A(na)esthetics

Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics

by David Levi Strauss

New York: Autonomedia, 1999 144 pp./$7.95 (sb)

In "Take As Needed," the second essay of his collection of art criticism Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics, David Levi Strauss tells of having

surgery on his shoulder. While in doctors' offices and in the hospital, he made a point of paying attention to the kind of art he found hanging on the walls. As one might expect, the work placed in medical environments was generally meant to be as innocuous as possible. As Strauss asserts, to call images of "cocker spaniel puppies perched precariously on saddles" insufferable would be to give them more power than was originally intended when they were chosen for decoration.

But are they simply meant to spruce up sterilized rooms without getting in the way? Or is there another reason why evanescent landscapes are the preferred genre of art in such settings? Strauss ties the pastoral pictures and puppy imagery of his experience to the dominant mode of medicine practiced in America-one that treats symptoms and not causes. He differentiates this allopathic approach from other forms of treatment such as homeopathy, in which a small amount of a disease is introduced as a way of preventing or curing its larger and more harmful forms. Paralleling these two approaches is what he outlines as the difference between anaesthetics and aesthetics. The former mimics allopathy in maintaining the status quo, which results in a failure to research the root of a problem, whether relating to art or society. The latter creates a momentary disequilibrium necessary for what Strauss terms a "true" or "transformative" healing, as opposed to a healing that "involves a return to normalcy or stasis."

As an illustration of homeopathic aesthetics within a medical environment, Strauss offers an extended analysis of the Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1515), a painting by Matthias GrOnewald, with its grisly crucifixion scene and renderings of saints plagued by a variety of ailments. Recent scholarship has shown that many of these figures exhibit symptoms of illnesses treated in the hospital next to the chapel containing Grunewald's work. Not only does the painting portray these illnesses, it also depicts many of the methods used in the hospital to cure them. In this way it serves as an allegory for the healing process. Strauss describes this kind of art as a "homeopathic revelation" and (echoing a related idea developed by Donald Kuspit) a form of "therapeutic realism."

The concepts of both realism and instrumentality are tricky ones when it comes to moving from sixteenth-century Germany to late-twentieth-century North America. Nevertheless, the theoretical framework Strauss proposes in the first two essays of Between Dog & Wolf is persuasive enough when applied to the art of Joseph Beuys, Jean-Luc Godard, Daniel Martinez and Carolee Schneemann. These discussions form the core of the book, offering fresh perspectives on a group of artists (excluding Martinez) whose work is frequently in danger of being idealized by 1960sstyle personal liberation aesthetics-even though all three artists produced important and very different work after that period.

The work of Schneemann serves as an excellent example of the transformative aesthetics Strauss outlines. Though Beuys is somewhat the hero of the book, Strauss's essay on Schneemann is one of the best in the collection. Strauss provides both contexts and interpretations of many of her most famous (or infamous) works, including her 1967 film Fuses, her 1975 performance/text Interior Scroll and her emotionally and visually powerful 1994 installation Mortal Coils. Strauss argues convincingly for her crucial place in the history of art during the past three decades-- precisely because of her attacks on traditional aesthetic notions of the isolated art object, and for her related genre-creating and genre-- crossing styles. As Strauss states, "A pioneer of 'performance art,' 'body art,' 'multimedia,' and 'site-specific installation' before any of these terms existed, Schneemann's influence as progenitor is so pervasive that it has become invisible." In Strauss's terminology, invisible is used in the sense of being overlooked at the same time its groundbreaking quality is taken for granted.

Strauss attributes much of the emphasis on the body in recent art to a struggle for control over this immediately political domain. The body is where the anaesthetics of numbness and the aesthetics of transformation have their most tangible results. Yet in each of the essays dealing with the issue of the body in art, neither Strauss nor the artists discussed are content to stop at the boundaries of individual bodies; instead they use the body as a metaphor for social and political realms. More specifically, by following a trajectory sketched out by Beuys's life and art, Strauss moves from the healing of the individual body to interventions in the social body.

"Columbus Plus Ultra" and "Reading Desert Storm" do not deal with contemporary art at all. Rather, they refer to the use of images in contemporary North American society. These pieces focus on the 500-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage to America and representations of the Persian Gulf War. Such comparisons are useful in expanding the scope of the book while also implicating the work of Godard and Martinez, whose own works reflect and provoke a corporate media structure. While Martinez may be best known for his 1993 Whitney Biennial museum tags that spelled out the phrase "I Can't Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White," Strauss presents a list of public art projects Martinez produced during the two years preceding the Biennial that also led to controversy, primarily because of the topics dealt with in these large-scale works. Think, for instance, of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981), though it was Martinez's engagement with issues of class and ethnicity that instigated heated debates in response to his work.

"Images and symbols are real," Strauss writes, while also pointing out that the political Right in the United States seems to take the influential power of images and symbols more seriously than does the Left. Between Dog & Wolf attempts to reclaim the power of images for a progressive politics. The implicit argument running through these essays is that art will never be able to do this on its own, whether in theory or practice. Instead, Strauss foresees a strategy of constant contextualization, both on the part of the artist and the critic, thereby creating a web of relations between art, culture and history. Strauss does not doubt art's capacity to meet this challenge. He equates aesthetics with transformation knowing full well that the notion of aesthetics has been increasingly cast into doubt during the postmodern period.

The essays in Between Dog & Wolf argue polemically, though never stridently, for art's continued relevance to daily life. They are imbued with a sense of inquiry, for which Strauss finds a model in the work of Godard. "There is a kind of pedagogical intent," he writes, "but it is more accurate to say that Godard is enacting an inquiry"-an inquiry that seeks to have direct material effects. Though non-academic in both their style and theoretical approach, the essays are scholarly and meant to be instructional in a way different from either a general survey of recent political art or a close reading of individual works. The format of the book-inexpensive, small, with relatively short chapters and an abundance of references to direct readers to further engagements with the work discussed--ends itself to this pedagogical intent.

The closing essay of the collection "Coming to the Point at Three Rivers: Art/Public/Community, What Do Artists Want?" brings together various concerns. While touching on the works of Beuys, Robert Smithson, Andy Warhol and others, Strauss notes the connection between the collapse of the booming art market during the 1980s and the consequent "Culture Wars." This shifted attention from art's monetary worth to its social impact. "Suddenly, art went from being a marketing issue to a public policy issue," writes Strauss. In this way, the attention Jesse Helms and others paid to work they declared obscene, while creating an environment institutionally detrimental to the creation and display of politicized art work, renewed-or at least reinvigorated-a debate over art's political significance. Energized by the possibility of this social and political role for art, Strauss's Between Dog & Wolf is an impassioned and lucid attempt to articulate a radical aesthetics in opposition to widespread anaesthetic visual culture.

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ALAN GILBERT is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY.