made an actual artistic discovery, that his paintings were a revelation what art could be. Indeed, his comic paintings became an immediate success, and together with Andy Warhol´s soup cans and the like they established New York Pop Art (ironically, Warhol had done paintings from comics as well originally, but as soon as he discovered that Lichtenstein did the same thing, he turned to other motives which would make him even more famous). Lichtenstein´s paintings consisted of relatively few colours, but they were tasty and bright, saturated and a pleasure for the eye. They were actually destined to become pop-ular. He expanded his motives and his style throught his career. His paintings would become allusions to Surrealism, or to Picasso, to Matisse or to Léger. His famous brush stroke paintings, icons of Pop Art all the same, were allusions to Abstract Expressionism and to Action Painting. Lichtenstein also made sculptures, of his brush strokes or of his explosions, i.e. something you would not consider a motive for a sculpture. But such was the tacit humour that you had in all his art. Eventually his oeuvre was full of citations from the history of painting. He was one of the most successful American artists, with many of his paintings becoming popular and printed as posters in huge quantities.

Pop Art was the last movement in art that managed to establish a universal signifier and a universal paradigm, a concise statement and a concise diagnosis of the world as a whole. Ideally, this is what you would expect from art. Yet such expectations have become frustrated afterwards, and ever since the 1970s or so. Therefore one might consider Pop Art as the last true triumph of an art that was somehow avant-gardist and somehow “stronger” and more intelligent than the world, than the society it sprang out of, that was ahead of its time. After Pop Art, developments in society seemingly became more turbulent, more intelligent and more avant-garde than art, with art merely trying to catch up with those developments, with art becoming an intellectual by-product of social developments. Art reflects on society, and society had changed at the time when Pop Art came into play. It had become a consumer society, a society of mass consumption and a society of (fordist) mass production. A wealthy and seemingly pacified society. The artifacts that sprang out of and circulated in society had changed – with the standardised mass consumer product, i.e. Warhol´s soup cans and Brillo boxes, becoming the emblem of society. Clement Greenberg´s sharp distinction between Art and Kitsch became blurred. Artefacts of the popular – i.e. consumer products and advertisement, comics, movies, fashion, music, etc. – were oscillating between Art and Kitsch, respectively they were neither (high) art nor addressing a stupid sentimentality as does the Kitsch. The Popular became a category of its own. Therefore it seems a natural consequence that art becomes poppy. Vice versa, in the later 1960s popular music or the cinema (“New Hollywood”) even became distinctly artistic. At any rate, Pop Art, in essence, reflected on the Popular. Although Pop Art was innovative and something new, it was not extremely avant-garde. Neither it was obviously critical and expressing an Unbehagen in der Kultur that intellectuals, and various types of people, have been lamenting ever since about so-called consumer society. Rather than that, Pop Art even seemed optimistic. In general, Pop Art reduced itself to being a diagnosis of its time, and little else. And in doing so, Pop Art did it perfectly right. In refraining from being judgemental, Pop Art preserved its charismatic enigma of leaving everything afloat. Andy Warhol left it open whether his art actually meant a lot – or practically nothing at all; whether it was full of meaning, or devoid of any. Therefore his art has the quality of great art – as it remains vibrant, oscillating, alive, present. Pop Art serves as an examination of the depth of the supposed flatness it seemingly portrays. It is, as any great art, an enigmatic clash of dimensions that finally cannot be explicitly sorted out, neither by our intellect or by our perception or imagination.

