However, as a brief digression, if we consider the ailing avant-garde work on the basis of its material properties, what it's made of, there might be something in the difference between how the work uses materials and how they are anyway out in the world. Doesn't the work extend the potential of the material, perhaps showing it how it was never meant to be used in the first place, a kind of protest, as it were, at the limitations of the world's purely practical, or efficient use of that same material? Isn't it saying, "Look at this differently; it can also be done like this"? But is that in any way meaningful? I don't know. In one sense it's a deviation from the world's logic, a deviation which has the effect of giving us a sense of potential.

Chaim Soutine

If we consider some classical painting for a moment, like Soutine [slide 3: Soutine], remember him, or the next slide, Morandi [slide 4: Morandi]—another painter that no one talks about anymore—if we consider this sort of classical painting, we're being asked to read the paint in relation to figuration, obviously. We see that the material can do something strange, can give us a new view of that shoulder, or that corner of a house, or a simple patch of light.

Giorgio Morandi

As we recognize this change in materials we feel a pleasure at glimpsing possibilities, a point at which our own limits might dissolve and extend in relation to the world. I think this is a physiological experience equivalent to our grasp of Conceptual art's inventiveness with language and ideas. And I'll return to this thought when I discuss the Brazilian artist at the very end of the talk, Hélio Oiticica.

There's an idea of Adorno's that I like, and I can't really see how to fit it in anywhere else, so I'm just sort of tacking it on here. In Aesthetic Theory he frequently repeats how the antagonisms of society are sustained in the artwork as irreconcilables of form. So the problems, the issues in society, become reproduced in the art work through formal problems. That's a nice equation, I think, that one. This suggests that there might be a different sort of enquiry made of avant-garde works; one that looks deeper than their surface content to unravel the way that they use materials and forms.

The problem facing a critical avant-garde is not so much the lack of impact it has (which is intangible) than the recuperation of its iconoclasm by the society it criticizes. This happens in bourgeois democracies rather than in dictatorships like Akmatova's Soviet Union, where the avant-garde is wiped out or silenced. You'll know that European and American societies place a high value on controversial and antagonistic representations. They exemplify the tolerance and enterprise on which these countries' systems of government are supposedly founded. They serve as a sign that culture is progressive and adventurous, values that happen also to be shared by the business community. And you might know of the way that the business community has been looking to artists as a model, a model type of employee, because of our versatility, our ability to work well with others, our communication skills, and our willingness to work crazy hours. These all seem to be model skills for a current employee.

Now to get around this predicament artists have sometimes intensified their oppositional representations or have tried to find ways to ensure their productions are unusable. In the late nineteenth century, Mallarmé's withdrawal of his poetry into a kind of pure research could be understood as an unwillingness to engage in a bourgeois modernity which views technological innovation, culture, and commodification as functions of social progress when in the nineteenth century these actually slow down improvements for the majority of people.

This point about a faith in technological innovation is something I raise later, and it's not too difficult to see how the surge in economic prosperity and technology in the nineteenth century was good only for a minority, if you consider the mass of people who had to continue to work in factories and who didn't directly benefit from this progress.

Mallarmé once said that the poet was on strike against society. But even through its withdrawal, this art cannot avoid being recuperated by the social forces it opposes. I like Paul Mann's remark that "in culture every exit is a revolving door."

In the history of the reception of Duchamp's Fountain, again, to go back to this, we see the same kind of recuperation. In challenging the limits of what the institution takes for art Fountain only extends them. Duchamp's presence on the panel of judges to which he anonymously submits the urinal initiates the theatricality of all such challenges.

When I was once asked by a women's art magazine—this is a strange story—to write a paragraph on what artwork I would like to steal—the sign of coveting an art work is being prepared to steal it—I suggested that we should send Bruce Willis back in time to 1917 to abduct Fountain from the entries to the Armory show. This was around the time of the science-fiction movie Twelve Monkeys, based on—you'll know Chris Marker's La Jetée—and Bruce Willis goes back in time. I thought it would be interesting to imagine art history without it. But that piece never got printed. It was probably too frivolous. . . .