Pop Art has been deemed superficial. On the one hand because of its boldness and simplicity. Nevertheless, it was due to this boldness and simplicity that Pop Art became a success and a landmark within art history (Pop Art actually surfaced not in New York but in Great Britian and was pioneered by artists like Richard Hamilton, David Hockney or Peter Blake – yet British Pop Art was, in a way, too reflective, too thoughtful and too nuanced, too hesitant to reach its full maturity). On the other hand, politically conscious people may feel offended especially by the superficiality of Pop Art´s leading proponent and, moreover, the defining artist of his time, Andy Warhol. Although Warhol was able to artistically capture an entire age and to establish universal signifiers, he was unable, or unwilling, to reflect on what happened in the second part of the 1960s in America (a time when Pop Art was past beyond its prime, however), notably the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, the race question. Truly, Andy Warhol was not a particularly critical or politically conscious person (and neither Pop Art had been of such qualities). His primary motive was to become famous, a celebrity. And it is true that all his art remained superficial. Warhol himself acknowledged that and at time lamented it. But his art was superficial in a highly evocative way. According to Dali, the genius spiritualises everything. And Andy Warhol spiritualised superficiality. That is no mean achievement. Superficiality is even something that is universal. The Vietnam war and the opposition against it, the Black Panther movement or the feminist avantgarde were things that happened in some space and in some time and that were linked to vocabularies that are somehow outdated. The consumer society (and the desire for fame) still persists. Also Lichtenstein´s art is less superficial than it appears to be. Apart from the mastery of execution and the humor and the versatility of the intellect that keeps his art highly alive, Lichtenstein´s art is evocative, almost an epiphany. His art clearly expresses what painting could be and what painting could be about. And it comes in an unexpected way. It catches by surprise. There is sophistication to it, but it is also easily approachable and tangible for a larger audience. That´s what art should be and should do. The white space of the empty canvas is an abyss. The metaphysical abyss of art. It confronts imagination with what could be, with what could reasonably happen in art. If you are lucky and very imaginative, something will rise up from this abyss that tells a greater truth. This is what happened also In Roy Lichtenstein´s case.  

It was a good idea of the Pop artists not to try to comment a lot about the change within society they reflected on – the transformation into a consumer society. Many intellectuals and wannabe-intellectuals could not evade that trap. However, the transformation into a consumer society is a historical change far too profound for anyone to truly grasp. It is a transformation that will likely have its effects on the rest of human history. Time and again, there is voiced a concern about the “superficiality” consumer society supposedly brings about. But, obviously, what consumer society brings about is something that is good. If anyone laments the superficiality of consumer society, it, well, is probably due to his own superficiality or inability to see and adapt to larger patterns. As already noticed, the Popular became distinctly more artistic in the later 1960s, epitomised for instance in the Beatles´ album Sgt. Pepper´s Lonley Hearts Club Band, arguably the greated and most universal piece of popular music of all time (the iconic cover was done by a true Pop artist, Peter Blake). With Sgt. Pepper the Beatles wanted to express the sentiment of their time, that is to say of carefreeness and of joy. Rightfully, Sgt. Pepper has dominated the lists of best albums of all time, also the famous List of 500 best albums of all time by the Rolling Stone magazine. Yet recently, Sgt. Pepper got positioned in distinctly lower ranks by the Rolling Stone magazine. Much more dominating are now albums by people of colour and by women (notably hip hop records). The best album of all time is now considered to be What´s Going On by Marvin Gaye. I have listened to What´s Going On several times in trying to understand what would be so great about it, but I still can hardly remember anything from it. I do not catch why this album should be super, musically. However, the Rolling Stone magazine is fascinated because What´s Going On deals with racism, police brutality or the Vietnam war. Well, okay. In championing for What´s Going On the people from the Rolling Stone magazine obviously think they are very thoughtful. However I do not think they truly are. The Vietnam war, racism and police brutality against Afroamericans is not something that is truly universal. Nothing of this actually affects me, or anyone I know. When the Beatles want to bring cheerfulness and joy it deems me a lot more universal. Meanwhile I have travelled the world a bit, and I have witnessed that most of the “oppressed” people in this world are conformists all alike. They are not very “conscious” and they are not very interested in politics. They are interested in consumer products. If they have consumer products, they´re happy. They bring them cheerfulness and joy. Therefore Pop Art is universal art. And Sgt. Pepper´s Lonley Hearts Club Band is the preeminent popular music album of all time.

Dance Music for the „Other”/Homage to M.I.A.

Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam aka M.I.A. is a superwoman. She is an entity that is distinctly superior to you; something you cannot match or encounter at the same plane of reality. Together with Betty Davis, Shampoo, Spellling and Billie Eilish, M.I.A. is one of my grand dames in popular music.

Her biography is adventurous. Of Tamil descent, Maya Arulpragasam has experienced the horrors of civil war and “big time” poverty during her childhood in Jaffna, Sri Lanka (yet, as she recalls, also some of her happiest moments of her life). Her father, Arular, was a political activist on behalf of the oppressed Tamil minority (or, as the Sri Lankian government would claim, a terrorist), and was mostly absent during her childhood as he had to live in hiding. At the age of 11 Maya moved with her mother, Kala, to London. There, she experienced outright racism. Nevertheless, she attended art school and had her first exhibitions as a visual artist in the early 2000s. She encountered early success with her art and was also awarded for the Alternative Turner Prize. Then somebody suggested to her making music.

Under the pseudonym M.I.A. she became a critical and commercial success as a musician in the second half of the 2000s, with her albums Arular and Kala (both named after her parents). She had numerous singles and even one great, everlasting hit, Paper Planes, which rightfully got included in the Rolling Stone´s list of 500 best songs of all time (Kala got included in the list of 500 best albums of all time). She struck the audience with her off-the-wall mix of dance and electronic music mixed up with many other influences. Most notably, she struck with her authentic off-the-wall existence. A refugee and victim of many sorts of racism and poverty, coming from a rather unknown country, her M.I.A. project gives you a sense of dislocation as well as a perspective on unity and humanitarianism – a global human perspective, which, as critics mention, has not been reached before or ever since. The M.I.A. songs deal about migration, political violence, rebellion, revolution, oppression, gender stereotypes, and the like. Moreover, they seem to deal with all that at once. Her music has been described as an “eclectic world-underclass dance amalgam”.

The most noteworthy aspect about M.I.A. is, however, its permanent guerilla attitude and its permanent sense of dislocation. Critics have noted an “image of provocation, yet also avoidance of, or inability to use consistent images and messages”. M.I.A. is an artist that cannot ever be “typed”, she is running out in (and retreating from) all directions. She radiates a great deal of chaos and randomness and of psychosis-like creativity. She has a talent of mixing up avant-garde with mainstream, yet in a way of avoiding both the traps the lie in one as well as in the other. It has been said that she is always able to use a larger force against itself. With the result of M.I.A., as suggested at the beginning, always becoming a larger force than you, something truly superior, of another category: a superwoman. M.I.A. is a creative genius of the highest order, to say the least. Respectively, as “genius” might be something you´ll be quite familiar with in popular music, she is a genius of a special kind that needs special investigation.

Not surprisingly, M.I.A.´s music is quite heavy metal. It is agitated, loud, overloaded, confusing, difficult to catch up with, pushing the boundaries, (forever) ahead of its time. Actually it is cacophonic, with her talent being able to turn this inherent cacophony into something relatable nevertheless. Of course, there are also moments of outright beauty and transcendence, with beautiful melodies and harmonies, as this is inherent in the entire M.I.A. perspective as well. Her music is described as fusion between electronic, electroclash, hip hop, alternative, reggae, rhythm and blues, dance, world music, and Bollywood. Indeed, M.I.A. likes to draw many registers. It can also be summed up as avantgarde pop combined with mainstream elements – or the other way round. Nevertheless, whereas fusion sound may often be some helpless eclecticism and something that is blatant and boastful, M.I.A.´s fusion is highly genuine and organic, it originally and organically seems to come from the depths of her mind. What a complex mind! Yet what a strangely complex mind, seemingly transgressing our understanding of complexity into something unfamiliar and unknown, into something other. M.I.A.´s complexity is not an ordinary complexity. M.I.A. has described her music as dance music of club music for the “other”.

Years ago I attempted to characterize such individuals as the „ultracomplex people“. I have written more recently about (Clyfford Still and) radical otherness. M.I.A. is a radical other. A while ago I have written about the “antisphere”: the final sphere of extreme creativity, a negatively curved space, where everything flies into the infinite, and the dances between signifiers and the signified become most eccentric – nevertheless become unified into a whole, a phantasma, that is nevertheless transgressed and understood (as you can most perfectly see it in Spellling´s Under the Sun; M.I.A.´s mind is however too political to be of exactly the same sort and to reside in exactly the same sector within the antisphere; as the political finally refers to some exactly defined and clear meanings). Most recently I have written about alterity: as the condition of the mind of the poète maudite. Due to this sense for alterity, the mind of the poète maudit can grasp infinitely large structures (like establish a universal human perspective): as alterity both contains the ego and the other, in some sort of (“nonlinear”) mutual relationship. It makes the ego look like the other, and the other like the ego, like something inherently familiar to the poète maudit. In M.I.A.´s mind, there is this alterity. That is why she is such a great poet – a poète maudit. M.I.A.´s mind can make up a universal, heterogenous gathering of all races, notably of the global underclass. That is a seldom achievement. (And it is precarious as well: Since the beautifully, colourfully heterogenous elements of this gathering are homogenous in the special mind of the poète maudit, yet heterogenous in reality and to themselves. They are likely to truly diverge. Likewise, what the poète maudit can not truly grasp is conformism, i.e. the true fabric of humanity and society. Therefore, in his universalism, the poète maudit will live in splendid isolation or “forever in the future”. Yet, as M.I.A. acknowledges: hers is club music for the “other” anyway.)

M.I.A.´s videos are extremely creative and they are part of the M.I.A. Gesamtkunstwerk, if one may say so. Her skills as a visual artist come to play in her videos. Often they exhibit acute sensory overload, on other occasions they make impact with very easy, though eccentric means. Bad Girls is one of the strongest (“power women”) videos I have ever seen, Sunshowers features her with Tamil female guerillas in the jungle, XXXO is pop in a hyperspace, Borders powerfully delivers a humanitarian message, Go Off solely shows explosions in a mine (and that work great with the music). I have watched some music videos for Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Dua Lipa or Rihanna occasionally. Therein, they are all presented as some kind of untouchable, erect queens. M.I.A., by contrast, oscillates in more dimensions. She is clearly more interesting. She oscillates with the world. She is a bit hard to touch as well, but that is due to her complexity, and not due to something that seems fabricated. She seems stronger than the pop queens because she exhibits distinctly more room for maneuver. M.I.A. is clearly liberated and free, whereas the pop queens clearly are not. Taylor, Rihanna et al. clearly are enslaved.

M.I.A. is also often labelled as “the rapper from the future”. In stark contrast to the usually awful voices of rappers, M.I.A.´s voice and singing is beautiful, bright and penetrating. Apart from rapping, M.I.A. has adopted various types of singing. She is described as having a whooping, chanting voice coming in with “an indelible nursery-rhyme swing”. The artwork of her albums, naturally done by herself, are on the verge of being eye-hurting, as it exhibits sensory overload and a guerilla-like approach to art and visual imagery. Like Betty Davis, Spellling, Shampoo or Billie Eilish, M.I.A. exhibits an acute sense for fashion. Fashion in the ordinary sense usually is something quite boring and conformist, even if it is elite. All those mentioned sister musicians and sister geniuses dress themselves in extravagant, random ways, with clothes that often do not fit together. Such a highly penetrative aesthetic view upon the world is something that you can obviously expect from that sort of people. M.I.A. is, all in all, beautiful. A beautiful voice of the global underclass.

Sadly, there is potential that such individuals become alienated from society, if not humanity. M.I.A. always claimed that she did not desire mainstream success, rather would like to remain on the outskirts of mainstream. After her initial albums, she actually gradually faded from view. Her latest album, Mata, from 2022, was released via the internet only. Truly, her albums aren´t that catchy anymore, although especially Mata is a good one, though also a nerdy one. After every album she claims that this would be her last one and the last music that she ever will want to make. It does not seem that M.I.A. is well known today. Recently she has announced that she has “found Jesus”. She is sure that this will annoy a good deal of her fanbase, which largely consists of progressives. It is however natural for individuals like Maya to be spiritual.

There is a place deep inside my heart for Maya Arulpragasam. And, notably, in my mind.

Documentary about M.I.A.